Books
Out of the abyss
Alan Brien Into Unknown England Edited by Peter Keating (Fontana £1.50, University of Manchester Press E5.95) From the Mouths of Men George Ewart Evans (Faber £5.50) When George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier appeared in 1937, the largely middleclass Labour-voting readers, the Left Book Clubbers, felt that they had glimpsed into an abyss. Orwell, it seemed, had crossed a bar, passing as a native, that was quite as distinct and impenetrable to one of his class and background as that of skin colour in South Africa or the Deep South of the United States. He was an explorer, a speleologist turning his torch on subterranean creatures who rarely saw the light of respectable, suburban day; there was a distinct impression that this was both a courageous and enterprising safari by a pioneer who had already thrilled the armchair travellers with an earlier trek into the Forbidden Quarters of modern Babylon, Down and Out in Paris and London.
The people he discovered were strange, and pathetic, but also a little frightening, like the Morlocks in Wells' The Time Machine. And Orwell, in the theoretical polemic about socialism which makes up the second half of the book, does not spare the surface dwellers, the equivalent of the Wellsian Eloi. Indeed his language has an intemperate, sneering edge to it which would be impossible to imagine in the mouth of the most extreme propagandists of Left or Right today.
The bourgeois prole-fanciers are 'mingey little beasts' who would flee, holding their noses, at the materialisation of 'a real working man'. The typical educated Socialist was likely to be a 'fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist and feminist'—and there is no doubt in Orwell's mind that each of those terms is pejorative and tinged with contempt. Even the Left's intellectual heroes (and he coined the phrase 'the pansy Left') are second-rate—Auden is 'a sort of gutless Kipling'.
Orwell's attempts to make genuine contact, as we know now from his letters and the reminiscences of his friends, had a bizarre, almost perverse, quality about them. It was rather as if his blacking-up and disguising himself were a sexual compulsion rather like Dorian Gray's mysterious disappearances into an East End of nameless evil. The Eloi, despite his abuse of them, were impressed and intrigued. Not so the actual Morlocks, at least judging from my own experience as one of them, a working-class boy in the 'thirties, growing up in a depressed, poverty
blighted area of the North, eight miles from Jarrow, the Guernica of the British class war. I remember my father throwing down The Road to Wigan Pier, complaining that Orwell had travestied and sensationalised the working class by seeking out the most corrupted and venal examples.
So the first salutary reward of Peter Keating's Into Unknown England, a Fontana Original, is his perceptive and scholarly introduction which demonstrates that Orwell was actually at the end, not the beginning, of a long and honourable tradition of reporting how the other half, or rather the other ninetenths, lived. The dominant class in Victorian times, contrary to the usual indictment of them as uniquely hypocritical and callous, contained many sympathetic and sharp-eyed observers who were in no doubt that they were on the wrong side of the barricades that divided the Two Nations. Indeed, it could be demonstrated that many of them were more concerned, and more aware of the apartheid created by the Industrial Revolution, than their equivalents in the thirties.
Orwell would not have seemed an oddity between 1866 and 1913, the period covered by Peter Keating's brilliant and compelling anthology, when much the same job was being undertaken, often with rather more depth and insight, certainly with less breastbeating, by a wide variety ofinvestigators and researchers.
Some of them are well known to students of the period, like Charles Booth and William Booth. Others are long established in socialist hagiology, like Jack London. He was a perennially popular writer among the self-educated, at once both over-rated and under-rated—his Iron Heel a masterly prophetic vision of Fascism, perhaps even more timely today than when it enjoyed a revival in the 'thirties and 'forties. Some are associ
ated with quite other interests and attitudes, like Rider Haggard or George R. Sims.
Some were totally unknown to me, such as James Greenwood, whose eye-witness account of a fight between a dwarf and a bull dog rivals Hazlitt, and remains a controversial issue today in Hanley, a hundred years after it was published.
The image of the underground, the submerged mass, the troglodyte warren, occurs again and again. It may have its origin in
Wells (The Time Machine was published in 1895) but it certainly stuck—Jack London's The People of the Abyss (1903), Mary Higgs' Glimpses into the Abyss (1906) C. F. G. Masterman's From the Abyss (1902) and James Greenwood's Low-Life Deeps, just a year after Wells, in 1896. The Two Nations theme is usually associated with Disraeli, Spectator 29 May 1916 and predictably echoed in Marx and Engels' but Peter Keating shows it was a common' place as early as Carlyle in 1831: Wealth has accumulated itself into masses and Poverty, also in accumulation enough, lies impassably separated from it ; opposed, an; communicating, like forces in positive an negative poles'. To cross these tracks, to lower your self into these caverns, was a much 111°re daring and uncharted enterprise for these writers (some of them women, like MarY Higgs, Mrs Pember Reeves and Lady Bell, ' despite Orwell's sneers at feminism) than for Orwell. Into Unknown England is Ot only an education in itself, throwing int° three-dimensional chiaroscuro the flat statie stics of 'scientific' history, but a splendid example of prose which is always immediate and alive. In an oblique, but still recognisable, waY' Ronald Blythe's Akenfield (1969) was The Road to Wigan Pier of the post-war era' This portrait of a Suffolk village had an our,: standing, and justified, success with Ntu readers and commentators. Here was an' other kind of unknown England, often _lost as harsh and oppressive despite its sylvan surroundings, a generation later than he Keating's collection. And this time, thed natives spoke their own tongue and use their own words. But Ronald Blythe's achievement rather' overshadowed several other, and earlier. harvestings in the same field : for exan1Ple; Ronald Fraser's recording of persona' accounts of people today at work, originallYd printed in the New Left Review in 1967 an 4. 1968, and appearing in two volumes Pelican Originals in the year of Akenfielel Since then there has been an American survey of the same kind—Studds Terkel 5 Working. George Ewart Evans deserves nivres praise and appreciation than he has Pahl ;always received for his many devoted 0 umes of oral history, notably The DaYsilla f We Have Seen, and now From the Mouths °id Men. Candid, detailed, funny, moving an., always vividly individual, his latest eollectidne moves from the Akenfield world of t,: 11 countryside, the land and the sea into the town and another kind of abyss, the Mince Socialists, such as myself, will find ituselnly support for their view of how unfaile.d. society is, and always has been, organis But, equally, Conservative lovers of nc); talgia may find here evidence for a Idev,.,t decline in the old graces and the ancle'ic traditions. It covers not only grindingwdrin and everyday exploitation in the pits and,_,., the upstairs-downstairs basements, but alsev, many other aspects of a world almost Ptl,st. such as horse transport in a small town business methods at the turn of the centtlt.JJ From The two together, Fro the Mouths of Men and Into Unknown England, feral. fruitful and pleasurable partnership wh,ic taken side by side, cannot fail to give enidY,5 ment, and new feeling about our count5a0 future as interpreted through the crystal v of the past.
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