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In the first half of The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell catalogues his participant/observation of the economically deprived North of England focusing on squalor, pollution and hardship during the Depression. Wigan Pier is a dystopic bleak vision of degrading capitalism - without his study, 1984 would not have existed. As political polemic in the second half, he provides the solution; Socialism. Orwell, fully aware of his own upper middle class prejudices, set to challenge his own feelings of disgust for the working classes; he was educated to believe that they 'smell'. His description of the Brookers' boarding house is a wonderfully Dickensian gothic and grotesque description of squalor and disappointed lives illustrating that dirt and disgust is what stands in the way of socialism's triumph. I was tickled by Orwell's greater repulsion for the bearded fruit-juice drinking middle class socialist crank who wants to 'level the working class 'up' (up to his own standard) by means of hygiene...birth-control, poetry' In essence, Wigan Pier is a confession of Orwell's own failings; he knows he cannot resolve the class problem by being friends with the working classes; he is an outsider. Orwell is also seeringly honest about his own feelings of masculine inferiority regarding his repulsion/attraction for the 'superhuman' miners. I admire Wigan Pier because I recognise my own hypocrisies in the way Orwell tries to abolish that part of himself he came to abhor as being an instrument of the British Empire in India. We are all guilty of class prejudice.