The Road To Wigan Pier

2 Pages 537 Words

In The Road To Wigan Pier, Orwell has described the lives of the coal miners in the 1930’s. In reading another assigned book, Hiroshima by John Hershey, a much greater compassion for the people of Hiroshima immerged in the reader. Both books communicate the lives and conditions the people of these two towns were subjected to and how they survived their surroundings. Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier is full of facts and accounts but nothing compared to the feelings brought forth in the visual image story telling style of Hershey’s Hiroshima.

Orwell is very factual in his account of the conditions and lives of the coal mining community and its people while Hershey tells of the lives, the pain and the desensitizing of an entire town when the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Orwell discusses the wages, living conditions, working conditions and how they survived on the food that they could afford. He seems very unattached to his entire surroundings and is only writing the facts as he sees them. As any person reading this book, feelings of sadness can arise for the people of Wigan Pier as well as any other coal mining town. In Hershey’s book he paints a picture of the people of Hiroshima who were left with nothing and wandered the town passing people they could not help and knew would die. This line of story telling draws the attention of the reader and makes a point at the same time.

The points made in both books are the same, despair and helplessness but also of pride. The coal miners in Orwell’s book are in a helpless situation, the same as the people of Hiroshima. Pride was the source of strength in both books that seemed to be overlooked by Orwell in his depiction of the times and lives of the people. Orwell was much more passionate in the second part of his book discussing Socialism and Fascism, then he was for the people of Wigan Pier. Hershey’s vivid characterization brought a human face to the destruction caused...