Mealtimes in Wigan - Orwell eats

I suppose the ultimate piece of research for a book involves living the life of those you are writing about. George Orwell visited Wigan before he wrote his famous condemnation of the conditions in which the working classes lived in England.

When you think of it - nothing makes your gorge rise more than reading about poorly served food eaten under filthy and appalling conditions - to put it mildly.

Orwell knew his trade, of course, and would have used his description of mealtimes as an illustration of his point of view - that the working class people of England were treated little better than beasts of burden - driven as they were to these depths by the grinding poverty that existed at that time - and that despite the enormous creation of wealth by the very same people who had no share in it.

The meals at the Brookers' house were uniformly disgusting. For breakfast you got two rashers of bacon and a pale fried egg, and bread-and-butter which had often been cut overnight and always had thumb-marks on it.However tactfully I tried, I could never induce Mr Brooker to let me cut myown bread-and-butter; he would hand it to me slice by slice, each slicegripped firmly under that broad black thumbs For dinner there weregenerally those threepenny steak puddings which are sold ready-made intins--these were part of the stock of the shop, I think--and boiledpotatoes and rice pudding. For tea there was more bread-and-butter andfrayed-looking sweet cakes which were probably bought as 'stales' from thebaker. For supper there was the pale flabby Lancashire cheese and biscuits.The Brookers never called these biscuits biscuits. They always referred tothem reverently as 'cream crackers'--'Have another cream cracker, Mr Reilly.You'll like a cream cracker with your cheese'--thus glozing over the factthat there was only cheese for supper. Several bottles of Worcester Sauceand a half-full jar of marmalade lived permanently on the table. It wasusual to souse everything, even a piece of cheese, with Worcester Sauce,but I never saw anyone brave the marmalade jar, which was an unspeakablemass of stickiness and dust. Mrs Brooker had her meals separately but alsotook snacks from any meal that happened to be going, and manoeuvred withgreat skill for what she called 'the bottom of the pot', meaning thestrongest cup of tea. She had a habit of constantly wiping her mouth on one of her blankets. Towards the end of my stay she took to tearing off strips.

From: 'The Road to Wigan Pier' by George Orwell