George Orwell.  The Road to Wigan Pier

"On the day when there was a full chamber-pot under the breakfast table I decided to leave.  The place was beginning to depress me.  It was not only the dirt, the smells and the vile food, but the feeling of stagnant meaningless decay, of having got down into some subterranean place where people go creeping round and round, just like black beetles, in an endless muddle of slovened jobs and mean grievances.  The most dreadful thing about people like the Brookers is the way they say the same things over and over again.  It gives you the feeling that they are not real people at all, but a kind of ghost for ever rehearsing the same futile rigmarole.  In the end Mrs Brooker's self-pitying talk -- always ending with the tremulous whine of 'It does seem 'ard, don't it now?' -- revolted me even more than her habit of wiping her mouth with bits of newspaper.  But it is no use saying that people like the Brookers are just disgusting and trying to put them out of mind.  For they exist in tens and hundreds of thousands; they are one of the characteristic by-products of the modern world.  You cannot disregard them if you accept the civilisation that produced them.  For this is part at least of what industrialism has done for us.  Columbus sailed the Atlantic, the first steam engines tottered into motion, the British squares stood firm under the French guns at Waterloo ... and this is where it all led -- to labyrinthine slums and dark back kitchens with sickly, ageing people creeping around and round them like black beetles.  It is a kind of duty to see and smell such places now and again, especially smell them, lest you should forget that they exist...." (p. 14).

"Trade since the war [WWI] has had to adjust itself to meet the demands of underpaid, underfed people, with the result that a luxury is nowadays almost always cheaper than a necessity.  One pair of plain solid shoes costs as much as two ultra-smart pairs.  For the price of one square meal you can get two pounds of cheap sweets.  You can't get much meat for threepence, but you can get a lot of fish and chips....And above all there is gambling, the cheapest of all luxuries.  Even people on the verge of starvation can buy a few days' hope ('Something to live for', as they call it) by having a penny on a sweepstake.  Organised gambling has now risen almost to the status of a major industry.  Consider, for instance, a phenomenon like the Football Pools, with a turnover of about six million pounds a year, almost all of it from the pockets of working-class people." (p. 82)

"Working-people often have a vague reverence for learning in others, but where 'education' touches their own lives they see through it and reject it by a healthy instinct.  The time was when I used to lament over quite imaginary pictures of lads of fourteen dragged protesting from their lessons and set to work at dismal jobs.  It seemed to me dreadful that the doom of a 'job' should descend upon anyone at fourteen.  Of course I know now that there is not one working-class boy in a thousand who does not pine for the day when he will leave school.  He wants to be doing real work, not wasting his time on ridiculous rubbish like history and geography.  To the working class, the notion of staying at school till you are nearly grown-up seems merely contemptible and unmanly.  The idea of a great big boy of eighteen, who ought to be bringing a pound a week home to his parents, going to school in a ridiculous uniform and even being caned for not doing his lessons!  Just fancy a working-class boy of eighteen allowing himself to be caned!.... There is much in middle-class life that looks sickly and debilitating when you see it from a working-class angle." (p. 107)

"The nomad who walks or rides, with his baggage stowed on a camel or an ox-cart, may suffer every kind of discomfort, but at least he is living while he is travelling; whereas for the passenger in an express train or a luxury liner his journey is an intergnum, a kind of temporary death." (p. 186)

"A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into...." (p. 84)

(In 1936, George Orwell was commissioned by Victor Gollancz to describe the plight of the working class in the depressed areas to the North of England.  He left London in January and spent two months living amongst the miners, mill workers, and homeless in Lancashire and Yorkshire, and then wrote and published the manuscript between April and December of the same year.  The result is a searing, vivid indictment of the underside of capitalism, industrialism, and cilivization -- all the more memorable for its insistence on the facts, the the smell and taste and look of things, for its grim humor, its bleak sadness, and the extraordinary indignation with which Orwell describes the unknown, forgotten, and largely ignored lives of tens of thousands of working-class poor, of whose existence middle- and upper-class England was scarcely aware.  The second half of this heart-breaking account of the unemployment-ridden, poverty-stricken North is a moving plea for Socialism -- perhaps of lesser interest on account of its quaint, hopefully outdated concern for the gulf between rich and poor in England of the 1930s.  "Everybody knows the fight was fixed," Leonard Cohen growls.  "The poor stay poor, the rich get rich.  That's how it goes.  Everybody knows.")