George Orwell: from Hell to Salvation

“Leaving behind a bucolic past, the engine of modernity has nature on the run as it speeds towards an uncertain future.”

“Our civilization…is founded on coal,” thus begins George Orwell’s 1937 essay “Down the Mine.” Orwell visited the coal mining districts of England to write a series of essays on the nation’s working class, which would eventually be published as his book—released that same year—The Road to Wigan Pier. Orwell’s descent into the mine was incredibly arduous, as he dropped hundreds of feet vertically and then over a mile horizontally in a cramped dust filled shaft. “[T]he place is like hell,” writes Orwell, “or at any rate like my own mental picture of hell. Most of the things one imagines in hell are there—heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and, above all, unbearably cramped space.”

Orwell’s drop into the mine in many ways follows a classic mythic descent into the underworld. He enters the more elemental world that underlies the surface world of modern English civilization. As hellish as this underworld is—rather than pitying the miners and their brutal work—Orwell marvels at their strength and toughness:

“It is impossible to watch the ‘fillers’ at work without feeling a pang of envy for their toughness. It is a dreadful job that they do, an almost superhuman job by the standard of an ordinary person.”

All civilizations begin in the earth. Its elements are confronted and transformed by human labor, as well as by the human imagination. A human civilization represents the successful transformation of suffering or, in the words of Nietzsche, “the sublimation of cruelty.” Coal miners, writes Orwell, are the “caryatids” upon which sits all of England’s grandeur and power.