Labour as Artistic Object in Orwell's Down the Mine
A first reading of Orwell’s Down the Mine impresses upon the reader the hardships of coal-mining and the heroism of those who practice it. Read this way, the essay is expository, serving to humanize coal miners whose work is often overlooked. Instead, I argue here, Orwell’s angelic depiction of miners — focusing incessantly on their value as artistic objects — is more justifiably viewed as an abstract portrait of the heroic laborer, in fact dehumanizing the individual miners Orwell meets in the shafts. That is to say, in the process of being immortalized in literary form, the men posing for Orwell’s literary portrait lose their shape, coalescing into a singular “miner” that has all the qualities of the institution, and none of the men.
The first striking instance of Orwell’s depiction of miner as artistic object comes in the first paragraph, where he likens the miner to “caryatid upon whose shoulders nearly everything that is not grimy is supported.” (p18) The word “caryatid” connotes a sublime — almost god-like — statue. A statue that, almost by happenstance, serves as a literal pillar in a monument. The function of caryatid — and by analogy, of miner in society — as pillar, the reader concludes, is ancillary to its value as art. The analogy deepens when Orwell observes that “the fillers look and work as though they were made of iron,” (p19) again using language akin to that describing the intricate construction of a sculpture.
Orwell also leans into language objectifying the workers by describing their body parts as a butcher might describe a magnificent cut of lamb: marveling at its rotundness, firmness, and quality. Or as a sculptor might marvel at the form of the human before them, excited to manifest that in stone, in doing so both seeing the person in front of them, and not. Orwell describes the bodies of these workers in gory detail, outlining the shape of their buttocks, their weights and ages, the amount of flesh (or lack thereof) on their waistlines, and more. Here Orwell is roadside portrait artist and sociological essayist in equal measure; here it's most evident how his interest is just as much in the artistic value of the miners (and their bodies) as the Herculean nature of their task. At this point, they are not humans but amalgamations of flesh that work magically to form the energetic backbone of contemporary society. Note the irony in how the act of black-boxing their work as "magic" serves only to depict the miners as cut from a different cloth: somehow both less, and more, than human.
The sentence remarking that the process of coal mining is “worth watching” (p18) suggests that the value of mining comes in large part from its nature as “spectacle,” (p31) as Orwell later describes it. This is important because spectacles have only artistic value, by definition. Then when describing the experience of going down and the difficulty of going from place to place within the mine, he strangely describes this difficulty as “disappointing,” (p21) as if he had a certain idyllic image of what mine-life was like, and to see that the performance in front of him isn’t quite what he expected was a letdown. One cannot help but compare the act of watching the miners at work to that of perusing an art museum, studying the objects on display as if their value comes from the thoughts they provoke in you, the observer.
The piece is also infused with a child-like spirit of enthusiasm. Claims with superlatives like “unbearable agony” (p23) combined with qualifications like “I am not exaggerating,” (p23) are reminiscent of a child on the playground, recounting an unbelievable story hoping excitedly yet desperately that his friends believe him. There are also descriptions of the mines as lying beneath tons of earth that contain “bones of extinct beasts,” (p24) a description so fantastical one would imagine it is better suited for a children’s adventure story than a sociological examination of the British lower class’ working conditions. Repeated use of numerical descriptions like “five feet” (p22) when describing the depth into the coal face the miners cut, or “twenty five yards” (p24) when describing how far back the miners are supposed to go when blasting holes, initially seem at odds with the purported depiction of the miners as objects in a work of art. In fact, they can be justified as an attempt to use numbers to more exactly describe the image the reader should maintain in their mind, or as an attempt to assure the reader of the realism of the scene being described. Use of strange details like exact lengths and volumes might be a way that a child justifies what he’d seen upon hearing his classmates do not initially believe him.
Orwell also emphasizes the “otherworldly” (p25) nature of the work at hand. Note the hellish connotations of blackened soot lining the skin of the workers, of workers going hundreds of feet underground, forced to cramp together with little space to breathe shepherded down long corridors in systematic squalor. Orwell himself mentions how the mines represent his own “mental picture of hell.” (P18) Orwell also sets up the twin juxtapositions of the mining world below as a contrast to “our world above,” (p19) as well as compares the miners’ “lamp-lit world” (p22) below ground to the “daylight world” we regular citizens inhabit. The canonical religious depictions of hell as layered with several stories, each demarcated with a new form of suffering, come easily to mind when Orwell describes the ominous descent into the depths of earth through the mine shaft. This is made concrete when towards the end, Orwell notes “what different universes people inhabit.” The otherwordly nature of the mining at hand is important because it mirrors how characters in work of art occupy a reality that is parallel but distinct to that of our own. The miners still at times give into needs of the flesh: stripping down when working, chewing tobacco to allay thirst. Yet somehow the miners simultaneously occupy a plane of existence orthogonal to our own. They are characters in a painting; a vivid painting, certainly, in which the characters come to life, but are characters nonetheless. Insofar as they are characters in a work of art first, and real people with difficult jobs second, this depiction of the mines as hellish dehumanizes the miners.
There is also contradiction latent in the duality of miner (individual) and miners (institution). Orwell spends time elaborating on how important coal mining is in general: "all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor drudges underground." (p31) However, when painting his portrait of the coal miner, he never singles out any individual miner. The portrait he weaves throughout the essay is that of the prototypical miner: some hazy mélange of the traits he's observed in many different miners. By combining lots of individuals, he depicts no one miner in particular, and so there is irony in how the essay that extols the virtues of these miners simultaneously makes any individual miner out to be eminently forgettable. This contradiction is reflected in the wage the miner is paid. Though the world (particularly in Orwell's pre-WW2-energy-intensive time) would indeed grind to halt if it didn't have any miners at all, an individual miner is barely paid a living wage. In economic terms, the miner is totally replaceable, because someone else would (learn to) do the job for just as little money. The fact that being a coal miner is not a job most parents want for their children looms over Orwell's placement of the job on a pedestal. In lamenting how high-brow jobs like those of poets and Archbishops pale in importance to society when compared to the lowly coal-miner, Orwell forces the reader to consider the implicit question of why they are paid so little.
Through analogies with status, sensual descriptions of miners' bodies, evocation of religious and hellish language, careful use of numerical quantities, and more, Orwell paints a vivid pictures of the coal miners of south England. So vivid, in fact, that though the reader is left with a clear understanding of what they do and how difficult it is, the reader can't help but come away with a feeling that these miners are not human. Sometimes they are more than human — god-like, and nimble, and objects of intense artistic pleasure — and sometimes something less than human — like gremlins or dwarves that roam underfoot. The reader leaves with clear images (though sometimes contradictory) of miners, and in doing so, every lone miner who toils away day and night, is forgotten. This is the irony of Orwell the artist, so precisely capturing everything artistic about the miner and his vocation that the man behind the pickaxe is left in the dust.