Smell and Prejudice

I read George Orwell’s book about class and working conditions in early-twentieth-century England, The Road to Wigan Pier.

The book’s most famous passage considers smell:

Here you come to the real secret of class distinctions in the West—the real reason why a European of bourgeois upbringing, even when he calls himself a Communist, cannot without a hard effort think of a working man as his equal. It is summed up in four frightful words which people nowadays are chary of uttering, but which were bandied about quite…