The Road to Wigan Pier

George Orwell

Apr 2001 · Penguin UK

About this ebook

George Orwell's searing account of working-class life in the bleak industrial heartlands of Yorkshire and Lancashire in the 1930s, The Road to Wigan Pier is a brilliant and bitter polemic that has lost none of its political impact over time

Orwell's graphically unforgettable descriptions of social injustice, cramped slum housing, dangerous mining conditions, squalor, hunger and growing unemployment are written with unblinking honesty, fury and great humanity. It crystallized the ideas that would be found in his later works and novels, and remains a powerful portrait of poverty, injustice and class divisions in Britain.

Includes illustrations, explanatory footnotes, and an introduction by Richard Hoggart

Ratings and reviews

I actually thought it evolved from 1997 onwards with Tony Blair and his ilk, but as ever Orwell nails it almost 100yrs prior. Aptly describing the 'Bourgeois Socialists' of his day and their remoteness to the Working Class. I wish every Labour politician of our day would read this book, and appropriate the necessary actions before they lose the Working Class entirely.

I'm yet to be disappointed by Orwell.. The Road to Wigan Pier gives a great insight into what life was like before the NHS and before many of the significant union gains we take for granted today.. The great fight is yet to be won, but we're on our way! Many people could learn an awful lot from this book! Give it your attention, it's a duty!

His account of classes which should never have existed: And still shouldn't!!

About the author

Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell) was born in India in 1903. He was educated at Eton, served with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, and worked in Britain as a private tutor, schoolteacher, bookshop assistant and journalist. In 1936, Orwell went to fight for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and was wounded. In 1938 he was admitted into a sanatorium and from then on was never fully fit. George Orwell died in London in 1950.