The Road to Wigan Pier

by George Orwell (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  1972

  $13.94

  In the 1930s George Orwell was sent by a socialist book club to investigate the appalling mass unemployment in the industrial north of England. He went beyond his assignment to investigate the employed as well. Not one to observe from the sidelines, Orwell shared the experiences of the coal miners, living in foul lodgings, subsisting on a meager diet, and going down into the hellish, back-breaking mines. What he saw and recorded helped clarify his feelings about socialism. In this book he pointedly tells why socialism, the only remedy to the shocking conditions he had witnessed, repelled so many normal decent people. His rebuke was so stinging that it brought a rebuttal from one of his sponsors, published as a foreward to the original edition of The Road to Wigan Pier and also included here.

• New

  Paperback
  2001

  $10.92

  This is a searing account of George Orwell's observations 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. His 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 Orwell's later works and novels, and remains a powerful portrait of poverty, injustice and class divisions in Britain. Published with an introduction by Richard Hoggart in Penguin Modern Classics. It is easy to see why the book created and still creates so sharp an impact...exceptional immediacy, freshness and vigour, opinionated and bold...Above all, it is a study of poverty and, behind that, of the strength of class-divisions. (Richard Hoggart).