The Road to Wigan Pier

About the book

Published in 1937, The Road to Wigan Pier grew out of the weeks George Orwell spent in the industrial north of England in early 1936, commissioned to report on the lives of the unemployed and the working poor. He lodged with families in Wigan and Sheffield, went down a coal mine, and recorded housing, wages and diets in careful detail. The first half of the book is reportage on the conditions he found. The second is a personal and deliberately provocative essay on class and socialism, in which Orwell examines his own upbringing and argues that socialists were failing to win over the people they claimed to speak for.

Characters

• George Orwell — Author and observer

  The writer records industrial working conditions and examines his own class assumptions and political commitments.

• Mr. Brooker — Lodging-house keeper

  A former miner whose household and shop provide the setting for the book's opening observations.

• Mrs. Brooker — Lodging-house keeper

  Brooker's wife, whose complaints and poor health form part of Orwell's account of the household.

About the author

GO

George Orwell

George Orwell (1903–1950) was the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, an English novelist and essayist who turned plain, exact prose into a political act. Born in India and schooled at Eton, he served five years in the imperial police in Burma, then lived among the poor of Paris and London, and was shot through the throat fighting Franco's forces in Spain — and each of those became a book. He wanted prose to be "like a window pane", and distrusted any language built to hide what it meant. Animal Farm made him famous; Nineteen Eighty-Four, finished on a Scottish island while tuberculosis was killing him, gave the world Big Brother and doublethink. His work also includes Burmese Days, The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia.