He tried to get Orwell to let him publish part 1 without part 2, but Orwell refused. He concludes that British class feeling is basically impossible to eradicate and that British socialists would do well to stop vilifying the middle class, i.e., themselves, because everybody can smell a phony.It was first published with grave reservations by noted lefty publisher Victor Gollancz as a selection of the Left Book Club. Part 2 is an examination of the feelings of middle class British socialists (virtually all British socialists, Orwell included, being middle class) and the British working class (virtually none of them socialists) towards each other. My third Orwell in as many weeks, if you’re keeping score.Part 1 is his tour through the living conditions of the working class in industrial Lancashire and Yorkshire, primarily coal miners and the unemployed. The Road to Wigan Pier cemented ideas that would be found in Orwell's later works, and remains a powerful portrait of poverty, injustice and class divisions in Britain to this day. It is an honest, gripping and humane study that also looks at socialism as a solution to the problems facing working-class northerners – something many readers at the time were uncomfortable discussing. Orwell graphically and emphatically describes the hardships of ordinary people living in cramped slum housing, working in dangerous mines and growing hungry through malnutrition and social injustice. Revolutionary for its time, The Road to Wigan Pier documents Orwell’s stint in towns likes Barnsley, Sheffield and Wigan in 1936, where he met and observed working-class people living in the bleak industrial heartlands of Yorkshire and Lancashire.

In the mid-1930s, George Orwell was given an assignment from his publisher – to write a book about unemployment and social conditions in the economically depressed north of England. If there is one man to whom I do feel myself inferior, it is a coalminer. HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics.

The road to wigan pier book review