Product Description

Collected together for the first time, this volume includes the complete text of THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER - Orwell's vivid and impassioned documentary of unemployment and proletarian life - as well as Orwell's best writing on the political and social condition of England.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #159280 in Books
• Published on: 2001-05-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

About the Author
Born in India in 1903 George Orwell moved to England with his family in 1907. He was educated at Eton and joined the Indian Imperial Police, serving five years in Burma before returning to Europe. The period of poverty that followed inspired DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON (1933). In 1937 he published THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER. His political convictions led him to fight for the Republicans in Spain and to write HOMAGE TO CATALONIA. In 1945 ANIMAL FARM was published. Orwell died of TB in 1950.

Customer Reviews

An eye-opener
I wasn't quite sure what to expect when I bought this book. The first part of the book includes the "Road to Wigan Pier", which is excellent. A very graphic description of the poverty endured by people in the north of England during the 1930s. The second half looks at the English national character, and is equally description. Having read Paxman's "The English", I found that Orwell's observations are much more enlightening and true. The attributes may have been observed 70 years ago, but many are still accurate today.

A telling account of poverty in interwar England.
This excellent collection of essays alongside the brilliant Road To Wigan Pier shows some of Orwell's more journalistic work at its finest. Although he was the author of some brilliant fiction, Orwell made a name for himself before the war writing some excellent surveys of poverty and many other issues. The Road To Wigan Pier makes up the bulk of this work. It describes poverty in the northern industrial towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and in it Orwell gives an excellent story of the kinds of conditions the working classes were living in at that time. Perhaps the best part of this book is the description of the kinds of housing conditions these people had to endure, such as back-to-back houses, shared outdoor lavatories and the general dilapidation of the housing stock. All the writing in this work is a brutal condemantion of poverty and unemployment, and goes well with some of Orwell's other work, and betrays the fact that all was not well in interwar England.