The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell
The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell
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The Road to Wigan Pier

Author: George Orwell

Narrator: Frederick Davidson

Unabridged: 7 hr 43 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/11/2008


Synopsis

When Orwell went to the north of England in the thirties to find out how industrial workers lived, he not only observed but shared in their experience. He stayed in cramped, dreary lodgings and subsisted on the scant, cheerless diet of the poor. He went down into the coal mines and walked crouching, as the miners did, through a one to threemile passage too low to stand up in. He watched the backbreaking, dangerous labor of men whose net pay then averaged $575 a year. And he knew the unemployed, those who had been out of work for so long they had sunk beyond despair into an inhuman apathy. In his searing yet beautiful account of life on the bottom rung, Orwell asks himself why Socialismwhich alone, he felt, could conserve human values from the ravages of industrialismhad so little appeal. His answer was a harsh critique of the Socialism and Socialists of his time.

About George Orwell

Eric Arthur Blair (1903-1950), better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic. His work is marked by lucid prose, awareness of social injustice, opposition to totalitarianism, and outspoken support of democratic socialism. He is best known for the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Orwell's work continues to influence popular and political culture, and the term Orwellian - descriptive of totalitarian or authoritarian social practices - has entered the language together with many of his neologisms, including Big Brother, Thought Police, newspeak, doublethink, and thoughtcrime.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Barry on October 27, 2014

Alright Georgie I get what you're saying, being poor in the 30s was really fucking awful. I loved the way you wrote about the industrialisation of the north of England and your views on a Socialism and the such but ugh why did you write this one so... unenjoyably? It felt like I was reading a 200-pa......more

Goodreads review by Riku on March 18, 2014

The Road to Wigan Pier & 1984: A Parallel Analysis Commissioned fortuitously in the period when Socialism was on the retreat and Fascism on the rise, Orwell must already have begun to glimpse the world which he was to envision with vigorous clarity in ‘1984’. This review is a dual review then, of ‘19......more

Goodreads review by Paul on March 21, 2023

The first half of this odd book is universally beloved, and I can see why – I loved it too! Investigative journalism at its finest, 1937 style. The second half was greeted with cries of horror and consternation, and I can very easily see why! The publisher, who paid George a handsome sum up front fo......more

Goodreads review by Emily May on November 09, 2021

The Road to Wigan Pier is a very interesting book. For several reasons. Personal to me is the reason that the first part of the book documents the poverty and squalor of working class life in Northern industrial towns in Britain. It feels personal because this is where I am from, and the people he de......more

Goodreads review by Nigeyb on March 07, 2017

I've recently read quite a few books by George Orwell (The Clergyman's Daughter, Coming Up For Air, Keep and The Aspidistra Flying), having previously read Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm and Homage to Catalonia, and am rapidly coming to the conclusion that he's one of my favourite writers. This w......more