Book Bearings
The Road to Wigan Pier
- 230 pages · about 4 hours
- First published 1937
- 138 editions
- Free to read
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1 About this book
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.
Good for readers who want: economics, a true life story, and a book they can read free online.
- Economics
- Social science
- Personal Memoirs
- Social conditions
- Socialism
- Working class
- Labor
- Slums
2 Read it free, right here
A free scan from the Internet Archive opens right here on the page, with no sign-up.
Read it on the Internet Archive3 About George Orwell
Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
4 More by George Orwell
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