The Road to Wigan Pier

This novel by George Orwell is an insightful socio-political commentary on the living conditions of the working class in Lancashire and the industrial English north in the years leading up to the Second World War.

First published in 1937, The Road to Wigan Pier is a longform essay analysing the life of the working class in Yorkshire and Lancashire in the early 1900s. George Orwell analyses contemporary attitudes towards socialism, specifically why those who would have most to gain from it are often its biggest opponents. Known for his political novels and allegories such as Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four(1949), this early essay by Orwell is not to be missed by those with an interest in his biting social commentary.