Will I love The Road to Wigan Pier?

The first half is a fascinating account of spending time with miners and other poor / working class people in Northern England, documenting the stunning difficulty of their lives. The chapter on mining is chilling. The second half is a long critique of British socialists, mainly lamenting their inability to connect with their critics rather than preaching to the choir of “vegetarians and sandal-wearers” (not an exact quote). The book was a selection of the Socialist “Left Book Club” in 1937. At first, I didn’t like the second half, but then it grew on me, and many of its critiques… show more.

The first half of this book is a deep immersion into the shockingly bleak living conditions of 1930s working-class families in the impoverished industrial north of England, then in the grip of the Great Depression. As an Irish person – and given the historic nature of the relationship between the two countries, in which Britain has always been the dominant and powerful one – it was genuinely eye-opening to me to understand how hard life was for ordinary English people.

Orwell’s writing was undertaken from the vantage point of his own experience. He spent months living with families in Lancashire… show more.