The Road to Wigan Pier - George Orwell - Google Books The Road to Wigan Pier 1 Review 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. The Road to Wigan Pier - 必应 Sign in The Road to Wigan Pier The Road to Wigan Pier is a book by the British writer George Orwell, first published in 1937. The first half of this work documents his sociological investigations of the bleak living conditions among the working class in Lancashire and Yorkshire in the industrial north of England before World War II. The second half is a long essay on his middle-class upbringing, and the development of his political conscience, questioning British attitudes towards socialism.

Orwell states plainly that he himself is in favour of socialism; but feels it nece ... (展开) ssary to point out reasons why many people who would benefit from socialism, and should logically support it, are in practice likely to be strong opponents. According to Orwell biographer Bernard Crick, publisher Victor Gollancz first tried to persuade Orwell's agent to allow the Left Book Club edition to consist solely of the descriptive first half of the book. When this was refused Gollancz wrote an introduction to the book. "Victor could not bear to reject it, even though his suggestion that the "repugnant" second half should be omitted from the Club edition was turned down. On this occasion Victor, albeit nervously, did overrule Communist Party objections in favour of his publishing instinct.

His compromise was to publish the book with [an introduction] full of good criticism, unfair criticism, and half-truths." The book grapples, "with the social and historical reality of Depression suffering in the north of England, – Orwell does not wish merely to enumerate evils and injustices, but to break through what he regards as middle class oblivion, – Orwell's corrective to such falsity comes first by immersion of his own body – a supreme measure of truth for Orwell – directly into the experience of misery." The Road to Wigan Pier is a book by the British writer George Orwell, first published in 1937. The Road to Wigan Pier sets out a hellish vision of a broken Britain, before delivering a long meditation on creating a fairer society. Its author favours a socialist ... The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell Styled byLimpidSoft. Contents PART ONE1 1. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1 264 pages · 1972 In the 1930s Orwell was sent by a socialist book club to investigate the appalling mass unemployment in the industrial north of England. He went beyond his assignment to … book.douban.com/subject/1457246 ... and The Road to Wigan Pier is a powerful description of the poverty he witnessed there. The road to Wigan Pier, 75 years on | Books | The Guardian The Observer The road to Wigan Pier, 75 years on David Sharrock retraces George Orwell's journey that laid bare Britain's north-south divide, and finds a growing sense of hard times here again A group of unemployed men, from an illustrated feature on poverty in Wigan that appeared in the Picture Post in 1939.

Photograph: Kurt Hutton/Getty Images Saturday 19 February 2011 19.04 EST First published on Saturday 19 February 2011 19.04 EST Share on Messenger Close Seventy-five years ago this weekend, Old Etonian Eric Blair – "a tall feller with a pair of flannel bags, a fawn jacket and a mac", as one northerner described him – was pacing along the Leeds and Liverpool canal searching for Wigan Pier. "Terribly cold," he recorded in his diary. "Frightful landscape of slagheaps and belching chimneys. A few rats running through the snow, very tame, presumably weak with hunger." The mill girls, scurrying to work in their clogs down the cobbled streets, sounded to him "like an army hurrying into battle". Weeks earlier, Blair had set out from London armed with a small advance from his publisher, Victor Gollancz, to investigate the "distressed areas" of northern England.

It was Gollancz who, to save the former colonial officer's family from embarrassment, gave Blair the pseudonym George Orwell when he published Down and Out in Paris and London and had come up with the idea for what would become The Road to Wigan Pier, a classic literary journey that critics called beautiful and disturbing. The New Statesman and Nation's review said of Orwell: "The honest Tory must face what he tells and implies, and the honest Socialist must face him, too." Today the book seems curiously relevant to our own distressed times. An Old Etonian prime minister, in a cabinet stuffed with public school boys, has embarked upon the most radical reduction of public spending in generations, making cuts that have prompted robust criticism of their pace and scale. North and south are pulling apart once more – not yet to the extent where Orwell could describe his journey as if "venturing among savages", but getting there. We are witnessing the longest squeeze in living standards since the 1920s, according to Mervyn King , governor of the Bank of England, and its effects fall heavier on the north.

Orwell had only the vaguest notion of what he would write about and where to go, but tramping the north was newly fashionable among the literati: JB Priestley's English Journey was selling well and Aldous Huxley was visiting the Nottinghamshire coalfields. Following the Wall Street Crash and the global depression that it heralded, unemployment in places such as Wigan remained stubbornly high. The Road to Wigan Pier sets out a hellish vision of a broken Britain, before delivering a long meditation on creating a fairer society. Its author favours a socialist solution, but then spends more time deriding socialism's mainly middle-class proponents in a voice and style that would guarantee him a Daily Mail column today and make readers of the Observer, for which he wrote until his untimely death in 1950, blanch. There's a lot of hand-wringing about the British class structure, the north-south divide and their commingling – a theme that appears to have lit a recent bushfire after the BBC Trust said that Radio 4 isn't "northern" enough. East of Wigan along the Leeds-Liverpool canal lies Salford, the BBC's new home so despised by its London staff.

Were he alive today to revisit his journey north, Orwell would find time and distance converging, the past rushing to meet him. I set out, armed with a credit card, to walk in his steps with his contemporary diary as my guide. Orwell was fastidious in recording the minutiae of his budget as he tramped north, using trains, buses and his own two legs. But where Orwell spent the best part of two months on his journey and nine months writing it up, I only have three days. Inevitably, I hop on a Virgin Express train to Wigan, availing of its complimentary Wi-Fi to mug up on my subject. Return fare from London Euston: £70. He originally intended to go to Rochdale, home of Jack Hilton, a working-class writer whom he greatly admired. Hilton, a lifelong socialist, advised him to head for Wigan, where an incoming southerner would see the full magnitude of the depressed north. Ever since, Wiganers have regretted Hilton's advice, while cannily turning the infamy of Orwell's depiction to the advantage of their town.

My grandfather was a Wigan miner whose bare skin, perma-tattooed with blue spiders' webs from the coal dust, frightened me as a child on summer days on Morecambe Bay shore. Orwell said the miners' marbled skin looked like Roquefort cheese, which would have meant nothing to them. He also condemned Lancashire cheese as "flabby", which only goes to show how food fashions change. Grandad and his workmates couldn't understand why Orwell chose to dwell so relentlessly on the negative, the impact of which altogether erased his praise of the heroism of miners working underground in appalling and dangerous conditions. Orwell's depiction of his sordid lodgings above a tripe shop – with an unemptied chamber pot beneath the breakfast table – makes great copy but tells us little about the living conditions of most Wiganers. It is an article of faith in the town that he only moved to live with the Forrests because of their low reputation and that his previous lodgings were too clean. Orwell also visited Liverpool, Sheffield and Barnsley – each of which now finds itself in the political limelight.

Embarrassingly for David Cameron, Liverpool has pulled out of his "big society" project , saying it is impossible to fulfil at the same time as having to take responsibility for slashing local services. Embarrassingly for Labour, Eric Illsley is behind bars for fraud over the MPs' expenses scandal after resigning his Barnsley Central seat and forcing a byelection next month. In Sheffield, the local MP and Liberal Democrat leader, deputy prime minister Nick Clegg , is battling catastrophic opinion poll ratings for flip-flopping over an £80m loan to Sheffield Forgemasters set up by Labour before the general election – the coalition government said it was unaffordable. A large pawnshop is the first impression of Wigan: it faces the railway station. Turn left and walk the short distance to Wigan Pier and you will find it corralled by signs offering residential and commercial space for sale and to let. A plaque commemorates the Queen's opening of Wigan Pier in March 1986, 50 years after Orwell's forlorn efforts to find it. In fact the "pier" never existed, except in song and laughter.

The story goes that day-trippers on the train to Southport, peering out across the blighted landscape in a thick fog, spotted a railway gantry leading to a jetty from which coal was tipped into barges on the canal. "Are we there yet?" asked a passenger, mistaking the ghostly outline for one of Britain's newly fashionable seaside attractions. "Nay, lad, that's Wigan Pier tha' cun see," replied the railway signalman. True or not, the pier became a music-hall staple of George Formby. The Pier "experience"-cum-heritage centre was Wigan's revenge, cashing in on the one-sided portrait painted by Orwell. But the Way We Were museum, featuring a Victorian schoolroom and colliery, closed in 2007 and has stood empty ever since. At Wigan Pier Bar and Restaurant, they are serving pints for £1.75 until 7pm, but the only customer is John from Essex, a Traveller who has been living in Wigan these past nine years. John stays because the natives are friendly and "you don't get too many coppers about – they're too afraid to come out".

He tells hair-raising stories about a local pub's "trannie night", which he claims is popular with ex-miners. The bar staff admit that the current trading conditions are abysmal. It's time to move on. King Street begins with the Money Shop – "Cheque-cashing in no-time!" – and a jobs agency, but ends at the county court. In between lies Wigan's nightlife zone: Revolution, Outback Surfers Paradise, Mortimer's, The Hub, Jumpin Jaks, Chicago Rock Café, Maloneys, Legends, Elements, Ibiza, Madisons, The Godfather, Bamboogy retro bar and Reflex the 80s Bar. Guse's Kebabs feeds the hungry and stupefied as they tumble out on to King Street in the small hours. The Wigan Observer reports that an eight-months-pregnant teenager was jailed for blinding in one eye a 34-year-old single mother by twice stamping a stiletto heel into her victim's face in a Wigan nightclub. Amy Smith, 17 at the time of the attack, said she was too drunk to recall what had happened.

She will serve 33 months in a young offenders institute but what future is there for Joanne Brown? Permanently disfigured, her eye socket smashed in 16 places and cheekbone, jaw and skull fractured, she faces years of surgery. Orwell read the local papers in Wigan Library, as I am doing, in an upstairs room backing on to King Street, but he didn't visit the town's pubs or observe Wiganers at play. His brother-in-law, Humphrey Dakin, a no-nonsense Yorkshireman with little time for Eric's politics, chided him for not taking in a football match and only seeing the worst of life up north. Describing the British class structure, Orwell said in The Road to Wigan Pier that as a child he felt lower-class people were almost subhuman, with coarse faces, hideous accents and gross manners; feelings forged before the Great War when it was impossible or at least very dangerous for a well-dressed person to go through a slum street. Whole quarters were considered unsafe because of hooligans, he wrote.

I grew so tired of people telling me they were certain that Orwell wouldn't recognise Wigan today that, spying a meeting in Crompton Street spiritualist church, I entered in the hope that I would be able to contact the author and put an end to the riddle. Unfortunately my mobile phone rang at an inopportune moment – when the psychic was describing the presence of the spirit of an eight-year-old girl standing next to a supposed relative – and I retreated into the night, leaving behind a promise of "Psychic Suppers, including hot pot for £7" and an "Extravaganza of Mediums – £12 per reading". Next door Gala Bingo's car park was two-thirds full. Orwell was constantly cold in Wigan and complained about the food – particularly the local delicacy of cold tripe seasoned with vinegar, a dish that my father still recalls with Proustian pleasure. I had the opposite problem, with stiflingly warm bars, cafes, restaurants and hotel rooms, and an excess of culinary choice ranging through McDonald's, KFC, Subway and assorted bakeries, Chinese buffets and Indian sit-in/carry-outs.

Preparing for an interview with David Molyneux, the council's deputy leader, over a fried breakfast (£4; mug of tea 30p), a slice of black pudding lurking beneath the bubble and squeak spurted on to my shirt when I stabbed it. "It's took us a long time to get over his books," said Molyneux of Orwell, who lodged in his ward. "I can't say he did us any favours; the flat-cap-and-whippet syndrome stuck around longer than we wanted." Labour is the permanent party of local government in Wigan metropolitan borough, holding 24 out of 25 wards. Molyneux said the budget would be reduced by £55m over the next three years, with the loss of 820 public-sector jobs. "It's not good, I can't deny that we're suffering." Through schemes such as the Working Neighbourhood Fund, which ends in April, "we've created a new business every day last year". The demise of the North West Development Agency means that a well-advanced inner relief road scheme to tackle the town's traffic congestion has been abandoned, along with other redevelopment projects.

Molyneux, a miner's son, was dismissive of Cameron's "big society". Two volunteer-staffed libraries have been running successfully on outlying housing estates for several years, with plans to extend the concept to civic and leisure centres. "When councils are close to the voluntary sector these are things that grow organically, not a back-of-a-fag-packet idea like this 'big society' stuff from the Con-Dems," he huffed. Across the Pennines in Barnsley, Meg Munn, MP for Sheffield Heeley, is on familiar territory as she joins the Labour byelection campaign to hold Illsley's seat: she was a social worker here in the 1990s. "The big worry is that as a result of this government's policies we do get back to the things that Orwell wrote about, the north-south divide, which was very evident in Sheffield and Barnsley in the 1980s and 1990s. Physically both are completely transformed.

When I first came here it was terrible, with most of the shops boarded up." This was my first visit to Sheffield since the miners' strike of the mid-1980s and I was staggered by the city's transformation. New buildings, public spaces and monuments all conspire to project a positive image of progress. A piercing siren goes off on the corner of Leopold Street and Barker's Pool and nobody reacts. "It dates back to the days when the great steel-hammers were going right across the city to let workers know it was the end of their lunch break," explains Paul Scriven, the Liberal Democrat leader of the council. "It's a symbol of Sheffield, proud of its traditions but forging a new future, letting investors know that this is the right city at the right time." Scriven says he shares the frustration of his fellow Lib Dem council leaders who have criticised the government for front-loading public-sector cuts. "But we've shown that even in the worst year, this year, we've managed to protect frontline services. We are not closing any libraries, although opening hours will be cut slightly, and we saved 300 jobs by freezing pay rises for anyone earning over £21,000 for the next two years.

We are having to cut 270 council jobs, but that's less than the 500 jobs we've just secured by Sky moving here. Of course, I'm frustrated that we are all having to make cuts because of the mess left us by the last Labour government, but I think political decisions are being made by some Labour authorities in the north." Orwell said he would find little to interest him in Barnsley, which was a kindness compared to his verdict on Sheffield: "It seems to me, by daylight, one of the most appalling places I have ever seen." From his two months in the north, one image stayed with him above all others; a pale young woman "with the usual draggled, exhausted look … I thought how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling in the gutter in a back alley in Wigan, in the bitter cold, prodding a stick up a blocked drain.

At that moment she looked up and caught my eye, and her expression was as desolate as I have ever seen; it struck me that she was thinking just the same as I was." We cannot know if he was right, but it seems a rare moment, in a book about human sympathy, of connection between the man raised to be an officer of the empire and the proletariat that, however much he wished to embrace, repelled him still. Jack Hilton, the man who set him on the road to Wigan, hated the book, judging it a failure and falling out with the author. "So George went to Wigan and he might have stayed at home. He wasted money, energy and wrote piffle," was his damning verdict. Victor Gollancz disagreed, but with strong reservations. He finally published it as part of the Left Book Club series, but included a foreword in which he rebutted Orwell's colourful views on the "fruit-drinkers" of the middle-class liberal elite, fearful that his readership might take offence. In a later edition, against the author's wishes, he deleted the polemical second section altogether.

By the time the book appeared in its distinctive tangerine soft cover, Orwell was in Spain fighting fascism. Alongside him were men from Barnsley, Sheffield and Wigan. George Orwell | British author | Britannica.com British author Alternative Title: Eric Arthur Blair George Orwell Virginia Woolf George Orwell, pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair (born June 25, 1903, Motihari , Bengal, India —died January 21, 1950, London , England ), English novelist, essayist, and critic famous for his novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), the latter a profound anti- utopian novel that examines the dangers of totalitarian rule. George Orwell. BBC Copyright Born Eric Arthur Blair, Orwell never entirely abandoned his original name, but his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London , appeared in 1933 as the work of George Orwell (the surname he derived from the beautiful River Orwell in East Anglia). In time his nom de plume became so closely attached to him that few people but relatives knew his real name was Blair.

The change in name corresponded to a profound shift in Orwell’s lifestyle, in which he changed from a pillar of the British imperial establishment into a literary and political rebel. Early life He was born in Bengal, into the class of sahibs. His father was a minor British official in the Indian civil service; his mother, of French extraction, was the daughter of an unsuccessful teak merchant in Burma (Myanmar). Their attitudes were those of the “landless gentry,” as Orwell later called lower-middle-class people whose pretensions to social status had little relation to their income. Orwell was thus brought up in an atmosphere of impoverished snobbery. After returning with his parents to England, he was sent in 1911 to a preparatory boarding school on the Sussex coast, where he was distinguished among the other boys by his poverty and his intellectual brilliance. He grew up a morose, withdrawn, eccentric boy, and he was later to tell of the miseries of those years in his posthumously published autobiographical essay , Such, Such Were the Joys (1953). Orwell won scholarships to two of England’s leading schools, Winchester and Eton, and chose the latter.

He stayed from 1917 to 1921. Aldous Huxley was one of his masters, and it was at Eton that he published his first writing in college periodicals. Instead of accepting a scholarship to a university, Orwell decided to follow family tradition and, in 1922, went to Burma as assistant district superintendent in the Indian Imperial Police. He served in a number of country stations and at first appeared to be a model imperial servant. Yet from boyhood he had wanted to become a writer, and when he realized how much against their will the Burmese were ruled by the British, he felt increasingly ashamed of his role as a colonial police officer. Later he was to recount his experiences and his reactions to imperial rule in his novel Burmese Days and in two brilliant autobiographical sketches, “ Shooting an Elephant” and “ A Hanging,” classics of expository prose. Against imperialism Scientists Ponder Menopause in Killer Whales In 1927 Orwell, on leave to England, decided not to return to Burma, and on January 1, 1928, he took the decisive step of resigning from the imperial police.

Already in the autumn of 1927 he had started on a course of action that was to shape his character as a writer. Having felt guilty that the barriers of race and caste had prevented his mingling with the Burmese, he thought he could expiate some of his guilt by immersing himself in the life of the poor and outcast people of Europe. Donning ragged clothes, he went into the East End of London to live in cheap lodging houses among labourers and beggars; he spent a period in the slums of Paris and worked as a dishwasher in French hotels and restaurants; he tramped the roads of England with professional vagrants and joined the people of the London slums in their annual exodus to work in the Kentish hopfields. British Culture and Politics Those experiences gave Orwell the material for Down and Out in Paris and London, in which actual incidents are rearranged into something like fiction. The book’s publication in 1933 earned him some initial literary recognition.

Orwell’s first novel, Burmese Days (1934), established the pattern of his subsequent fiction in its portrayal of a sensitive, conscientious , and emotionally isolated individual who is at odds with an oppressive or dishonest social environment . The main character of Burmese Days is a minor administrator who seeks to escape from the dreary and narrow-minded chauvinism of his fellow British colonialists in Burma. His sympathies for the Burmese, however, end in an unforeseen personal tragedy. The protagonist of Orwell’s next novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), is an unhappy spinster who achieves a brief and accidental liberation in her experiences among some agricultural labourers. Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) is about a literarily inclined bookseller’s assistant who despises the empty commercialism and materialism of middle-class life but who in the end is reconciled to bourgeois prosperity by his forced marriage to the girl he loves. Britannica Lists & Quizzes Editor Picks: Exploring 10 Types of Basketball Movies Orwell’s revulsion against imperialism led not only to his personal rejection of the bourgeois lifestyle but to a political reorientation as well.

Immediately after returning from Burma he called himself an anarchist and continued to do so for several years; during the 1930s, however, he began to consider himself a socialist , though he was too libertarian in his thinking ever to take the further step—so common in the period—of declaring himself a communist . From The Road to Wigan Pier to World War II Orwell’s first socialist book was an original and unorthodox political treatise entitled The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). It begins by describing his experiences when he went to live among the destitute and unemployed miners of northern England, sharing and observing their lives; it ends in a series of sharp criticisms of existing socialist movements. It combines mordant reporting with a tone of generous anger that was to characterize Orwell’s subsequent writing. By the time The Road to Wigan Pier was in print, Orwell was in Spain; he went to report on the Civil War there and stayed to join the Republican militia, serving on the Aragon and Teruel fronts and rising to the rank of second lieutenant. He was seriously wounded at Teruel, with damage to his throat permanently affecting his voice and endowing his speech with a strange, compelling quietness.

Later, in May 1937, after having fought in Barcelona against communists who were trying to suppress their political opponents, he was forced to flee Spain in fear of his life. The experience left him with a lifelong dread of communism, first expressed in the vivid account of his Spanish experiences, Homage to Catalonia (1938), which many consider one of his best books. Returning to England, Orwell showed a paradoxically conservative strain in writing Coming Up for Air (1939), in which he uses the nostalgic recollections of a middle-aged man to examine the decency of a past England and express his fears about a future threatened by war and fascism. When World War II did come, Orwell was rejected for military service, and instead he headed the Indian service of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). He left the BBC in 1943 and became literary editor of the Tribune, a left-wing socialist paper associated with the British Labour leader Aneurin Bevan .

At this period Orwell was a prolific journalist, writing many newspaper articles and reviews, together with serious criticism , like his classic essays on Charles Dickens and on boys’ weeklies and a number of books about England (notably The Lion and the Unicorn , 1941) that combined patriotic sentiment with the advocacy of a libertarian , decentralist socialism very much unlike that practiced by the British Labour Party . Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four Connect with Britannica Facebook Twitter YouTube Instagram Pinterest In 1944 Orwell finished Animal Farm , a political fable based on the story of the Russian Revolution and its betrayal by Joseph Stalin . In the book a group of barnyard animals overthrow and chase off their exploitative human masters and set up an egalitarian society of their own. Eventually the animals’ intelligent and power-loving leaders, the pigs, subvert the revolution and form a dictatorship whose bondage is even more oppressive and heartless than that of their former human masters. (“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”) At first Orwell had difficulty finding a publisher for the small masterpiece, but when it appeared in 1945, Animal Farm made him famous and, for the first time, prosperous.

Dust jacket for the first American edition (1946) of George Orwell’s Animal … Advertising Archive/Courtesy Everett Collection Animal Farm was one of Orwell’s finest works, full of wit and fantasy and admirably written. It has, however, been overshadowed by his last book, Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), a novel he wrote as a warning after years of brooding on the twin menaces of Nazism and Stalinism . The novel is set in an imaginary future in which the world is dominated by three perpetually warring totalitarian police states. The book’s hero, the Englishman Winston Smith , is a minor party functionary in one of those states. His longing for truth and decency leads him to secretly rebel against the government, which perpetuates its rule by systematically distorting the truth and continuously rewriting history to suit its own purposes. Smith has a love affair with a like-minded woman, but then they are both arrested by the Thought Police.

The ensuing imprisonment, torture, and reeducation of Smith are intended not merely to break him physically or make him submit but to root out his independent mental existence and his spiritual dignity until he can love only the figure he previously most hated: the apparent leader of the party, Big Brother . Smith’s surrender to the monstrous brainwashing techniques of his jailers is tragic enough, but the novel gains much of its power from the comprehensive rigour with which it extends the premises of totalitarianism to their logical end: the love of power and domination over others has acquired its perfected expression in the perpetual surveillance and omnipresent dishonesty of an unassailable and irresistible police state under whose rule every human virtue is slowly being suborned and extinguished. Orwell’s warning of the potential dangers of totalitarianism made a deep impression on his contemporaries and upon subsequent readers, and the book’s title and many of its coined words and phrases (“Big Brother is watching you,” “ newspeak ,” “doublethink”) became bywords for modern political abuses. Trending Topics Amazon.co.uk: The Road to Wigan Pier: Books Amazon's George Orwell Page George Orwell is one of England's most famous writers and social commentators.

Among his works are the classic political satire Animal Farm and the dystopian nightmare vision Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell was also a prolific essayist, and it is for these More about George Orwell George Orwell George Orwell (1903-1950) On each landing, opposite the lift shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran. "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--for ever." --from Nineteen Eighty-Four The British author George Orwell, pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, b. Motihari, India, June 25, 1903, d. London, Jan. 21, 1950, achieved prominence in the late 1940s as the author of two brilliant satires attacking totalitarianism.

Familiarity with the novels, documentaries, essays, and criticism he wrote during the 1930s and later has since established him as one of the most important and influential voices of the century. Orwell's parents were members of the Indian Civil Service, and, after an education at Eton College in England, Orwell joined (1922) the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, an experience that later found expression in the novel Burmese Days (1934). His first book, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), was a nonfictional account--moving and comic at the same time--of several years of self-imposed poverty he had experienced after leaving Burma. He published three other novels in the 1930s: A Clergyman's Daughter (1935), Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), and Coming Up for Air (1939).

His major works of the period were two documentaries: The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), a detailed, sympathetic, and yet objective study of the lives of nearly impoverished miners in the Lancashire town of Wigan; and Homage to Catalonia (1938), which recounts his experiences fighting for the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War. Orwell was wounded, and, when the Communists attempted to eliminate their allies on the far left, fought against them and was forced to flee for his life. Orwell's two best-known books reflect his lifelong distrust of autocratic government, whether of the left or right: Animal Farm (1945), a modern beast-fable attacking Stalinism, and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), a dystopian novel setting forth his fears of an intrusively bureaucratized state of the future. The pair of novels brought him his first fame and almost his only remuneration as a writer.

His wartime work for the BBC (published in the collections George Orwell: The Lost Writings, and The War Commentaries) gave him a solid taste of bureaucratic hypocrisy and may have provided the inspiration for his invention of "newspeak," the truth-denying language of Big Brother's rule in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell's reputation rests not only on his political shrewdness and his sharp satires but also on his marvelously clear style and on his superb essays, which rank with the best ever written. "Politics and the English Language" (1950), which links authoritarianism with linguistic decay, has been widely influential. The four-volume Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell was published in 1968. Richard A. Johnson Bibliography: Atkins, John, George Orwell (1955); Buitenhuis, P., and Nadel, I.

B., George Orwell: A Reassessment (1988); Crick, B., George Orwell: A Life (1980); Kalechofsky, Roberta, George Orwell (1973); Kubal, David L., Outside the Whale: George Orwell's Art and Politics (1972); Lee, Robert A., Orwell's Fiction (1969); Meyers, Jeffrey, A Reader's Guide to George Orwell (1977) and, as ed., George Orwell (1975); Oxley, B.

T., George Orwell (1969); Patai, D., The Orwell Mystique: A Study in Male Ideology (1984); Reilly, P., George Orwell: The Age's Adversary (1986); Stansky, P., and Abrahams, W., The Unknown Orwell (1972) and The Transformation (1979); Steinhoff, William, George Orwell and the Origins of 1984 (1975); Williams, Raymond, ed., George Orwell: A Collection of Critical Essays (1974); Woodcock, George, The Crystal Spirit (1966); Zwerdling, Alex, Orwell and the Left (1974). Text Copyright © 1993 Grolier Incorporated Orwell Links George Orwell George Orwell Location of death: London, England Cause of death: Tuberculosis Remains: Buried, All Saints Church, Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire, England Gender: Male Executive summary: 1984 and Animal Farm Military service: POUM (Spanish Civil War, infantry) Wife: Eileen O'Shaughnessy (m. 1936, d.

1945) Son: Richard Horatio Blair (adopted, b. May-1944) Wife: Sonia Brownell (m. 1949) High School: St Cyprian's School, Eastbourne, Sussex Down and Out in Paris and London (1933, novel) Burmese Days (1934, novel) A Clergyman's Daughter (1935, novel) Keep The Aspidistra Flying (1936, novel) The Road to Wigan Pier (1937, social studies) Homage to Catalonia (1938, memoir) Coming Up for Air (1939, novel) The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (1941, social studies) Animal Farm: A Fairy Story (1945, novella) Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949, novel) The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (1968, collection) Do you know something we don't? The Road to Wigan Pier: Amazon.co.uk: G.

Orwell: Books The Road to Wigan Pier Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1 This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading. Hardcover Â£17.93 Amazon Prime Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. Apple To get the free app, enter your mobile phone number. or Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here , or download a FREE Kindle Reading App . Product details By Anita Treso on 1 April 2006 Format: Paperback 'The Road to Wigan Pier' is split into two parts. Part one is George Orwell's recording of his experiences in the North of England, meeting miner's families and reporting at first hand what he saw and heard. Orwell records with sincerity the working class condition. There is no blame or embellishment of what Orwell saw. Orwell's descriptions of the people in the boarding houses he was staying in, are wonderful.

You really get a sense of the filth and depravation, and yet the people make you feel at home, to the point of marking your bread and butter with "a black thumb-print on it". I appreciate Orwell's candid writing. The stark reality of poverty is brought to life by Orwell, from his description of the conditions of working in the mines, to the weekly shopping bill and food consumption. Part two is Orwell's polemic on what he saw and experienced. I found this part of the book filled with passion, anger and justifications. Orwell always makes sure to explain the reasoning behind his arguements and even apologises for his background. Part two consists of political theories, language, class distinction and the personal journey Orwell experienced whilst researching part one. In my opinion, 'The Road to Wigan Pier' is a wonderful snapshot of a time and a place. It still has a place in literature today as a reminder to us all that there are still destitute people in the world and that things haven't changed as much as we hoped.

Question: The 1937 novel ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’ was written by which British author?
Answer: George Orwell