The Road to Wigan Pier

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics.If there is one man to whom I do feel myself inferior, it is a coalminer.In the mid-1930s, George Orwell was given an assignment from his publisher – to write a book about unemployment and social conditions in the economically depressed north of England. Revolutionary for its time, The Road to Wigan Pier documents Orwell’s stint in towns likes Barnsley, Sheffield and Wigan in 1936, where he met and observed working-class people living in the bleak industrial heartlands of Yorkshire and Lancashire.Orwell graphically and emphatically describes the hardships of ordinary people living in …