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What did George Orwell observe while researching The Road to Wigan Pier?
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George Orwell
Known best for his powerful anti-utopian novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), English author George Orwell came to be regarded as a prophetic voice in 20th-century literature.
While researching for his 1937 book The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell lived among the destitute and unemployed coal miners of northern England. During this period, he directly shared in and observed the harsh realities of their daily lives, documenting their struggles with a tone of generous anger and mordant reporting.1