A collection of Orwell’s compellingly perceptive essays on subjects from food to weather to unemployment, edited and introduced by Professor Michael Gardiner.

To be poor and destitute in 1920s Paris and London was to experience life at its lowest ebb. George Orwell, penniless and with nowhere to go, found himself experiencing just this as he wandered the streets of both capitals in search of a job. This book gives an account of the streets and those who have no choice but to live on them.

Deals with the 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. This title includes descriptions of social injustice, cramped slum housing, dangerous mining conditions, squalor, and more.

Features that illuminate the life and work of one of the most individual writers of this century. Displaying an almost unrivalled mastery of English plain prose, this essays create a literary manner from the process of thinking aloud and continue to challenge, move and entertain.

Now presented in a new annotated edition, The Road to Wigan Pier represents a unique record of a society riven by class inequality and plagued by unemployment, inadequate housing, unsafe working conditions and other social ills, as well as providing an invaluable insight into the evolution of Orwell's political consciousness.