Word: wigan
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...ROAD TO WIGAN PIER (264 pp.)-George Orwell - Harcourt, Brace...
George Orwell was a pilgrim who hated progress and found an empty shrine at the end of a blind alley called socialism. Famed British Critic V.S. Pritchett has called him "the conscience of his generation." An extremely troubled conscience it was, and Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier does much to explain...
...reporting, The Road to Wigan Pier is unmatched in the set pieces of industrial sociology. In the black country, Orwell first took lodgings above a shop that sold nothing much but "black tripe" (the "grey flocculent stuff" and the "ghostly translucent feet of pigs" were kept in a beetle-infested cellar). To get his story, he wandered in and around Wigan (population then a little under 87,000), and the account of these wanderings still makes the reader feel that he has been dragged heels first through a municipal garbage dump. Orwell lived in rooms that smelled "like a ferret...