Word: wigan
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...such a platitude as it sounds." Indeed, for all the pessimism attributed to him posthumously, Orwell had an abiding, almost pious faith in the ability of that fragile, querulous species, humankind, to correct its deficiencies by the most radical process of all: thinking. In The Road to Wigan Pier he expressed the belief that "economic injustice will stop the moment we want it to stop, and no sooner, and if we genuinely want it to stop the method adopted hardly matters." "Political chaos," he continued to stress, "is connected with the decay of language . . . one can probably bring about some...
...report on the plight of miners and factory workers unemployed in the drift of the Depression. Orwell spent two months early in 1936 among these people, not drunks and derelicts this time but victims of economic forces beyond their understanding or control. The first half of The Road to Wigan Pier recounts some of their stories. The second half tells Orwell...
Kieran Kenny, then 17 years old and an unemployed surveyor trainee from industrial Wigan in Britain's Lancashire, must have touched the heart of someone at Buckingham Palace when he wrote a plaintive letter to Queen Elizabeth II in 1980, asking for a job. Within weeks Kenny was hired as a stores (pantry) clerk and assigned lodgings in the staff quarters. Like all employees of the royal household, Kenny had to pledge in writing never to reveal to outsiders what goes on inside the royal residences...
...study The Unknown Orwell). Blair was feeling his way as a minor novelist, self-absorbed and "unremittingly nonpolitical." By the time Eric fully became George, he was passionately political in every line. The transformation was triggered by the poverty, unemployment and neglect he saw while researching The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). Then the Spanish Civil War confirmed his vision of a new socialist order-and gave him an education in the treachery of internecine politics. In between these experiences, he married his first wife, a bright, game girl named Eileen O'Shaughnessy. One of the delights of this...