George Orwell travelled to England’s industrial north between January and March 1936 to report on living conditions in the wake of the Great Depression. The result was The Road to Wigan Pier - first half sociological investigation, second half socialist polemic – which was published in March 1937 while the author was in Spain.
In addition to a great deal of research, the book was based on Orwell’s diaries, which begin in Coventry on the 31st January 1936 and end near Barnsley on the 25th March. From the 31st January 2023, Orwell Daily subscribers will receive Orwell’s diary entries in real-time, eighty-seven years to the day since they were written, offering a unique insight into a crucial moment in his development as a writer.
As with our previous serial, the text will be taken from The Complete Works of George Orwell, edited by the late Peter Davison. The diaries can also be found in George Orwell: Diaries, also edited by Davison and published in hardback by Harvill Secker (for US readers) and in paperback by Penguin.
The Wigan Pier Diaries were first ‘post-blogged’ by Gavin Freeguard and The Orwell Prize in 2012, with the original transcriptions made by David Lyons, and we are grateful to them both for making this edition possible. The material published in the serial remains under copyright and is reproduced by kind permission of Bill Hamilton and the Orwell Estate at A. M. Heath.