Road To Wigan Pier

Volume 5 of The Complete Works of George Orwell

Victor Gollancz personally commissioned Orwell to write about the distressed north of England in January 1936. After Orwell handed in his typescript a little before Christmas Day 1936, he immediately left to fight in Spain. Shortly afterwards the book was selected for publication by the Left Book Club. This meant a print run of 47,340 copies instead of 2,150, so bringing Orwell to a much wider audience. The first part of Orwell's account, Gollancz wrote in Left News in April 1937, ‘has done, perhaps in a greater degree than any previous book, what the [Left Book] Club is meant to do – it has provoked thought and discussion of the keenest kind’. All copies of the original Left Book Club and first public editions of The Road to Wigan Pier were sold. This edition reproduces the illustrations selected for that first edition, corrects the text and prints Victor Gollancz’s Foreword as an Appendix. (See Volume Ten for Orwell’s Wigan Pier Diary and the research materials he wrote and collected in order to write The Road to Wigan Pier.)