The road to wigan pier orwell6/20/2023 North and south are pulling apart once more – not yet to the extent where Orwell could describe his journey as if "venturing among savages", but getting there. An Old Etonian prime minister, in a cabinet stuffed with public school boys, has embarked upon the most radical reduction of public spending in generations, making cuts that have prompted robust criticism of their pace and scale. Today the book seems curiously relevant to our own distressed times. The New Statesman and Nation's review said of Orwell: "The honest Tory must face what he tells and implies, and the honest Socialist must face him, too." It was Gollancz who, to save the former colonial officer's family from embarrassment, gave Blair the pseudonym George Orwell when he published Down and Out in Paris and London and had come up with the idea for what would become The Road to Wigan Pier, a classic literary journey that critics called beautiful and disturbing. Weeks earlier, Blair had set out from London armed with a small advance from his publisher, Victor Gollancz, to investigate the "distressed areas" of northern England.
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