At some point in the next few days Gollancz asked him to consider a new project – writing a book about unemployment and social conditions in economically depressed northern England.
"As a social reformer, a socialist, and an idealist, Gollancz had an unquestioning, perhaps overly optimistic, faith in education; if only people could be made to know the nature of poverty, he thought, they would want to eradicate it, remove from power the government that tolerated it, and transform the economic system that brought it into being.
"[5] As a successful publisher however, he knew that to reach a large audience he needed something more than a collection of facts, statistics, graphs and dogmatic conclusions.
The view that this was a specific commission with a £500 advance – two years' income for Orwell at the time – is based on a recollection by Geoffrey Gorer who was interviewed for Melvyn Bragg's TV programme Omnibus in 1970.
On 1 April 1936, Orwell rented a cottage in the remote village of Wallington, Hertfordshire, where he wrote The Road to Wigan Pier.
Yet, writing to Jack Common in April 1936 about setting up shop, "Orwell sounds hard put to find £20 in order to stock his shelves, rather than a man who had received £500 a couple of months earlier.
[6] Orwell set out on the journey on the last day of January 1936, having given up his job at "Booklovers' Corner" and his flat in Kentish Town; he would not live in London again until 1940.
[11] For three weeks in February 1936 he was in Wigan, the longest single stop he would make; March was allotted to Yorkshire – Sheffield, Leeds, Barnsley.
The original edition included 32 illustrations that were photographs of Welsh coal miners and of slums in the East End of London.
George Orwell set out to report on working-class life in the bleak industrial heartlands of the West Midlands, Yorkshire and Lancashire.
He points out that most people who argue against socialism do not do so because of straightforward selfish motives, or because they do not believe that the system would work, but for more complex emotional reasons, which (according to Orwell) most socialists misunderstand.
At one time, on one of the muddy little canals that run round the town, there used to be a tumble-down wooden jetty; and by way of a joke some nicknamed this Wigan Pier.
The joke caught on locally, and then the music-hall comedians got hold of it, and they are the ones who have succeeded in keeping Wigan Pier alive as a byword."
[16] In general, early reviewers of The Road to Wigan Pier praised Orwell's depiction of the working class in Part I.
"[17] Responses to Part II, as the book transformed from reportage into a mix of politics, polemics, and selective autobiography, were more varied, ranging from praise to anger and indignation.
"[19] Douglas Goldring, writing in Fortnightly in April 1937, describes the book as "beautiful" and "disturbing", and like Miles highly recommends that both conservatives and socialists read it.
"[24] In the April 1937 edition of the Left News, Gollancz reported that the book had produced "both more, and more interesting, letters than any other Club Choice.
Orwell in Spain was continuing his education – in a real war against Fascism – and it was very different from anything envisioned by the selectors of the Left Book Club.
[26] Communist Party of Great Britain leader Harry Pollitt, who was also an acquaintance of Orwell and a native of Lancashire where the book is set, gave a strongly negative review.
[27][28] Although Pollitt praised Orwell's description of mining conditions and the indictment of housing in industrial centres, he believed that Road to Wigan Pier was a snobbish portrayal of working class life.
"As his published correspondence shows, every time Orwell wrote anything objectionable to the Left, up would come this old charge again, having attained the mythic status that placed it beyond mere factual refutation."