George Orwell - O Caminho para Wigan Pier

When, in 1936, the socialists of the Left Book Club commissioned George Orwell to report on the working conditions of British coal miners, they were unprepared for the monumental work that would land in their hands.

 The Road to Wigan Pier begins with Orwell journeying north, infiltrating — like the rain and wind — the cracks of the dilapidated houses of industrial England, descending with the miners into the catacombs of existence. With detail and sensitivity, he tells the story of a community shackled by unemployment and inhuman labor, surviving against all odds. Then comes the controversial second part of the book (which the socialist club’s editor published reluctantly), where a light begins to glimmer at the end of the long, dark tunnel. In clear, impassioned, and ironic prose, Orwell openly acknowledges the privilege of his middle-class upbringing, refuses the ideological trench others wanted to throw him into, and lays the groundwork for a critical — yet no less committed — vision of what socialism should mean. Above political theories, above intellectual allies or opponents, above even the class prejudices that were also his own, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) supports the building of a more just and compassionate world — as far removed from the misery fostered and ignored by his country’s industrial capitalism as it is from the totalitarian dystopia he would later imagine in Nineteen Eighty-Four.