Orwell is quite detailed in his descriptions of people, their mannerisms, their environment, and their attitudes, which put together a picture of almost Dickensian poverty and hardship. The difficult lives of coal miners are described vividly, including their working life, family life, housing, and living conditions. In the first half of the book Orwell describes his visit to the Lancashire and Yorkshire in the mid 1930s, where he spends time in Wigan, Barnsley, Sheffield, and other predominantly coal mining towns.

Written during the 'Great Depression', it shows the effects of this period on the lives of working class people. This is a book about poverty, either in work or unemployment, Socialism, and the ills of industrialisation. What Orwell saw clarified his feelings about socialism, and in The Road to Wigan Pier, he pointedly tells why socialism, the only remedy to the shocking conditions he had witnessed, repelled 'so many normal decent people.' 'Orwell's code was a simple one, based on truth and 'deceny' he was important ?-? and original ?-? because he insisted on applying that code to his own Socialist comrades as well as to the class enemy.It is the best sociological reporting I know.'?-?The New Yorker Read more Orwell chose to live as the coal miners did ?-? sleeping in foul lodgings, subsisting on a meager diet, struggling to feed a family on a dismal wage, and going down into the hellish, backbreaking mines. Once there, he went beyond the requests of the book club, to investigate the employed as well. In the 1930s, the Left Book Club, a socialist group in England, sent George Orwell to investigate the poverty and mass unemployment in the industrial north of England. Before he authored the dystopian 1984 and the allegorical Animal Farm, George Orwell was a journalist, reporting on England's working class ?-? an investigation that led him to examine democratic socialism.

Batman, Volume 2 by Scott Snyder