Revisiting Orwell's Wigan Pier

George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) has long been considered an important semi‐documentary source for living and working conditions in the north‐west of England during the 1930s. Yet exactly how important—and how accurate and useful—the book is has never been determined. This article examines its historicity, both in its detailed coverage of such aspects of life as housing, diet and rates of pay and in its vignettes of particular people and scenes. A comparison is made with the complete text of ‘The Road to Wigan Pier Diary’, in the Orwell archive at University College London, which, contrary to popular belief, is shown to be not a first version of the final book but a real working diary. The results shed light not only upon society during the depression but upon Orwell's methods as a social commentator and upon the reliability of his work as historical source material.