A searing account of George Orwell's observations of working-class life in the bleak industrial heartlands of Yorkshire and Lancashire in the 1930s. Graphically unforgettable descriptions of social injustice, cramped slum housing, dangerous mining conditions, hunger and unemployment are written with unblinking honesty, fury and great humanity. It crystallized the ideas that would be found in Orwell's later works, and remains a powerful portrait of poverty, injustice and class divisions in Britain.