Following the Wall Street Crash and the global depression that it heralded, unemployment in places such as Wigan remained stubbornly high. Orwell had only the vaguest notion of what he would write about and where to go, but tramping the north was newly fashionable among the literati: JB Priestley's English Journey was selling well and Aldous Huxley was visiting the Nottinghamshire coalfields. We are witnessing the longest squeeze in living standards since the 1920s, according to Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, and its effects fall heavier on the north. North and south are pulling apart once more – not yet to the extent where Orwell could describe his journey as if 'venturing among savages', but getting there. An Old Etonian prime minister, in a cabinet stuffed with public school boys, has embarked upon the most radical reduction of public spending in generations, making cuts that have prompted robust criticism of their pace and scale. Today the book seems curiously relevant to our own distressed times. The New Statesman and Nation's review said of Orwell: 'The honest Tory must face what he tells and implies, and the honest Socialist must face him, too.' It was Gollancz who, to save the former colonial officer's family from embarrassment, gave Blair the pseudonym George Orwell when he published Down and Out in Paris and London and had come up with the idea for what would become The Road to Wigan Pier, a classic literary journey that critics called beautiful and disturbing. Weeks earlier, Blair had set out from London armed with a small advance from his publisher, Victor Gollancz, to investigate the 'distressed areas' of northern England.

The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell