22nd April 2022 by
The Road to Wigan Pier: References
George Orwell makes a surprisingly wide reference to books and authors in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). This article lists them in the order they appear in the book, along with an attempt to identify specific titles by authors when Orwell does not give the details.
*
| Authors and | Titles Mentioned in |
| The Road to Wigan Pier | |
| Rev. W. R. Inge, | England *1 |
| Colliery Year Book and Coal Trades Directory for 1935 | |
| Mr Joseph Jones | The Coal Scuttle |
| John Orr | [Food Health and Income] |
| [Hippolyte-Prosper-Olivier “Lissa”] Lissagaray | History of the Commune |
| [Walter] Greenwood play | Love on the Dole |
| Samuel Butler | Way of All Flesh, Erewhon |
| Somerset Maugham | On a Chinese Screen |
| Professor [George] Saintsbury | Second Scrap Book |
| Last Scrap Book | |
| Jack London’s | The People of the Abyss |
| Arnold Bennett | |
| [Charles] Baudelaire | |
| [George Orwell] | Burmese Days |
| Down and Out in Paris and London | |
| John Galsworthy | The Man of Property |
| Justice | |
| The Silver Spoon | |
| ‘Beachcomber’ | |
| [David Low] | Colonel Blimp |
| Alec Brown, Philip Henderson | [See below] |
| D H Lawrence | Lady Chatterley’s Lover |
| Ronald Knox, Arnold Lunn, [G K] Chesterton | |
| [George Bernard] Shaw | Major Barbara |
| Captain Brassbound’s Conversion | |
| Misalliance | |
| W. W. Jacobs | |
| Henri Barbusse, [Marcel] Proust, [Andre] Gide | |
| [Dmitri] Mirsky’s | Intelligentsia of Great Britain |
| [Joseph] Conrad | |
| W. H. Auden | |
| Upton Sinclair, William Morris, Waldo Frank | |
| Mr N. A. Holdaway | |
| Karel Capek play | R.U.R. |
| Jonathan Swift | Gulliver’s Travels. |
| [Charles] Dickens | Hard Times |
| Mr John Beevers | World Without Faith |
| H. G. Wells | [many titles] |
| Aldous Huxley | Brave New World |
| Mr John Strachey | The Coming Struggle for Power |
| [Ezra] Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Roy Campbell, T.S. Eliot | |
| [Major] Douglas Credit group | |
| [Karl] Marx’s | Capital |
| [William] Shakespeare | |
| Mr Alec Brown | The Fate of the Middle Classes |
| [Periodicals mentioned] New Statesman, Punch, Daily Worker, Daily Mail, Saturday Review, News Chronicle | |
| [Mock Title] Comrade X, | Marxism For Infants |
| * | * |
| *1. | “The 7th volume in the series The Modern World: A Survey of Historical Forces edited by H A L Fisher” |
| The author given variously as William Ralph Inge, and Dean Inge. | |
| First published Ernest Benn 1926, reprinted same year. Reprinted 1933. Published by Hodder and Stoughton 1938. 1953 Ernest Benn: revised version with an extensive new preface. | |
| Tauchnitz edition 1934. | |
| Published in New York by Charles Scribers Sons, 1926. Revised edition: McGraw-Hill January 1953 | |
| Published in a German translation in 1939 as England; Inhalt: Das Land und seine Bewohner – Die Seele Englands – Das Weltreich – Industrialismus – Demokratie – Schlußbetrachtung (Translator: Ins Deutsche übertragen von Fritz von Bothmer) |
Thank you for posting this.
Stunning, Les
A terrific resource, Les. Thanks for this super piece (appropriately on a day when the Guardian has a title over a column: ‘Orwell was a great writer but, it turns out, not such a great reader’)
Thank you so much for the references, just what I wished for while on reading road to Wigan Pier’. I’m curious if anyone knows, which book reviews are held in the 1st edition ‘4 volumes of the collected essays, journalism and letters’.
Many thanks
We don’t have a list of the contents of the CEJL, unfortunately, but it is well worth acquiring Volume 4 because the Index there is an index to all four volumes, not just volume 4 itself.