George Orwell, 21 Estcourt Avenue

Everyone knows 1984 and Animal Farm, but for me it's George Orwell's non-fiction that gives us the most insight and value. Open the mighty four-volume Collected Essays Letters and Journalism at any page and you'll find a line that slaps your mind. A more select book of Essays should be standard reading for anyone of conscience.

George Orwell's older sister, Marjorie Dakin, lived at 21 Estcourt Avenue, Headingley (Google map).

Orwell stayed with the Dakins for a week (5-13 March 1936) between his visits to Sheffield and Barnsley on his travels researching The Road To Wigan Pier, and again after Barnsley before his return to London (26-30 March 1936).

He typed up an lengthy lot of notes not only about his experiences in Wigan, Sheffield etc, but also about what he found and did in Leeds. This document was found among his papers after his death. It is now held in the extensive Orwell Archive at University College London Library.

He talks of visiting a local pub for a political discussion group (sadly he doesn't say which one). During the visit they went to Haworth and the Bronte parsonage, and stayed at Humphrey and Marjorie's cottage nearby at Middlesmoor.

The Left Book Club commissioned Orwell to write reportage of life for working class people in Northern industrial towns. In The Road To Wigan Pier, they got considerably more than they bargained for. Not only was their Orwell's characteristic clarity of style and compassion in the face of injustice, but along with the journalism and social analysis was a hefty section considering the socialist movement in Britain, much of it uncomplimentary.

Ruffling feathers never bothered Orwell much at any time, but less so with this. Despite it being his best selling book by far, he its reception as he went off to fight with the POUM militia in the Spanish Civil War.

According to the chronology appendix in his Collected Essays Letters and Journalism Volume 1, he sent off the finished manuscript on 15 December 1936 and had left for Spain by Christmas. The book was published on 8 March 1937 and Orwell returned home in early July.

I remember reading that it was by quite some distance his biggest selling book at the time. As the Left Book Club was a subscription thing, there was a guaranteed readership. If memory serves, there were about 35,000 sold, compared to the low thousands for everything else before Animal Farm came out in 1945.

Marjorie Dakin (nee Blair, presumably) was married to Humphrey Dakin. They had three children. She died on 3 May 1946, aged 48, of a kidney disease and the funeral was in Nottingham.

The Road To Wigan Pier Diary was published in An Age Like This 1920-1940: The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters volume 1, 1968 (reprinted by Penguin in 1993, and by David R Godine, 2007). It is most readily available in Orwell's England, which has the full text of Road To Wigan Pier along with the other writings that contextualise it. Read the illuminating introduction to Orwell's England here.

The full text of The Road to Wigan Pier (but not the diary) is online here.