The Road to Wigan Pier [With Earbuds]

To find out how industrial workers lived, Orwell not only observed but shared their experience. Orwell stayed in dreary lodgings and subsisted on their scant diet. He went down into coal mines and walked for three miles crouching as the miners did. He watched the backbreaking, dangerous labor of men whose net pay then averaged $575 a year, and he lived to write about it.