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Urgently he kept struggling to become a novelist, but the sketches he wrote about his flophouse experiences became his first book. He knew that the seamy life depicted in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) would unnerve and embarrass his parents, so he told his agent that he did not want the book published under his own name: "As a pseudonym, a name I always use when tramping etc. is P.S. Burton, but if you don't think this sounds a probable kind of name, what about Kenneth Miles, George Orwell, H. Lewis Allways. I rather favor George Orwell." George, the patron saint of England, plus Orwell, a river that Eric Blair had known when young: the choice suggested the buried patriotism of a disaffected subject.
By this time the conviction that something was terribly wrong in his native land had begun to obsess him. Eric Blair had experienced injustice and poverty; George Orwell began to look for their causes. The change was not entirely voluntary. He wrote and published novels, and tried to pursue the kind of literary career that had been traditional in England since the 18th century. But the urge to stand witness to his times nagged him out of seclusion: "In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer."
A publisher asked him to go to the north of England and report on the plight of miners and factory workers unemployed in the drift of the Depression. Orwell spent two months early in 1936 among these people, not drunks and derelicts this time but victims of economic forces beyond their understanding or control. The first half of The Road to Wigan Pier recounts some of their stories. The second half tells Orwell's.
It is an astonishing document: a call for socialism to wipe out the inequalities of capitalism and class, coupled with a stinging indictment of contemporary Socialists: "One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw toward them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist and feminist in England." Orwell not only sensed the distaste that unemployed miners would feel for such studied eccentricities, he shared the feeling. He also perceived something that was to reverberate in political writings for half a century: ascendant leftist theories threatened to replace one form of tyranny with another. "The truth is that to many people calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which 'we,' the clever ones, are going to impose upon 'them,' the Lower Orders."