Who is John Galsworthy from The Road to Wigan Pier and what is their importance?

John Galsworthy (1867 - 1933) was an English novelist and playwright. Galsworthy's work often dealt with the plight of the poor, and most of his fictional characters believed that slums are created by slum-dwellers, and not the other way around. Also, Galsworthy generally puts forward a view that women in general and the working-class in particular are generally exploited—but that there is nothing possible to be done to change it. Orwell states that by the age of eighteen he had read and re-read all of Galsworthy's works and found them supportive of middle-class snobbery. Orwell refers to Galsworthy as a "very think-skinned tear-in-the-eye, pre-war humanitarian...start[ing] out with a morbid pity-complex which extends to thinking that every married woman is an angel chained to a satyr" (p. 158). Orwell refers to Galsworthy's work in Chapters 4, 9, and 10.