Down and Out in Paris and London
1933
- poor
- literature
- fiction
- homelessness
- social conditions
- history
- british and irish fiction (fictional works by one author)
- orwell, george, 1903-1950
- poor, france
- poor, great britain
The story
'You have talked so often of going to the dogs – and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them.' George Orwell's vivid memoir of his time among the desperately poor and destitute in London and Paris is a moving tour of the underworld of society. Here he painstakingly documents a world of unrelenting drudgery and squalor – sleeping in bug-infested hostels and doss houses, working as a dishwasher in the vile 'Hotel X', living alongside tramps, surviving on scraps and cigarette butts – in an unforgettable account of what being down and out is really like.
What it’s like
Hard, bare prose with no ornament: a reporter's flat sentences describing kitchens, lodging-house beds and pawnshop queues in grey, unglamorous detail, the grime and the smell of cheap food and cheap tobacco rendered without self-pity. The mood is wry and bleak in equal measure, closer to a sober walk through a city's back stairs than to anything consoling, so it suits a cold, dim afternoon or a long train journey when you want something honest and unvarnished. Its structure moves in loosely connected episodes, each one a new job, a new room, a new stretch of hunger, and the narrator's voice stays watchful, dry and faintly amused at the absurdities of poverty and of the people who manage it. There is no romance of the gutter here; the arc is one of gradual education, a young man learning how the economy of charity, wages and waiting actually works from the inside. Intensity is low on violence and gore, though hunger, filth, illness and humiliation are described in plain, unsparing detail, with a few brief fights and scenes of petty cruelty. This is for readers who want social realism that is precise, unsentimental and quietly furious, rather than comfort or escape.
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