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Down and Out in Paris and London
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Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) (edit title/settings)

by George Orwell (Author) (edit contributors)

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This unusual fictional account, in good part autobiographical, narrates without self-pity and often with humor the adventures of a penniless British writer among the down-and-out of two great cities. In the tales of both cities we learn some sobering Orwellian truths about poverty and society.

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Summary edit see section history

''Down and Out in Paris and London'' (1933) is one of George Orwell’s first published works, an autobiographical account (or perhaps only a semiautobiographical account, depending on which reviewer/critic you read) of being destitute in Paris and London.

The book opens in Paris with a... read more (warning: may contain spoilers)

''Down and Out in Paris and London'' (1933) is one of George Orwell’s first published works, an autobiographical account (or perhaps only a semiautobiographical account, depending on which reviewer/critic you read) of being destitute in Paris and London.

The book opens in Paris with a description of the hotel and neighborhood where Orwell is lodging. The overall impression is of filth and hunger and a quietly endured, never-ending desperation for Paris’s poor. Though the wealthy do feature in this book, they are like ghosts, flitting in and out of the narrative, but ultimately are not anything that Orwell can interact with or relate to on a meaningful level.

A one-time English tutor, Orwell has found himself without a job and low on funds. Work in Paris is scarce, particularly for a foreigner, so he begins to economize by cutting out essentials like wine and cigarettes and then, inevitably, food. His good clothes are soon pawned, along with the suitcase they were packed in, but the money he gets buys bread and butter for no more than a few days. Desperately searching for any kind of work, he seeks out and finds an old friend, Boris, an enormously fat Russian who at one point was a waiter. Boris, however, is also out of work, practically starving, and almost dying of illness and hunger when Orwell finds him. Somewhat rejuvenated by seeing his friend again, Boris insists the pair will soon find work. A dozen weeks (and many bouts of hunger, fatigue, and desperation) later, the two finally do land jobs at a hotel restaurant—Boris as a waiter, and Orwell as a ''plongeur'', or dishwasher.

But no ordinary dishwasher. The work of a ''plongeur'' is physically and spiritually exhausting—fourteen hours a day of frantic cleaning, scrubbing, and sweeping in the sweltering heat of a basement kitchen. And it’s at this point in the story that one telling characteristic becomes painfully apparent. Unlike other young men’s autobiographies, Orwell’s Down and Out gives no mention—ever—of love, desire, or even the pursuit thereof. His entire life has three main objectives: struggling through the workday, eating something, and grabbing a few hours of sleep before the travail starts again.

Despite the toil, Orwell is not at all miserable, and he has to be goaded by Boris into quitting the job at the hotel for a position as ''plongeur'' at a new restaurant for which the Russian will be the maitre d’, quite a step up from waiter. The new kitchen, though, is even more cramped and, in contrast to the professional working conditions of the hotel, abysmally filthy. He has to work eighteen to twenty hours a day to keep up and gets less money for it. Demoralized, Orwell decides to return to London.

In the first part of the book, the experience of poverty is related in claustrophobic, prison-like terms: Paris’s working poor seem geographically chained, moving only from their rented rooms to their jobs to their favorite bistros and back again. But in the second part of the book, Orwell describes London’s poor as predominantly mobile, forced to wander from shelter to shelter across London and the countryside or risk arrest.

Soon after he arrives in London, Orwell becomes one of those itinerant poor, though he by no means had intended to do so. Before he finalized his plans to return, he had been offered employment as a babysitter for a wealthy family. But the family, much to Orwell’s misfortune, decided to vacation just before he arrived, leaving him out of work—and out of money—for at least a month. He borrowed a few pounds and, as he did in Paris, pawned his best suit. Not used to leaving on the cheap in London, he spends his money too quickly by renting beds at overpriced inns. Very quickly, then, he has to join the other homeless in London, wandering between a series of “spikes,” or shelters. Though the shelters are free, no one can stay more than one night, and the food served at them is meager, just barely fit for human consumption. While Orwell is on the road between shelters, hunger and filth are constant companions, as is the sting of being considered contemptible by the majority of society.

The book ends just after Orwell arranges a final loan. His employers will be returning in eight days, so with only a little over a week to endure being destitute, he says goodbye to his tramping comrades, who will remain on the road, presumably for the rest of their lives. Orwell closes with some spectacularly pithy observations on poverty, and the reader is left with the resounding impression that it’s a condition—a situation, Orwell would insist—best avoided if at all possible.

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Quotes edit see section history

  • “P.68: He was a comely youth, aged twenty-four but looking eighteen, and, like most waiters, he carried himself well and knew how to wear his clothes. With his black tailcoat and white tie, fresh face and sleek brown hair, he looked just like an Eton boy; yet he had earned his living since he was twelve, and worked his way up literally from the gutter.”
  • “P.136: The fourth shopman was a large blond young man, very pink all over, like a slice of ham. He looked at the clothes I was wearing and felt them disparagingly between thumb and finger.”
  • “P.176: "It seems to me that when you take a man's money away he's fit for nothing from that moment.""No, not necessarily. If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can still keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, 'I'm a free man in here'" — he tapped his forehead — "and you're all right."”
  • “P.179: He had managed to keep his brain intact and alert, and so nothing could make him succumb to poverty. He might be ragged and cold, or even starving, but so long as he could read, think and watch for meteors, he was, as he said, free in his own mind.”
  • Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers
  • Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work.
    Highlighted by 23 Kindle customers
  • You discover that a man who has gone even a week on bread and margarine is not a man any longer, only a belly with a few accessory organs.
    Highlighted by 13 Kindle customers
  • For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future.
    Highlighted by 13 Kindle customers
  • The present state of affairs suits us, and we are not going to take the risk of setting you free, even by an extra hour a day. So, dear brothers, since evidently you must sweat to pay for our trips to Italy, sweat and be damned to you.'
    Highlighted by 12 Kindle customers
  • A man receiving charity practically always hates his benefactor—it is a fixed characteristic of human nature; and, when he has fifty or a hundred others to back him, he will show it.
    Highlighted by 12 Kindle customers
  • Poverty is what I am writing about, and I had my first contact with poverty in this slum. The slum, with its dirt and its queer lives, was first an object-lesson in poverty, and then the background of my own experiences. It is for that reason that I try to give some idea of what life was like there.
    Highlighted by 11 Kindle customers
  • After knowing him I saw the force of the proverb 'Trust a snake before a Jew and a Jew before a Greek, but don't trust an Armenian,'
    Highlighted by 11 Kindle customers
  • It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have thought so much about poverty—it is the thing you have feared all your life, the thing you knew would happen to you sooner or later; and it is all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would be quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be terrible; it is merely squalid and boring. It is the peculiar lowness of poverty that you discover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the complicated meanness, the crust-wiping.
    Highlighted by 10 Kindle customers
  • I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think.
    Highlighted by 9 Kindle customers
  • It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.
    Highlighted by 8 Kindle customers
Show all 14 quotes from this book

Setting & Locations edit see section history

First Sentence edit see section history

The Rue du Coq d'Or, Paris, seven in the morning.

Series & Lists edit see section history

This is book 86 of 96 in Waterstone's Top 100 Books of the 20th Century. (authoritative list)

Preceded by The Rainbow, and followed by 2001.

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. George Orwell (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Country: United States
Publication Date: 1933
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 213

Classification edit see section history

  • Library of Congress: DC715 .O7 1933a
  • Dewey: 914.436

More Books Like This edit see section history

   
  • The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (Classic Reprint)
  • The Road to Wigan Pier

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