Down and Out in Paris and London
George Orwell
Down and Out in Paris and London
Orwell's first book (1933): a memoir of living in poverty, first as a dishwasher in the hotels and restaurants of Paris, then as a tramp on the roads and in the casual wards around London.
About the book
Published in 1933, Down and Out in Paris and London was George Orwell's first book, and the first to appear under that name. It records the months he spent living in poverty, first in Paris, where he worked as a dishwasher in the kitchens of a grand hotel, and then in London, where he tramped between the lodging houses and casual wards that took in the homeless. Orwell writes about hunger, work and dirt with the directness of someone who has done without, and with a reporter's eye for how the system works: who is paid what, where the food goes and why a tramp must keep walking. The book is part memoir and part argument that poverty is a matter of circumstance, not of character.
Characters
The narrator — Orwell himself
A young Englishman who runs out of money in Paris and learns what poverty is from the inside.
Boris — Russian friend
A former captain in the Russian army, now an out-of-work waiter full of schemes for getting rich.
Valenti — Italian waiter
A waiter at the Hotel X who explains the life of the hotel and the price of hunger.
Charlie — Paris acquaintance
A young man of good family who tells stories of vice in the bistro of the Coq d’Or quarter.
Madame F. — Bistro owner
The patronne of the bistro below the narrator’s lodging in Paris.
Paddy Jaques — Irish tramp
An Irish tramp who becomes the narrator’s companion on the road in England.
Bozo — Pavement artist
A crippled pavement artist in London who keeps his self-respect by looking at the stars.
About the author
George Orwell (1903–1950) was the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, an English novelist and essayist who turned plain, exact prose into a political act. Born in India and schooled at Eton, he served five years in the imperial police in Burma, then lived among the poor of Paris and London, and was shot through the throat fighting Franco's forces in Spain — and each of those became a book. He wanted prose to be "like a window pane", and distrusted any language built to hide what it meant. Animal Farm made him famous; Nineteen Eighty-Four, finished on a Scottish island while tuberculosis was killing him, gave the world Big Brother and doublethink. His work also includes Burmese Days, The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia.