Down and Out in Paris and London

Down and Out in Paris and London is not a novel ... it’s a searing autopsy of dignity. Orwell drags you by the throat into the bowels of human existence, where grease coats your lungs, your stomach gnaws itself from hunger, and the stench of unwashed humanity clings like a curse you can’t scrub off.

Forget the polite image of “living rough.” This is the real thing: lice, filth, starvation, humiliation ... the slow rot of a man who’s become invisible. Orwell doesn’t romanticize poverty; he vivisects it. He shows you how despair isn’t loud or tragic ... it’s tedious, monotonous, and smells of cold cabbage water and damp wool.

His time in the Paris kitchens is a nightmare of futility ... endless piles of filthy plates, show more scalding water, and the hiss of oil so thick with grime you feel slimy just reading the words. Then London arrives like a wet slap ... the soup kitchens, the tramps shuffling from workhouse to workhouse, the cold so deep it seeps into your thoughts. It’s not just poverty you feel ... it’s degradation made tangible, a slow suffocation of spirit.

I read this book as a lazy, cocky young man and it scared the hell out of me. It was the slap I needed. I could smell the rot in those pages, taste the bitterness, and I swore I’d never, ever let myself fall into that kind of oblivion. Orwell made the struggle real and made me get off my ass and do something about it.

This isn’t literature to admire. It’s literature to endure. It doesn’t entertain; it haunts. You don’t finish it clean. You finish it grateful. For anyone who's ever thought about living hard just to experience that existence, read this ... and take the better road. show less

This was one of those books I fully expected to be incredibly boring. I mean, how can a semi autobiographical account of being extremely poor and having to pawn stuff and live as a tramp for a while be a gripping read? Turns out, by being written by George Orwell, that's how.

It was interesting to see the short digression on slang and swearing towards the end of the book, as I'd recently read Les Misérables, where Hugo goes off on an extremely similar tangent. Luckily, Orwell isn't quite as verbose...

A very good read, but don't expect to feel like going out for a meal any time soon afterwards...

"There is such a hopelessness about some of the people there – decent, broken-down types who have pawned their collars but are still trying for office jobs." (pg. 157)

A lucid and candid piece of reportage by George Orwell on the homeless, disenfranchised, jobless and unlucky denizens of our whited sepulchre of a society. His journalistic approach is less honed than it would become in his timeless polemic The Road to Wigan Pier, but this is still a remarkable piece, and one that remains, unfortunately, quite contemporary. We might not know what shillings and d are nowadays, but there are plenty who know, coldly, what it means to be absolutely wretched and discarded: to be condemned to a maddening "enforced idleness" (pg. 182) and live show more "no freer than if he were bought and sold. His work is servile and without art; he is paid just enough to keep him alive; his only holiday is the sack. He is cut off from marriage, or, if he marries, his wife must work too. Except by a lucky chance, he has no escape from this life, save into prison. At this moment there are men with university degrees scrubbing dishes in Paris for ten or fifteen hours a day. One cannot say that it is mere idleness on their part… they have simply been trapped by a routine which makes thought impossible." (pg. 117)

Ennui is a difficult thing to write about, because in order to evoke it honestly you need to bore the reader somewhat. Orwell gets a good balance between representing the dreariness and reviving the reader, largely because his prose is stellar. The book could perhaps have been better in providing a narrative, or in bringing out the characters among the down-and-outs (as John Steinbeck was soon to do in his writing; only Bozo in Orwell's book meets this standard). Nevertheless, Orwell is a sympathetic witness to the shameful rut these people endure; this is not poverty porn, and Orwell shows us that they retain their dignity and their humanity. Rather, the flaw of the book is not in any of its content but in its essential futility; it's not that people don't recognise the humanity of the down-and-outs, but that they don't want to. There are among us many dogs who have developed a taste for dog, and many rats who will eat anything, and for all those compassionate people like Orwell, or even those who recognise the validity of the phrase 'there but for the grace of God go I', there are countless multiples of that number who prefer exploitation and cruelty towards those who are struggling, the better to advance themselves, and can perform it without penalty, and often with great reward. The problem is not in the calibre of those who are down and out, but in the calibre of those who are thriving. show less

Orwell delves into the uncomfortable subject of poverty, but there's few you can trust as much as him to make the journey worthwhile. Initially he dodges homelessness but eventually falls prey and descends to the tramp life, the very lowest rung on the social ladder. His life at that point becomes merely existence, consumed by daily strategizing over how to find the next meal, the next bed. More often than not the food will be insufficient, the bed hardly better than sleeping on the ground. Fortunately he has a lifeline, a light at the end of the tunnel, which is more hope than his fellow travelers can rely on.

It's an extremely sympathetic portrayal of his fellows, a creditable job of portraying tramps as weakened by circumstance and show more not weak by nature. The stories he shares of their travails bear parallel echoes of the stories of life at any level - lucky moments, tragic setbacks, funny circumstance. Discomfort and indignities are the paramount differences around which tramp life revolves. There is still nobility, morality and brotherhood. As with every echelon, this one too has its social rules. Orwell learns the hard way what perfect honesty gets him, who he owes it to and who he does not. He also learns the vital importance of who you know, and who you trust.

Society's supports may differ today, but I can imagine the experience of subsistence is largely the same as what's described here from a hundred years ago. Orwell has some suggestions for how more comfort and dignity might be provided and it always begins with acknowledging the homeless as people like anyone else, desirous of living and thinking beyond just the moment. show less

Orwell has been called a master of plain style. You need not read further than the first page of this, his first book, to learn this doesn’t mean dull or simple. He describes his street in Paris as a “ravine of tall, leprous houses, lurching toward one another in queer attitudes, as though they had all been frozen in the act of collapse.” Anyone who has ever tried to write recognizes the keen observation and quest for just the right word—and then the next, and the next—that goes into producing just one sentence as good as this.
Yet this skillful prose doesn’t exist just to be good writing. This is prose with a purpose. Determined to become a writer, he was equally determined to find something that seemed worth writing about: show more the life of the absolutely destitute. Despite having a family ready to take him in (something he never mentions), as well as helpful acquaintances, he allows himself to slide down the social scale to a life of absolute poverty.
This gives a dual optic to the book. Most of the book describes Orwell’s life as a penniless dishwasher in a fashionable Paris hotel and then as a tramp in England. Then, toward the end of each half of the book, Orwell includes reflections: an essay that asks why the life of the plongeur is as it is, a brief chapter on slang and swearing, then a short essay on tramps, followed by one describing sleeping accommodations. These contain practical suggestions for improvement. Above all, Orwell argues for a change in perception from that of the “tramp-monster” to what he experienced: “A tramp is only an Englishman out of work.”
Whether Boris, the Russian emigré Orwell befriends in Paris, his tramp companion Paddy, or Bozo the screever (sidewalk chalk artist), it is the unforgettable portraits as well as the record of lived experience that gives Orwell’s prescriptions their credibility.
One more thing: Orwell is the master of the closing sentence. show less

This book struck me on a number of levels. As a travel diary, which is how I preferred to read it, it was more relatable than many I have read. I'll not pretend to be in circumstances nearly as dire as those portrayed, but I'm closer to that than I am the books of other successful writers. Hemingway's Paris was populated with Picasso, Fitzgerald, Stein; Kerouac's road trips were spent visiting Ginsburg and Burroughs; Orwell spent his days with anonymous tramps and the working poor; persons of no notable fame: Boris, Paddy Jacques, Bozo, et al. Though much of it is only apparent in retrospect, their worlds seem bound for greatness, where Orwell's world is full of uncertainty.

As social commentary, it is revealing and not moralizing. His show more portrayal of poverty in France and England seeks to humanize, not victimize, and to bring about some honest reflection to real problems. Unfortunately, for the many improvements that have come, the image of the poor among a large and significant part of the population as inveterate scoundrels, bent on defrauding the good, honest people for free money, remains. There are short chapters laying things out in direct terms-that we only find solutions when we start seeing the poor as people and look for solutions rather than punishments-but most of the book is really just a journey in the part of the world in which most of us hope to never reside. show less

The title isn't pretentious; it doesn't claim to be something it isn't. This book is, quite literally, about being down and out in Paris and London. Having been published in 1933 it is, as far as I know, the first full-length book that Orwell published. However early it comes in his career, you can sense some of the nascent ideas and concerns that would haunt his work for the rest of his life: the virtues of democratic socialism and the plight of the working poor.

In Paris, Orwell takes a job as a plongeur in an anonymous hotel. He trenchantly describes the "caste system" that exists within all of the finest hotels in Paris, from the manager to the lowest of the low, the dishwashers. His work is grueling, lasting up to fourteen or show more sixteen hours a day, only to go home, get almost no sleep, and have to do the same thing the next day, six days a week. While in Paris, he befriends an ex-military Russian by the name of Boris who is much the same predicament. Eager to find a job that allowed more than a few hours of sleep every night, he eventually quits his job and heads to London.

When he arrives in London, he is without a job and is forced to live in hostels and lodging houses. Because of British law which says that you can't stay in the same one for more than a few days, he is forced into becoming a transient. In London, he meets several people, including the Irishman Paddy and Bozo, a street artist. His ability to relate to them as more than simply "homeless" people is extraordinarily honest and sincere. He openly admits that these people are every bit as interesting (sometimes more so) than the middle-class Parisians and Londoners who walk the city streets and look down on Orwell and his friends.

The details of his day-to-day life can be debilitating to anyone with even a soupcon of optimism, but the book isn't without its gems. There are a handful of times when Orwell interrupts the action of the novel and interjects his critical social commentary. Even though they only last a couple of pages a piece, this constitutes some of the best writing in the book, reminiscent his greatest essays. This is a shining example, from Chapter XXXIV on "tramps":

"To take a fundamental question about vagrancy: Why do tramps exist at all? It is a curious thing, but very few people know what makes a tramp take to the road. And, because of the belief in the tramp-monster, the most fantastic reasons are suggested. It is said, for instance, that tramps tramp to avoid work, to beg more easily, to seek opportunities for crime, even - least probable of reasons - because they like tramping. I have even read in a book of criminology that the tramp in an atavism, a throwback to the nomadic stage of humanity. And meanwhile the quite obvious cause of vagrancy is staring one in the face. Of course a tramp is not a nomadic atavism - one might as well say that a commercial traveler is an atavism. A tramp tramps, not because he likes it, but for the same reason as a car keeps to the left; because there happens to be a law compelling him to do so. A destitute man, if he is not supported by the parish, can only get relief at the casual wards, and as each casual ward will only admit him for one night, he is automatically kept moving. He is a vagrant because, in the state of the law, it is that or starve. But people have been brought up to believe in the tramp-monster, and so they prefer to think that there must be some more of less villainous motive for tramping" (p. 201). show less