Down and Out in Paris and London
Encyclopedia
Down and Out in Paris and London is the first full-length work by the English author George Orwell
(Eric Blair), published in 1933. It is a memoir in two parts on the theme of poverty in the two cities. The first part is a picaresque account of living on the breadline in Paris and the experience of casual labour in restaurant kitchens. The second part is a travelogue of life on the road in and around London from the tramp's perspective, with descriptions of the types of hostel accommodation available and some of the characters to be found living on the margins.
, London at the end of 1927. While contributing to various journals, he undertook investigative tramping expeditions in and around London, collecting material for use in "The Spike
", his first published essay, and the latter half of Down and Out in Paris and London. In spring of 1928, he moved to Paris, where the comparatively low cost of living and bohemian lifestyle attracted many aspiring writers. He lived at 6 Rue du Pot de Fer in the Latin Quarter, a bohemian quarter with a cosmopolitan flavour. American writers like Ernest Hemingway
and F. Scott Fitzgerald
had lived in the same area. Following the Russian Revolution there was a large Russian emigre community in Paris. Orwell's Aunt Nellie Limouzin also lived in Paris and gave him social and, when necessary, financial support. He led an active social life, worked on his novels and had several articles published in avant-garde journals.
Orwell fell seriously ill in March 1929 and shortly afterwards had money stolen from the lodging house. The thief was probably not the young Italian described in Down and Out. In a later account he said the theft was the work of a young trollop that he had picked up and brought back with him; perhaps "consideration for his parents' sensibilities would have required the suppression of this misadventure. Whoever reduced Orwell to destitution did him a good turn;his final ten weeks in Paris sowed the seed of his first published book." Whether through necessity or just to collect material, he undertook casual work as a dishwasher in restaurants. In August 1929 he sent a copy of "The Spike" to the Adelphi
magazine in London and it was accepted for publication. Orwell left Paris in December 1929 and returned to England. He went straight home to his parents' house in Southwold
. Later he acted as a private tutor to a handicapped child there and also undertook further tramping expeditions culminating with a stint working in the Kent hop fields in August and September 1931. After this adventure, he ended up in the Tooley Street
kip, which he found so unpleasant that he wrote home for money and moved to more comfortable lodgings.
in the summer of 1931. Cape rejected it in the autumn. A year later he offered, " a fatter typescript (the London chapters had been added)" to Faber & Faber, where T. S. Eliot
, then an editorial director, also rejected it. At this point Mabel Fierz - (Fierz and her husband Francis, a London businessman, had been visitors to Southwold in the summer for a number of years and were on friendly terms with the Blairs) - in whose home Orwell discarded the typescript, took it to a literary agent, Leonard Moore. Leonard Moore, "recognised it as a 'natural' for the new house of Gollancz." Victor Gollancz
was prepared to publish the work subject to the removal of bad language and some identifiable names. Gollancz offered an advance of £40. The title improvised by Gollancz, Confessions of a Down and Outer bothered Orwell. "Would The Confessions of a Dishwasher do as well? I would rather answer to dishwasher than down & out ", he told Leonard Moore. At the last minute Gollancz shortened the title to Down and Out in Paris and London. The author, after possibilites including 'X', P.S.Burton - an alias Orwell had used on tramping expeditions -, Kenneth Miles, and H.Lewis Allways had been considered, was renamed "George Orwell". Orwell did not wish to publish under his own name Eric Blair, and Orwell was the name he used from then on for his main works—although many periodical articles were still published under the name Eric Blair. Down and Out in Paris and London was published on 9 January 1933 and received favourable reviews. It was subsequently published by Harper & Brothers
in New York. Sales however were low until December 1940 when Penguin Books
printed 55,000 copies for sale at sixpence.
A French translation, which Orwell admired, by R.N Raimbault and Gwen Gilbert entitled , was published by Éditions Gallimard
, 2 May 1935, with a preface by Panait Istrati
and an introduction by Orwell.
, often in tragi-comic terms. An Italian compositor forges room keys and steals his savings and his scant income vanishes when the English lessons he is giving stop. He begins at first to sell some of his clothes, and then pawn
his remaining clothes, and searches for work with a Russian waiter named Boris - work as a porter
at Les Halles
; work as an English teacher; restaurant work. He recounts his two-day experience without any food and tells of meeting Russian 'Communist
s' who, he later concludes, must simply have been swindlers who exacted entrance fees to an imaginary society, and then disappeared.
After the various ordeals of unemployment
and hunger the narrator obtains a job as a plongeur (dishwasher) in the 'Hôtel X', near the Place de la Concorde
, and begins working long hours. In chapter XIII he describes the 'caste system' in the hotel, manager-cooks-waiters-plongeurs and in chapter XIV, the frantic and seemingly chaotic workings of the hotel as he understands it. He notes also, "the dirt in the Hôtel X., as soon as one penetrated into the service quarters." He talks of his routine life as one of the working poor
in Paris: slaving and sleeping, then drinking on Saturday night until the early hours of Sunday morning. In chapter XVI the narrator characterises the semi-autonomous existence by referencing a murder that was committed outside the hotel where he stays 'just beneath my window'. '[T]he thing that strikes me in looking back', he says, 'is that I was in bed and asleep within three minutes of the murder... We were working people, and where was the sense of wasting sleep over a murder?'
Misled by Boris's optimism, the narrator is briefly penniless again after he and Boris quit their hotel jobs in the expectation of work at a new restaurant, the 'Auberge de Jehan Cottard', where Boris feels sure he will be a waiter again. (At the hotel he had been doing lower grade work.) Boris explains that the "patron", 'an ex-colonel of the Russian Army
,' seems to have financial difficulties — the narrator is not paid for ten days and spends a night on a bench rather than face his landlady over rent. 'It was very uncomfortable—the arm of the seat cuts into your back—and much colder than I had expected.'
At the restaurant the narrator finds himself working 'seventeen and a half hours' a day 'almost without a break' and looking back wistfully at his relatively leisured and orderly life at the Hotel X. Boris works even longer: 'eighteen hours a day, seven days a week'. 'Such hours', he explains, 'though not usual, are nothing extraordinary in Paris.' He adds that the Auberge, " was not the ordinary cheap eating-house frequented by students and workmen...we were picturesque and artistic...indecent pictures in the bar,[-] electric lights done up as candlesticks,...we were decidely chic." But, "the conditions behind the kitchen door were suitable for a pigsty." He falls into a routine again and talks of literally fighting for a place on the Paris Métro
to reach the 'cold, filthy kitchen' of the restaurant by seven. In spite of the filth and incompetence, the restaurant turns out to be a success.
The narrative is interspersed with recounted anecdotes told by some of the minor characters such as Valenti, an Italian waiter at Hotel 'X', and Charlie, 'one of the local curiosities' who is 'a youth of family and education who had run away from home'.
In chapter XXII, Orwell considers the life of a "plongeur":
Because of the stress of the long hours he mails to a friend back in London asking if he could get him a job that allowed him more than 5 hours sleep a night. His friend replies saying that he could get him a job taking care of a 'congenital imbecile' and sends him some money to get his possessions from the pawn. He then quits his job as a plongeur and leaves for London.
'. Unfortunately the would-be employers have gone abroad 'patient and all.'
Until his employers return, the narrator lives as a tramp
, sleeping in an assortment of venues : lodging houses, tramps' hostels (spikes), Salvation Army
shelters. Because vagrants can not, " enter any one spike, or any two London spikes, more than once in a month, on pain of being confined for a week", he is required to keep on the move, with the result that long hours are spent tramping or waiting for hostels to open. Chapters XXV to XXXV describe the journeys, the different forms of accommodation, a selection of the people he meets, and the tramps' reaction to Christian charity
; - " evidently the tramps were not grateful for their free tea
. And yet it was excellent [-] I am sure too that it was given in a good spirit, without any intention of humiliating us; so in fairness we ought to have been grateful-still, we were not." (XXVI) Characters in this section of the book include the Irish tramp called Paddy - "a good fellow", but whose "ignorance was limitless and appalling", and the pavement artist
Bozo who had a good literary background, was an amateur astronomer, but had suffered a succession of misfortunes that brought him down.
The final chapters provide a catalogue of different types of accommodation, and Orwell offers his general remarks, concluding
, describing a night spent in a Notting Hill
tramps' hostel. Before his departure from England he had voluntarily lived among tramps for some time.."
In The Road to Wigan Pier
Orwell referred to the tramping experiences described in Down and Out, writing, "nearly all the incidents described there actually happened, though they have been re-arranged".
Some measure of the work's veracity can be gleaned from a marked-up copy containing sixteen annotations on certain sections which Orwell gave Brenda Salkeld. Many major points have no comment, and for the descent into poverty from Chapter III, he wrote "Succeeding chapters are not actually autobiography but drawn from what I have seen". However, for Chapter VII he wrote "This all happened", on Hotel "X" "All as exact as I could make it" and on the Russian restaurant "All the following is an entirely accurate description of the restaurant". On the personalities, Orwell's own introduction to the French edition stated that the characters are individuals, but "intended more as representative types".
The luxury hotel where Orwell worked in the autumn of 1929 was identified as the Crillon
by Sonia Orwell - this stated by Sam White, the London Evening Standard
' s Paris correspondent in his column for 16 June 1967. The writers Stansky and Abrahams suggested, in their study of Orwell, that it was the Hotel Lotti.
complaining that the book was unfairly disparaging to the restaurant trade. The Times Literary Supplement had previously reviewed Down and Out in Paris and London, calling it "a vivid picture of an apparently mad world". Orwell responded to the restaurateur's criticism ; "I do know that in our hotel there were places which no customer could possibly have been allowed to see with any hope of retaining his custom." In Adelphi
, C Day Lewis wrote; "Orwell's book is a tour of the underworld, conducted without hysteria or prejudice ... a model of clarity and good sense." J. B. Priestley
, writing in the Evening Standard
, considered it, "Uncommonly good reading. An excellent book and a valuable social document. The best book of its kind I have read in a long time." Compton Mackenzie
wrote of Orwell's, ' immensely interesting book' and called it: "a genuine human document, which at the same time is written with so much artistic force that, in spite of the squalor and degradation thus unfolded, the result is curiously beautiful with the beauty of an accomplished etching on copper. The account of a casual ward in this country horrifies like some scene of inexplicable misery in Dante
." Following the American publication, James T. Farrell
, writing in The New Republic
, called it "genuine, unexaggerated and intelligent" and Herbert Gorman, for the New York Times Book Review, wrote; " He possesses a keen eye for character and a rough-and ready styleless style that plunges along and makes the reader see what the author wants him to see." In contrast the reviewer in New English Weekly
wrote "This book ... is forcefully written and is very readable, Yet it fails to carry conviction. We wonder if the author was really down and out. Down certainly, but out?" Cyril Connolly
later wrote "I don't think Down and Out in London and Paris is more than agreeable journalism; it was all better done by his friend Henry Miller
. Orwell found his true form a few years later." Henry Miller's controversial work Tropic of Cancer
(1934) is based on Miller's experiences in Paris around the time Orwell was there.
In an essay for the 1971 The World of George Orwell, Richard Mayne
considered the book as typical of something that was true of a great deal of Orwell's later writing; his - "relish at revealing behind-the-scenes squalor. He was always taking the lid off things - poverty, parlour Socialism, life in a coal mine, prep-school tyranny, the Empire, the Spanish Civil War
, the Russian Revolution, the political misuse of language. He might well have echoed W.H. Auden: All I have is a voice/To undo the folded lie. "
George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair , better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist...
(Eric Blair), published in 1933. It is a memoir in two parts on the theme of poverty in the two cities. The first part is a picaresque account of living on the breadline in Paris and the experience of casual labour in restaurant kitchens. The second part is a travelogue of life on the road in and around London from the tramp's perspective, with descriptions of the types of hostel accommodation available and some of the characters to be found living on the margins.
Background
After giving up his post as a policeman in Burma to become a writer, Orwell moved to rooms in Portobello RoadPortobello Road
Portobello Road is a street in the Notting Hill district of The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in west London, England. It runs almost the length of Notting Hill from south to north, roughly parallel with Ladbroke Grove. On Saturdays it is home to Portobello Road Market, one of London's...
, London at the end of 1927. While contributing to various journals, he undertook investigative tramping expeditions in and around London, collecting material for use in "The Spike
The Spike (essay)
"The Spike" is a 1931 essay by George Orwell in which he details his experience staying overnight in the casual ward of a workhouse near London...
", his first published essay, and the latter half of Down and Out in Paris and London. In spring of 1928, he moved to Paris, where the comparatively low cost of living and bohemian lifestyle attracted many aspiring writers. He lived at 6 Rue du Pot de Fer in the Latin Quarter, a bohemian quarter with a cosmopolitan flavour. American writers like Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
and F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigm writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost...
had lived in the same area. Following the Russian Revolution there was a large Russian emigre community in Paris. Orwell's Aunt Nellie Limouzin also lived in Paris and gave him social and, when necessary, financial support. He led an active social life, worked on his novels and had several articles published in avant-garde journals.
Orwell fell seriously ill in March 1929 and shortly afterwards had money stolen from the lodging house. The thief was probably not the young Italian described in Down and Out. In a later account he said the theft was the work of a young trollop that he had picked up and brought back with him; perhaps "consideration for his parents' sensibilities would have required the suppression of this misadventure. Whoever reduced Orwell to destitution did him a good turn;his final ten weeks in Paris sowed the seed of his first published book." Whether through necessity or just to collect material, he undertook casual work as a dishwasher in restaurants. In August 1929 he sent a copy of "The Spike" to the Adelphi
Adelphi (magazine)
The Adelphi or New Adelphi was an English literary journal published between 1923 and 1955.founded by John Middleton Murry. The first issue appeared in June 1922, with issues published monthly thereafter. Between August 1927 and September 1930 it was renamed the New Adelphi and issued quarterly...
magazine in London and it was accepted for publication. Orwell left Paris in December 1929 and returned to England. He went straight home to his parents' house in Southwold
Southwold
Southwold is a town on the North Sea coast, in the Waveney district of the English county of Suffolk. It is located on the North Sea coast at the mouth of the River Blyth within the Suffolk Coast and Heaths Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The town is around south of Lowestoft and north-east...
. Later he acted as a private tutor to a handicapped child there and also undertook further tramping expeditions culminating with a stint working in the Kent hop fields in August and September 1931. After this adventure, he ended up in the Tooley Street
Tooley Street
Tooley Street is a road in South London connecting London Bridge to St Saviour's Dock; it runs past Tower Bridge on the Southwark side of the River Thames, and forms part of the A200 road. - St Olave :...
kip, which he found so unpleasant that he wrote home for money and moved to more comfortable lodgings.
Publication
Orwell's first version of Down and Out was called "A Scullion's Diary". Completed in October 1930, it used only his Paris material. He offered it to Jonathan CapeJonathan Cape
Jonathan Cape was a London-based publisher founded in 1919 as "Page & Co" by Herbert Jonathan Cape , formerly a manager at Duckworth who had worked his way up from a position of bookshop errand boy. Cape brought with him the rights to cheap editions of the popular author Elinor Glyn and sales of...
in the summer of 1931. Cape rejected it in the autumn. A year later he offered, " a fatter typescript (the London chapters had been added)" to Faber & Faber, where T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
, then an editorial director, also rejected it. At this point Mabel Fierz - (Fierz and her husband Francis, a London businessman, had been visitors to Southwold in the summer for a number of years and were on friendly terms with the Blairs) - in whose home Orwell discarded the typescript, took it to a literary agent, Leonard Moore. Leonard Moore, "recognised it as a 'natural' for the new house of Gollancz." Victor Gollancz
Victor Gollancz
Sir Victor Gollancz was a British publisher, socialist, and humanitarian.-Early life:Born in Maida Vale, London, he was the son of a wholesale jeweller and nephew of Rabbi Professor Sir Hermann Gollancz and Professor Sir Israel Gollancz; after being educated at St Paul's School, London and taking...
was prepared to publish the work subject to the removal of bad language and some identifiable names. Gollancz offered an advance of £40. The title improvised by Gollancz, Confessions of a Down and Outer bothered Orwell. "Would The Confessions of a Dishwasher do as well? I would rather answer to dishwasher than down & out ", he told Leonard Moore. At the last minute Gollancz shortened the title to Down and Out in Paris and London. The author, after possibilites including 'X', P.S.Burton - an alias Orwell had used on tramping expeditions -, Kenneth Miles, and H.Lewis Allways had been considered, was renamed "George Orwell". Orwell did not wish to publish under his own name Eric Blair, and Orwell was the name he used from then on for his main works—although many periodical articles were still published under the name Eric Blair. Down and Out in Paris and London was published on 9 January 1933 and received favourable reviews. It was subsequently published by Harper & Brothers
Harper & Brothers
Harper is an American publishing house, the flagship imprint of global publisher HarperCollins.-History:James Harper and his brother John, printers by training, started their book publishing business J. & J. Harper in 1817. Their two brothers, Joseph Wesley Harper and Fletcher Harper, joined them...
in New York. Sales however were low until December 1940 when Penguin Books
Penguin Books
Penguin Books is a publisher founded in 1935 by Sir Allen Lane and V.K. Krishna Menon. Penguin revolutionised publishing in the 1930s through its high quality, inexpensive paperbacks, sold through Woolworths and other high street stores for sixpence. Penguin's success demonstrated that large...
printed 55,000 copies for sale at sixpence.
A French translation, which Orwell admired, by R.N Raimbault and Gwen Gilbert entitled , was published by Éditions Gallimard
Éditions Gallimard
Éditions Gallimard is one of the leading French publishers of books. The Guardian has described it as having "the best backlist in the world". In 2003 it and its subsidiaries published 1418 titles....
, 2 May 1935, with a preface by Panait Istrati
Panait Istrati
Panait Istrati was a Romanian writer of French and Romanian expression, nicknamed The Maxim Gorky of the Balkans. Istrati was first noted for the depiction of one homosexual character in his work.-Early life:...
and an introduction by Orwell.
Chapters I–XXIII (Paris)
Two verbless sentences introduce the scene-setting opening chapters which describe the atmosphere in the Paris quarter and introduce various characters who appear later in the book. From chapters III to chapter X, where the narrator obtains a job at 'Hotel X', he describes his descent into povertyPoverty
Poverty is the lack of a certain amount of material possessions or money. Absolute poverty or destitution is inability to afford basic human needs, which commonly includes clean and fresh water, nutrition, health care, education, clothing and shelter. About 1.7 billion people are estimated to live...
, often in tragi-comic terms. An Italian compositor forges room keys and steals his savings and his scant income vanishes when the English lessons he is giving stop. He begins at first to sell some of his clothes, and then pawn
Pawnbroker
A pawnbroker is an individual or business that offers secured loans to people, with items of personal property used as collateral...
his remaining clothes, and searches for work with a Russian waiter named Boris - work as a porter
Porter (carrier)
A porter, also called a bearer, is a person who shifts objects for others.-Historical meaning:Human adaptability and flexibility early led to the use of humans for shifting gear...
at Les Halles
Les Halles
Les Halles is an area of Paris, France, located in the 1er arrondissement, just south of the fashionable rue Montorgueil. It is named for the large central wholesale marketplace, which was demolished in 1971, to be replaced with an underground modern shopping precinct, the Forum des Halles...
; work as an English teacher; restaurant work. He recounts his two-day experience without any food and tells of meeting Russian 'Communist
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
s' who, he later concludes, must simply have been swindlers who exacted entrance fees to an imaginary society, and then disappeared.
After the various ordeals of unemployment
Unemployment
Unemployment , as defined by the International Labour Organization, occurs when people are without jobs and they have actively sought work within the past four weeks...
and hunger the narrator obtains a job as a plongeur (dishwasher) in the 'Hôtel X', near the Place de la Concorde
Place de la Concorde
The Place de la Concorde in area, it is the largest square in the French capital. It is located in the city's eighth arrondissement, at the eastern end of the Champs-Élysées.- History :...
, and begins working long hours. In chapter XIII he describes the 'caste system' in the hotel, manager-cooks-waiters-plongeurs and in chapter XIV, the frantic and seemingly chaotic workings of the hotel as he understands it. He notes also, "the dirt in the Hôtel X., as soon as one penetrated into the service quarters." He talks of his routine life as one of the working poor
Working poor
- Definition in the United States :There are several popular definitions of "working poor" in the United States. According to the US Department of Labor, the working poor "are persons who spent at least 27 weeks [in the past year] in the labor force , but whose incomes fell below the official...
in Paris: slaving and sleeping, then drinking on Saturday night until the early hours of Sunday morning. In chapter XVI the narrator characterises the semi-autonomous existence by referencing a murder that was committed outside the hotel where he stays 'just beneath my window'. '[T]he thing that strikes me in looking back', he says, 'is that I was in bed and asleep within three minutes of the murder... We were working people, and where was the sense of wasting sleep over a murder?'
Misled by Boris's optimism, the narrator is briefly penniless again after he and Boris quit their hotel jobs in the expectation of work at a new restaurant, the 'Auberge de Jehan Cottard', where Boris feels sure he will be a waiter again. (At the hotel he had been doing lower grade work.) Boris explains that the "patron", 'an ex-colonel of the Russian Army
Imperial Russian Army
The Imperial Russian Army was the land armed force of the Russian Empire, active from around 1721 to the Russian Revolution of 1917. In the early 1850s, the Russian army consisted of around 938,731 regular soldiers and 245,850 irregulars . Until the time of military reform of Dmitry Milyutin in...
,' seems to have financial difficulties — the narrator is not paid for ten days and spends a night on a bench rather than face his landlady over rent. 'It was very uncomfortable—the arm of the seat cuts into your back—and much colder than I had expected.'
At the restaurant the narrator finds himself working 'seventeen and a half hours' a day 'almost without a break' and looking back wistfully at his relatively leisured and orderly life at the Hotel X. Boris works even longer: 'eighteen hours a day, seven days a week'. 'Such hours', he explains, 'though not usual, are nothing extraordinary in Paris.' He adds that the Auberge, " was not the ordinary cheap eating-house frequented by students and workmen...we were picturesque and artistic...indecent pictures in the bar,[-] electric lights done up as candlesticks,...we were decidely chic." But, "the conditions behind the kitchen door were suitable for a pigsty." He falls into a routine again and talks of literally fighting for a place on the Paris Métro
Paris Métro
The Paris Métro or Métropolitain is the rapid transit metro system in Paris, France. It has become a symbol of the city, noted for its density within the city limits and its uniform architecture influenced by Art Nouveau. The network's sixteen lines are mostly underground and run to 214 km ...
to reach the 'cold, filthy kitchen' of the restaurant by seven. In spite of the filth and incompetence, the restaurant turns out to be a success.
The narrative is interspersed with recounted anecdotes told by some of the minor characters such as Valenti, an Italian waiter at Hotel 'X', and Charlie, 'one of the local curiosities' who is 'a youth of family and education who had run away from home'.
In chapter XXII, Orwell considers the life of a "plongeur":
Because of the stress of the long hours he mails to a friend back in London asking if he could get him a job that allowed him more than 5 hours sleep a night. His friend replies saying that he could get him a job taking care of a 'congenital imbecile' and sends him some money to get his possessions from the pawn. He then quits his job as a plongeur and leaves for London.
Chapters XXIV–XXXVIII (London)
The narrator arrives in London expecting to have a job waiting for him: he was told by a friend, to whom he refers as 'B.', that he would get paid to look after an 'imbecileImbecile
Imbecile is a term for moderate to severe mental retardation, as well as for a type of criminal. It arises from the Latin word imbecillus, meaning weak, or weak-minded. "Imbecile" was once applied to people with an IQ of 26-50, between "moron" and "idiot" .The term was further refined into mental...
'. Unfortunately the would-be employers have gone abroad 'patient and all.'
Until his employers return, the narrator lives as a tramp
Tramp
A tramp is a long term homeless person who travels from place to place as a vagrant, traditionally walking or hiking all year round. In British English meanwhile a tramp simply refers to a homeless person, usually not a travelling one....
, sleeping in an assortment of venues : lodging houses, tramps' hostels (spikes), Salvation Army
Salvation Army
The Salvation Army is a Protestant Christian church known for its thrift stores and charity work. It is an international movement that currently works in over a hundred countries....
shelters. Because vagrants can not, " enter any one spike, or any two London spikes, more than once in a month, on pain of being confined for a week", he is required to keep on the move, with the result that long hours are spent tramping or waiting for hostels to open. Chapters XXV to XXXV describe the journeys, the different forms of accommodation, a selection of the people he meets, and the tramps' reaction to Christian charity
Charity (practice)
The practice of charity means the voluntary giving of help to those in need who are not related to the giver.- Etymology :The word "charity" entered the English language through the Old French word "charité" which was derived from the Latin "caritas".Originally in Latin the word caritas meant...
; - " evidently the tramps were not grateful for their free tea
Tea
Tea is an aromatic beverage prepared by adding cured leaves of the Camellia sinensis plant to hot water. The term also refers to the plant itself. After water, tea is the most widely consumed beverage in the world...
. And yet it was excellent [-] I am sure too that it was given in a good spirit, without any intention of humiliating us; so in fairness we ought to have been grateful-still, we were not." (XXVI) Characters in this section of the book include the Irish tramp called Paddy - "a good fellow", but whose "ignorance was limitless and appalling", and the pavement artist
Street painting
Street painting, also commonly known as pavement art, chalk art, and sidewalk art, is the performance art of rendering original and non-original artistic designs on pavement such as streets, sidewalks, and town squares with impermanent and semi-permanent materials such as chalk.-Origin:Street...
Bozo who had a good literary background, was an amateur astronomer, but had suffered a succession of misfortunes that brought him down.
The final chapters provide a catalogue of different types of accommodation, and Orwell offers his general remarks, concluding
Fact and fiction
One of the debates surrounding Down and Out is whether it was a piece of factual autobiography or part fiction. Orwell wrote in the Introduction to the 1935 French edition: "I think I can say that I have exaggerated nothing except in so far as all writers exaggerate by selecting. I did not feel that I had to describe events in the exact order in which they happened, but everything I have described did take place at one time or another..." In Chapter XXIV it is, "clear that Orwell did distort facts by claiming on his return from Paris he found himself down and out in London and had not the slightest notion of how to get a cheap bed. This of course heightens the tension...but the truth is that in Paris he had already written his first substantial essay, The SpikeThe Spike (essay)
"The Spike" is a 1931 essay by George Orwell in which he details his experience staying overnight in the casual ward of a workhouse near London...
, describing a night spent in a Notting Hill
Notting Hill
Notting Hill is an area in London, England, close to the north-western corner of Kensington Gardens, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea...
tramps' hostel. Before his departure from England he had voluntarily lived among tramps for some time.."
In The Road to Wigan Pier
The Road to Wigan Pier
The Road to Wigan Pier is a book by the British writer George Orwell, first published in 1937. The first half of this work documents his sociological investigations of the bleak living conditions amongst the working class in Lancashire and Yorkshire in the industrial north of England before World...
Orwell referred to the tramping experiences described in Down and Out, writing, "nearly all the incidents described there actually happened, though they have been re-arranged".
Some measure of the work's veracity can be gleaned from a marked-up copy containing sixteen annotations on certain sections which Orwell gave Brenda Salkeld. Many major points have no comment, and for the descent into poverty from Chapter III, he wrote "Succeeding chapters are not actually autobiography but drawn from what I have seen". However, for Chapter VII he wrote "This all happened", on Hotel "X" "All as exact as I could make it" and on the Russian restaurant "All the following is an entirely accurate description of the restaurant". On the personalities, Orwell's own introduction to the French edition stated that the characters are individuals, but "intended more as representative types".
The luxury hotel where Orwell worked in the autumn of 1929 was identified as the Crillon
Hôtel de Crillon
The Hôtel de Crillon in Paris is one of the oldest luxury hotels in the world. The hotel is located at the foot of the Champs-Élysées and is one of two identical stone palaces on the Place de la Concorde. The Crillon has 103 guest rooms and 44 suites...
by Sonia Orwell - this stated by Sam White, the London Evening Standard
Evening Standard
The Evening Standard, now styled the London Evening Standard, is a free local daily newspaper, published Monday–Friday in tabloid format in London. It is the dominant regional evening paper for London and the surrounding area, with coverage of national and international news and City of London...
' s Paris correspondent in his column for 16 June 1967. The writers Stansky and Abrahams suggested, in their study of Orwell, that it was the Hotel Lotti.
Reactions
Within a month of publication, 'a restaurateur and hotelier of forty years', had written to The TimesThe Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
complaining that the book was unfairly disparaging to the restaurant trade. The Times Literary Supplement had previously reviewed Down and Out in Paris and London, calling it "a vivid picture of an apparently mad world". Orwell responded to the restaurateur's criticism ; "I do know that in our hotel there were places which no customer could possibly have been allowed to see with any hope of retaining his custom." In Adelphi
Adelphi (magazine)
The Adelphi or New Adelphi was an English literary journal published between 1923 and 1955.founded by John Middleton Murry. The first issue appeared in June 1922, with issues published monthly thereafter. Between August 1927 and September 1930 it was renamed the New Adelphi and issued quarterly...
, C Day Lewis wrote; "Orwell's book is a tour of the underworld, conducted without hysteria or prejudice ... a model of clarity and good sense." J. B. Priestley
J. B. Priestley
John Boynton Priestley, OM , known as J. B. Priestley, was an English novelist, playwright and broadcaster. He published 26 novels, notably The Good Companions , as well as numerous dramas such as An Inspector Calls...
, writing in the Evening Standard
Evening Standard
The Evening Standard, now styled the London Evening Standard, is a free local daily newspaper, published Monday–Friday in tabloid format in London. It is the dominant regional evening paper for London and the surrounding area, with coverage of national and international news and City of London...
, considered it, "Uncommonly good reading. An excellent book and a valuable social document. The best book of its kind I have read in a long time." Compton Mackenzie
Compton Mackenzie
Sir Compton Mackenzie, OBE was a writer and a Scottish nationalist.-Background:Compton Mackenzie was born in West Hartlepool, England, into a theatrical family of Mackenzies, but many of whose members used Compton as their stage surname, starting with his grandfather Henry Compton, a well-known...
wrote of Orwell's, ' immensely interesting book' and called it: "a genuine human document, which at the same time is written with so much artistic force that, in spite of the squalor and degradation thus unfolded, the result is curiously beautiful with the beauty of an accomplished etching on copper. The account of a casual ward in this country horrifies like some scene of inexplicable misery in Dante
DANTE
Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe is a not-for-profit organisation that plans, builds and operates the international networks that interconnect the various national research and education networks in Europe and surrounding regions...
." Following the American publication, James T. Farrell
James T. Farrell
James Thomas Farrell was an American novelist. One of his most famous works was the Studs Lonigan trilogy, which was made into a film in 1960 and into a television miniseries in 1979...
, writing in The New Republic
The New Republic
The magazine has also published two articles concerning income inequality, largely criticizing conservative economists for their attempts to deny the existence or negative effect increasing income inequality is having on the United States...
, called it "genuine, unexaggerated and intelligent" and Herbert Gorman, for the New York Times Book Review, wrote; " He possesses a keen eye for character and a rough-and ready styleless style that plunges along and makes the reader see what the author wants him to see." In contrast the reviewer in New English Weekly
New English Weekly
The New English Weekly was a leading review of "Public Affairs, Literature and the Arts."It was founded in April 1932 by Alfred Richard Orage shortly after his return from Paris...
wrote "This book ... is forcefully written and is very readable, Yet it fails to carry conviction. We wonder if the author was really down and out. Down certainly, but out?" Cyril Connolly
Cyril Connolly
Cyril Vernon Connolly was an English intellectual, literary critic and writer. He was the editor of the influential literary magazine Horizon and wrote Enemies of Promise , which combined literary criticism with an autobiographical exploration of why he failed to become the successful author of...
later wrote "I don't think Down and Out in London and Paris is more than agreeable journalism; it was all better done by his friend Henry Miller
Henry Miller
Henry Valentine Miller was an American novelist and painter. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of 'novel' that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is...
. Orwell found his true form a few years later." Henry Miller's controversial work Tropic of Cancer
Tropic of Cancer (novel)
Tropic of Cancer is a novel by Henry Miller which has been described as "notorious for its candid sexuality" and as responsible for the "free speech that we now take for granted in literature." It was first published in 1934 by the Obelisk Press in Paris, France, but this edition was banned in the...
(1934) is based on Miller's experiences in Paris around the time Orwell was there.
In an essay for the 1971 The World of George Orwell, Richard Mayne
Richard Mayne (administrator)
Richard John Mayne was a British advocate for European integration, journalist, broadcaster and writer.Mayne was born in North London and educated at St Paul's School in London...
considered the book as typical of something that was true of a great deal of Orwell's later writing; his - "relish at revealing behind-the-scenes squalor. He was always taking the lid off things - poverty, parlour Socialism, life in a coal mine, prep-school tyranny, the Empire, the Spanish Civil War
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...
, the Russian Revolution, the political misuse of language. He might well have echoed W.H. Auden: All I have is a voice/To undo the folded lie. "
External links
- Down and Out in Paris and London - searchable, indexed etext.
- Down and Out in Paris and London Complete book with publication data and search feature.
- New Yorker review