Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

To be poor and destitute in 1920s Paris and London was to experience life at its lowest ebb. George Orwell, penniless and with nowhere to go, found himself experiencing just this as he wandered the streets of both capitals in search of a job. By day, he tramped the streets, often passing time with ‘screevers’ or street artists, drunks, and other hobos. At night, he stood in line for a bed in a ‘spike’ or doss house, where a cup of sugary tea, a hunk of stale bread and a blanket were the only sustenance and comfort on offer.

Down and Out in Paris and London is George Orwell’s haunting account of the streets and those who have no choice but to live on them.

George Orwell was a curious hybrid. On the surface, he came from a privileged background – he was born in colonial India, descended from the aristocracy and attended an exclusive private school. On the other hand, he attended that school on a scholarship and his family did not by any means have the same social status and wealth as many of his schoolmates. As a consequence, Orwell felt that he straddled the edges of several different social classes and felt rather an outsider to all of them.

Perhaps as a result of this, Orwell’s autobiographical books indicate that he was very interested in how societies hang together and he made it his mission to investigate this by immersing himself in various societal groups. Down and Out in Paris and London describes his experiences in the poorer communities in those cities, starting with Paris (although in reality he lived in London first and then moved to Paris).

In Paris, Orwell experiences the desperation of searching for a job and becoming increasingly unable to pay his living expenses. He describes his all-consuming anxiety over how he is going to afford his next meal and he resorts to selling his possessions in Paris’ pawnshops. He does eventually find a job as a dishwasher at a restaurant and, although he works painfully long hours with very few days off, his humorous descriptions of the incessant chaos in the scorching temperatures of the hotel’s basement kitchens make for light-hearted reading.

After Paris, Orwell takes a ferry to England. When meeting some Romanians on the ferry who are moving to England to make a new life for themselves, he contemplates how differently we view our homeland from a distance or through the eyes of somebody who has never been there:

“England is a very good country when you are not poor […] The thought of not being poor made me very patriotic. The more questions the Romanians asked, the more I praised England: the climate, the scenery, the art, the literature, the laws – everything in England was perfect.”

This rose-tinted perspective does not come to fruition. Orwell finds himself homeless, travelling between lodging houses with others in the same position. He walks for miles, and he attempts street art on the banks of the Thames in the hope of making some money.

In reality, Orwell’s motivation for living this lifestyle was that he was conducting a (rather extreme) social experiment – he disguised himself as a ‘tramp’ and lived alongside genuine ‘tramps’ to generate material for use in The Spike, which was his first published essay and which was incorporated into Down and Out in Paris and London.

Down and Out in Paris and London is one of many writings by Orwell about class systems and societal disparity. It is tinged with aspiration and hope of a better life, in contrast to the hard reality of the day-to-day existence on the streets of a capital city. Always insightful and shrewd, Orwell captures the social perceptions and biases of various margins of society in the early twentieth century, much of which rings true today.