Editor's note: George Orwell is known primarily for two novels: 1984 and Animal Farm. But Orwell was a prolific writer, one who deservedly has a cult following. Other novels include Coming Up for Air, Burmese Days, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and The Road to Wigan Pier. Orwell wrote many essays, including How the Poor Die and Killing an Elephant. Your author has penned a review of his favorite Orwell novel, Down and Out in London and Paris.
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George Orwell was more than just a novelist and an essayist. He was also a skilled reporter and observer who, through his experiences, crafted several books that reveal styles of life distinct from most 1930s readers. In “Homage to Catalonia,” he brings the failed Spanish revolution to readers. The hard life of coal miners is the subject of “The Road to Wigan Pier.”
Orwell’s finest piece of reportage, however, is captured in “Down and Out in Paris and London.” Inspired by “People of the Abyss,” Jack London’s melodramatic tale of turn-of-the-century London slums, Orwell entered the life of the poor in Paris and London. “Down and Out...” is likely a blend of Orwell’s experiences, observances, and literary license. In Paris, he was a penniless writer who worked 17-hour days as a dishwasher to afford rent, drinks and food. In London, while waiting for a job, he existed as a tramp, walking miles a day with other unfortunates, sleeping on the public dole, or when he had a few cents, in lodging houses that were semi-flop houses.
Orwell’s tales in the different cities are a fascinating mix of narrative and social commentary. In Paris, the first-hand reports of a high-class restaurant in an expensive hotel is great reading. The employees, horribly overworked and underpaid, exist in a frenzy of organized chaos. The appearance of great service -- rather than great service -- is the goal of these workers. As a result, a smart looking, six-course turkey dinner may look great on a waiter’s tray, but its origins were more dirty. It was produced in a filthy subterranean portion of the hotel infested with cockroaches and rats. As Orwell puts it, “Everywhere in the service quarters dirt festered -- a secret vein of dirt, running through the great garish hotel like the intestines through a man’s body.”
Life in the Paris slums is described in great detail. From the bug-infested rentals, to small, dark bistros, to Saturday night drinking “blowouts” and desperate visits to officious pawnbrokers to sell shabby clothes for food. Sprinkled throughout the narratives are great life anecdotes of the characters the young Orwell meets. Charlie, a shiftless youth, recalls a visit to a high-priced brothel. An old miser dies of regret and misery after he discovers that cocaine he purchased to sell is face powder.
There is a funny scene where two Mormon missionaries try to deal with a rowdy crowd while preaching in Tower Hill. Orwell’s writing style is calm, sometimes with amused skepticism. After enduring a religious service in a lodging house in London, Orwell writes, “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.”
A Paris scene has Orwell and a buddy, Boris, go to see about becoming circus hands. The job involves allowing lions to jump through your legs. When they arrive, there is a long line of applicants already waiting. “There is some attraction in lions, evidently,” Orwell dryly observes.
The London scenes are memorable for the reports of the dirty conditions of the “shilling” lodging houses in London of that time. Also, Orwell brings readers into the lives of the unfortunate men who were forced -- through unemployment and lack of funds -- to tramp the English countryside for miles each day just to sleep in a charitable “spike” -- free lodging in a workhouse. Their many depredations are calmly described: forced religious services in return for a free meal; the petty shortchanging done by clerks at tea shops when they used a “food ticket”; the impersonal, bullying treatment at a “spike”; and the refusal of London police to allow a homeless person to sit down or sleep on the ground or the bench while outside.
Orwell writes, “A beggar, looked at realistically, is simply a business man, getting his living like other business man, in the way that comes to hand. He has not, more than most modern people, sold his honor; he has merely made the mistake of choosing a trade at which it is impossible to get rich.”
As mentioned, Orwell detours from his narrative at different times to offer his theories on why hotel workers are underpaid and why thousands of homeless men are forced to tramp the countryside. He also offers some solutions to the problems. His solutions are a blend of socialism and common sense. “Down and Out in Paris and London” is great reporting and one envies readers who get the opportunity to explore this a first time.
- Doug Gibson
Originally published a generation plus ago in the now-defunct Salt Lake City alternative weekly, The Event.
