Down and Out in Paris and London
by George Orwell

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Book Reviews of Down and Out in Paris and London

Book Review: Well worth reading...
Summary: 5 Stars

On page 5, Orwell sets out his mission statement for the book: `Poverty is what I'm writing about.'

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1. (Chapters 1-8) The book portrays the lives of the poor in 1930s Paris, living in shabby bug-infested accommodation, desperately trying to find work and then eke out a living working long hours, to pay their rent and avoid starvation.

(page 3) `The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people - people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work. Some of the lodgers in our hotel lived lives that were curious beyond words.'

(page 16) `...For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry. ...'

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2. (Chapters 9-23) The book portrays aspects of life working in the hotel and restaurant business in Paris, where Orwell worked for a time as a plongeur alongside his friend Boris: first, a month in the foul kitchens of the up-market Hotel Lotti; second, a fortnight at the newly opened, badly run and down-market Auberge de Jehan Cottard in `....an atmosphere of muddle, petty spite and exasperation', a job he left with great relief.

(page 78, on the Hotel X) `Roughly speaking, the more one pays for food, the more sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it. ... Dirtiness is inherent in hotels and restaurants, because sound food is sacrificed to punctuality and smartness... The only food at the Hotel X which was ever prepared cleanly was the staff's...'.

(page 114, on the state of the kitchen at the newly opened Auberge) `Looking round that filthy room, with raw meat lying among the refuse on the floor, and cold, clotted saucepans sprawling everywhere, and the sink blocked and coated with grease, I used to wonder whether there could be a restaurant in the world as bad as ours. But the other three all said they had been in dirtier places.'

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3. (Chapters 24-38 - chapters apparently written much later than the Paris material, after a shorter book on the Paris material alone had been rejected by several publishers) The focus of the book switches to England. Orwell gives up his job at the Auberge and returns to London, only to find that a new job promised him through a friend, of caring for an imbecile, was delayed a month. Almost penniless, and rather than seeking out alternative work for that month, the Orwell in the book (the chronology has been altered in fact) decides to adopt the life of a tramp for a month. He lives in `spikes' (one night accommodation for tramps) and in lodging houses, among the poor and the down-and-outs of southern England, trudging from place to place mainly in the company of an Irish tramp, Paddy. Orwell observes in detail the lives of English tramps in the 1930s (`...the most docile, broken-spirited creatures imaginable...'). He continues this impoverished life for that long month, until Orwell's carer job finally materialises.

(page 149, the morning after Orwell is let out of his first tramps' accommodation, or `spike') `How sweet the air does smell - even the air of a back-street in the suburbs - after the shut-in, subfaecal stench of the spike!'

(page 152, on Paddy the tramp, Orwell's pal) `He had two subjects of conversation, the shame and come-down of being a tramp, and the best way of getting a free meal.'

(page 158) `Paddy and I had scarcely a wink of sleep, for there was a man near us who had some nervous trouble, shell-shock perhaps, which made him cry out `Pip!' at irregular intervals. It was a loud, startling noise, something like the toot of a small motor-horn. You never knew when it was coming, and it was a sure preventer of sleep. ...he must have kept ten or twenty people awake every night. He was an example of the kind of thing that prevents one from ever getting enough sleep when men are herded as they are in these lodging houses.'

(p.168) `[Bozo] avoided religious charities, however, for he said that it stuck in his throat to sing hymns for buns...'.

(p.215, end) `My story ends here. It is a fairly trivial story, and I can only hope that it has been interesting in the same way as a trivial diary is interesting. ...At present I do not feel I have seen more than the fringe of poverty.
`Still, I can point to one or two things I have definitely learned by being hard up. I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant. That is a beginning.'

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Generally: This is a simple and straightforward, interesting and informative book to read, with short chapters. The book is not quite perfect (e.g. weak humour in some places, and a partly illogical rant in Chapter 22), but the book is well worth reading. It might put the reader off eating in cafes and restaurants, however.

If you enjoyed this book, you might wish to read Orwell's observations on the lives of ordinary working people in north England in the 1930s, written in a similar style, `The Road to Wigan Pier.' (1937).

Summary of Down and Out in Paris and London

In Paris, Orwell lived in verminous rooms and washed dishes at the overpriced "Hotel X," in a remarkably filthy, 110-degree kitchen. He met "eccentric people--people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent." Though Orwell's tone is that of an outraged reformer, it's surprising how entertaining many of his adventures are: gnawing poverty only enlivens the imagination, and the wild characters he met often swindled each other and themselves. The wackiest tale involves a miser who ate cats, wore newspapers for underwear, invested 6,000 francs in cocaine, and hid it in a face-powder tin when the cops raided. They had to free him, because the apparently controlled substance turned out to be face powder instead of cocaine.

In London, Orwell studied begging with a crippled expert named Bozo, a great storyteller and philosopher. Orwell devotes a chapter to the fine points of London guttersnipe slang. Years later, he would put his lexical bent to work by inventing Newspeak, and draw on his down-and-out experience to evoke the plight of the Proles in 1984. Though marred by hints of unexamined anti-Semitism, Orwell's debut remains, as The Nation put it, "the most lucid portrait of poverty in the English language." --Tim Appelo

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