Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14026 in Books
• Published on: 1972-03-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 228 pages

Amazon.com
What was a nice Eton boy like Eric Blair doing in scummy slums instead of being upwardly mobile at Oxford or Cambridge? Living Down and Out in Paris and London, repudiating respectable imperialist society, and reinventing himself as George Orwell. His 1933 debut book (ostensibly a novel, but overwhelmingly autobiographical) was rejected by that elitist publisher T.S. Eliot, perhaps because its close-up portrait of lowlife was too pungent for comfort.

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

The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature
Autobiographical work by George Orwell, published in 1933. Orwell's first published book, it contains essays in which actual events are recounted in a fictionalized form. The book recounts that to atone for the guilt he feels about the conditions under which the disenfranchised and downtrodden peoples of the world exist, Orwell decides to live and work as one of them. Dressed as a beggar, he takes whatever employment might be available to a poverty-stricken outcast of Europe. In Paris he lives in a slum and works as a dishwasher. The essay "How the Poor Die" describes conditions at a charity hospital there. In London's East End, he dresses and lives like his neighbors, who are paupers and the poorest of working-class laborers. Dressed as a tramp, he travels throughout England with hoboes and migrant laborers.

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Customer Reviews

To Write Well, One Must Live & Experience It in all its Reality.
Orwell began as an idealist and remained one until his untimely death at the age of 48 from tuberculosis. In most of the photographs I can find of the great writer, he always has a smoke in his mouth, typing away, while a white haze of thoughts, ideas, nicotine and tar surround him, like a dangerous muse.

Eric Blair or Orwell was of the writing school of thought that in order to write with authenticity, the writer must have experienced the emotion, relationship or event in some way. Many writers at the time were of the same persuasion; Hemmingway is the first that comes to mind...Jack London too, particularly his early work.

In Down and Out in Paris and London, the young writer sets out, a middle class Englishman, to find and work any manual labour job that he could find to eventually land one in Paris as a 'dogs body' -diswasher, cleaner, et al. He is paid very little and (most importantly) fed for his gruelling 14 hour shifts.

Though this was a great opportunity, as a writer, searching out material, this was the place to be...the characters' in the book are priceless.

One of the more memorable descriptions:

"In the kitchen the dirt was worse. It is not a figure of speech, it is a mere statement of fact to say that a French cook will spit in the soup - that is if he is not going to drink it himself."

This not to say this happends now in the twenty-first century, but this is only an observation from the author at the time - some eighty years ago.

This is early work from Orwell - an apprentice, so to speak, learning his trade.

Interestingly, next to Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm: Centennial Edition Down and Out is one of his best endevours.

In this book or as most say, Diary, the reader will recognize Orwell's gift for characterization.

Worth a look at.

This work is a piece of sociological brilliance, and a timeless classic!
The book itself describes the daily lives of people in two different nations/societies that were impoverished in his era. The way that they struggled to just receive the bare minimum as far as food and shelter are eye opening. To anyone entertaining ideas about accepting libertarianism please read this to understand how we as a society really do need to look out for one another. The parts that he includes showing the social hierarchy in poor groups is entirely necessary and in itself amazingly descriptive. Do read this because you will most definately not be disappointed.

A tramp is nothing but an Englishman out of work: a metropolitan anthropology of the lower classes
Orwell's first published book established a literary name for him and brought him some moderate success, which must have helped to escape the conditions that the book describes. It is a 'non-fiction' book with a lot of fictional spicing.
Roughly, the book has two parts, as the title indicates: the Paris part is dominated by work as minimum salary helper in restaurant kitchens, then the London part is exclusively given to trampdom, caused by homelessness and joblessness.
The two parts are oddly different in tone. The Paris adventures are, despite misery, darkly comical; the comedy aspect is clearly intended. The descriptions of lodging, eating, resp. not eating, working, partying are interjected with darkly funny tales about the types that populate the urban slums of the Paris of 1930. Some of them are quite disgusting, like the tales of drunken Charlie, who considers raping sex slaves as the ultimate in true love, while pitying them is base emotion. Or friend Boris, the ex captain of the White Russian army who considers Jews so far below a Russian officer, that they are not even worth his spittle. Less obnoxious is the tale of the miser who gets talked into investing some of his matress money into a load of cocain for transportation to England, gets arrested for possession, but freed when the police finds out it is 'face powder', whatever that is. The man dies of a broken heart.
(The Orwell of the Paris half has a contemporary successor in Germany, an investigative journalist named Guenter Wallraff, who has made himself a name as undercover serf in the worst paid jobs in Germany, and is honestly dreaded by German employers.)
The conditions in the two restaurants where Orwell works are so abominable that one would rather not eat in France any more. Of course that was nearly a century ago, and today everything is different. Right?
Orwell then had enough and had hopes for a job in London, so he went back, but found his hopes frustrated. He runs out of cash fast and spends weeks with the homeless crowd, tramping from one asylum to the other and writing 'hotel reviews'. There are few jokes in this part. An intriguing quote from this part: a clergyman and his daughter came and stared silently at us for a while ('us' being a group of tramps waiting for the shelter to open).
Orwell includes some theoretical chapters, like suggestions how to improve the legal situation, a typology of beggars, and a glossary on street language. This part lives mostly from his portraits of fellow tramps. The most impressive character is a pavement painter, who turns out to be a veritable philosopher. (An embittered atheist. He did not disbelieve in God as much as he disliked him.)
The book is highly readable, despite its uneven character. Of course it stood in a broad literary tradition, and Orwell added to it.