Down and Out in Paris and London

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Summary: How would We react to this life?
Review: I don't recall what possessed me to buy George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London after reading no Orwell since 1984. It was probably one of the online recommendations, and if so, a very good one it was. As a young man, educated but out of work, Orwell found himself in Paris with frightfully little money. Thus began his adventures through the Paris slums and the shady underside of life there.

This was not, apparently, an attempt on Orwell's part to go out and discover how the other half lives. It is not discipline but rather simple helplessness that sometimes forced him to go days without food, to pawn virtually everything he owned for a paltry few coins, and to live in desperation. Likewise, when work came, it was by necessity that he worked the hideously long hours at menial work in order to earn a living. So it was with at least in part the eye of the truly poor that he put to print what he experienced there. In true Orwell style, he manages to find the story in everyone he meets, and his powers of observation are exceptional.

When he manages to make it back to London, the book enters its second half. I found the London portion less insightful and entertaining. Learning that his waiting job is postponed a month, Orwell becomes a tramp, and travels through the various lodging houses and what passed for shelters in 1930's London. It was here that the text also becomes a bit dated and colloquial. Whereas in the Paris portion, presumably the dialogues have been translated from French into Standard English, in the London portion Orwell mimics street talk: "Want a kip? That'll be a `og, guv'nor." I've always thought this sort of thing just slows down the reading, does nothing for the story, and contributes to the inferiority of traditional English literature (American too, I'm not being a snob here). I also found the London bit more depressing and the characters less colorful and less sympathetic.

Actually, this is a point on which Orwell's future political leanings start to show. If his portrayals of some of these characters are correct, then I wouldn't want half of them working for me, either. A little professionalism, or just lack of criminal intent, can go a long way. Nonetheless, this book is meant more as a travelogue to the slums than as a deep analysis of societal problems. As entertainment, it is first rate, and as a look at a real aspect of life for many, it is a bit dated, but still first rate.

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Summary: Well worth reading...
Review: If your looking for a basic start, middle, end story then down and out is not for you. However, if you are looking for an honest insight in to the conditions of both Paris and London in the early 1900s then you have the right book. One can understand Orwell's plight and dedication in this book because of the fact that he has came from a wealthy middle class family and chooses to live like this. The book starts in Paris where the levels of poverty for the majority of people are shocking, unrecognisable by todays standards. Yet through Orwell's imagery and attention to detail even a teenager of the 21st century can imagine the filth and insanitary conditions of both towns. My favourite part of the book was the part in Paris. this is because the friendships he makes and the job he ends up with despite being horrific make the reader feel warm and that despite this hardship he is happy. The conditions in London and the description of the tramps and their way of life is sad and really makes you realise how lucky you are. A frank account.

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Summary: one of orwells best
Review: Orwell rapidly became one of my favorite writers after I finished Animal Farm and 1984. I thought these books were great and so I set out to find more of his books. This is the book I stumbled upon and found is just as fascinating as the other two. This book outlines the plight of poverty in urban settings; from the long ours as a plongeure in Paris, to the rowdiness of late night pubs in London. Through out the novel he describes the terrible inconvenience and burdon having no money places upon a poor person. He also tells of great adventures he shares with his friends in trying to acquire money and fun. I highly recommend this book to any reader but especially to Orwell fans.



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Summary: Poverty Taken To Task
Review: Ostensibly a novel, this book is Orwell's thinly fictional account of a time he spent "slumming it" in Paris and London. Orwell had read and greatly admired Jack London's book, "People of the Abyss" (1902), which chronicled his time spent among the wretched poor of London at the turn of the century. In the prewar '30s Orwell followed London's journalistic example, and voluntarily entered the ranks of the barely surviving in Paris. His account is rich in it's evocation of sights, sounds, and characters of this day-to-day existence. When he isn't unemployed and pawning his clothes, he works 12-18 hour days as a "plongeur" (dishwasher/gopher) at various hotels and restaurants. It's a pretty awful never-ending cycle of poverty to be caught in, as Orwell's books amply demonstrates. He ends his Paris section by speaking directly to the reader about the reasons for such poverty. Rather than claim any kind of nobility in poverty, he points out that the terrible jobs he and his friends perform are largely useless work and can be easily made obsolete. Later he moves over to London and joins the ranks of the homeless tramps. This section is less vivid and strong, and is better as a simple sociological study of homelessness in Edwardian England. He somewhat awkwardly inserts a lot of info about slang which is interesting, but somewhat tangential. The extreme policies he decries here have been replaced by the modern welfare state economy. Altogether, it's an interesting journalistic/sociological exercise with some strong statements.

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Summary: A Must Read!
Review: Something my fellow reviewers do NOT seem to have noticed is that this is a work of FICTION. Look for the word on the binding of your copy of the book. I have no doubt that Eric Blair, who changed his name to George Orwell when he wrote this book in order not to be discovered by his parents and friends, did have some brushes with the sort of life he describes. But how much of this are we to believe actually happened?

The problem with Mr. Blair's work is that it is tendentious. There are any number of novels out there that include heart-rending accounts of the life of the poor during this era, try Somerset Maugham's Of Human bondage, for instance. But the polemic chapters at the end on word usage and societal change reveal the raison d'etre for this book. I wish Mr. Blair could have written a straightforward essay instead of this not very gripping account of slumming it around Dickens' two cities. In doing so, he exhibits the trait that he censures other writers for so severely in his later years, pretentious rot.

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Summary: Paris Good, London Bad
Review: The beginning Paris section is engaging and one gets caught up in the author's adventures in the seemy underbelly of the city.

The London section comes off as a dry, analytical essay on social conditions and is quite boring.

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Summary: Well worth reading...
Review: This 1933 book is an enjoyable, informative, humorous book, based on Orwell's actual experiences. The book portrays the pressures in the lives of impoverished people, oppressed by the systems existing in 1930s Europe, in the daily ordeal of trying to get by and survive, working long hours on low wages or unemployed, many of them going hungry.

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).

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Summary: Fascinating look at the "down and out" of the early 20th c.
Review: This book reads much more like a memoir than the novel it is, and indeed it is a largely autobiographical work. Orwell begins with an anonymous narrator describing daily life in the poorer parts of Paris during the early 1900s. He describes the din, the dirt, the bugs, and all else in vivid detail. The narrator, an Englishman by birth, is living in Paris and running low on funds. We follow him through various attempts to earn money, including work as a lowly dishwasher or "plongeur" in the city's hotels, and also in one dubious restaurant. We learn all the dirty behind-the-scenes secrets of these operations, and it's quite enough to make one's skin crawl and cause one to avoid hotels and restaurants forever.

The second half of the book follows the narrator back to his native England, where he must find a way to get by in London while awaiting a permanent job. Here we are introduced to the tramp's way of life - vagrancy, begging, and sleeping in the cheapest (and filthiest) accomodations available. But we also get to know some of the narrator's fellow tramps, and to feel for them. They are not all the worthless, lazy scum that the higher classes of the time would paint them as. Orwell concludes the book with a brief treatise on the vagrant's plight and ways in which it can be eased, as well as making the tramp a usefull part of society.

Obviously Orwell's closing call-to-action is not entirely relevant anymore, as the workings of society have changed somewhat over the last century, but the book is nevertheless fascinating. A reader may at first be a little thrown off by the lack of a central plot, but once past this it is easy to get sucked into the world Orwell has illustrated here. His imagery is so striking that you actually feel as if you are sharing the narrator's experiences. You can feel the intense heat of the hotel kitchens, feel the weakness and weariness that comes with malnutrition, smell the grease and the sweat and the dirt.

And yet, as bleak as all this sounds, the book is not depressing. The narrator never lapses into dejection or self-pity, and the reader is left with a sense of hope throughout the novel. Being poor is not presented as a dead end - there are always ways to get by, some of them quite ingenious. And the narrator is even able to find humor in some of the truly absurd situations he finds himself in.

Any fan of Orwell's works will not be disappointed with this book. Or even if you've read nothing by Orwell (in which case you absolutely must pick up "1984" at some point), and merely want a glimpse into the life of the poor and jobless at this point in history, this is the book for you. And the fact that the narrator is anonymous (although the story is largely based on Orwell's life, the narrator is not, as some reviewers have claimed, Orwell himself) helps us imagine that he could be anyone, and that even we could be living this life. It's fairly short and easy to read, but opens up a whole world - one that is rarely contemplated in much detail - with it's rich descriptions. Definitely a recommended read.

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Summary: Revealing Look at the Poor
Review: _Down and Out in Paris and London_ is a book about the life of poverty in London and Paris. In the first half of the book the main character is in Paris where he goes several days without food. He finally gets a job in a hotel restaurant. The story is a first person account of trying to make ends meet in a tough world. The description of the working conditions and filth in the restaurants in Paris makes one think twice before eating out. The second half of the book is in London. The main character is promised a job in London but must hold out for a few months before he can start.
Orwell points out some interesting points and misconceptions about poverty. Even though this book was published in 1933 many of the misconceptions of poverty pointed out in this book are still widely believed. For example many people in London believed that tramps were much more dangerous then regular people. In Orwell's experience tramps being more dangerous doesn't seem to be true. Orwell also explains why people that are down and out aren't happy about accepting charity. When the poor do get jobs they usually had to work at least twelve hours a day. In London there were public lodging houses but they were often dirty and cramped. The tramps were also forced to move around constantly because many of the public houses didn't let the same person stay for more then one day or weekend a month. Orwell also talks about the malnourishment that many of the poor suffer.
This book is a very good study of the worst off in society of the 1920's and 30's London and Paris. Many of the observations that are made in this book are probably very true today especially the misconceptions that many people have today about the homeless. This book also is a very good look at the personal ideals of George Orwell. Most people know about _1984_ but that book doesn't do justice to what was Orwell's personal theories on politics and life. This book sheds some light on Orwell's thoughts and feelings about the way society treats the poor.