Down and Out in Paris and London is the first full-length work by the English author George Orwell, published in 1933. It is a memoir in two parts on the theme of poverty in the two cities. Its target audience was the middle- and upper-class members of society—those who were more likely to be well educated—and it exposes the poverty existing in two prosperous cities: Paris and London.
The first part is an account of living in near-extreme poverty and destitution in Paris and the experience of casual labour in restaurant kitchens. The second part is a travelogue of life on the road in and around London from the tramp’s perspective, with descriptions of the types of hostel accommodation available and some of the characters to be found living on the margins.
Background
After giving up his post as a policeman in Burma to become a writer, Orwell moved to rooms in Portobello Road, London at the end of 1927 when he was 24. While contributing to various journals, he undertook investigative tramping expeditions in and around London, collecting material for use in “The Spike”, his first published essay, and for the latter half of Down and Out in Paris and London.
In spring of 1928 he moved to Paris and lived at 6 Rue du Pot de Fer in the Latin Quarter, a bohemian quarter with a cosmopolitan flavour.
American writers like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald had lived in the same area. Following the Russian Revolution, there was a large Russian emigre community in Paris.
Orwell’s aunt Nellie Limouzin also lived in Paris and gave him social and, when necessary, financial support. He led an active social life, worked on his novels and had several articles published in avant-garde journals.
Orwell fell seriously ill in March 1929 and shortly afterwards had money stolen from the lodging house. The thief was probably not the young Italian described in Down and Out.
In a later account, he said the theft was the work of a young woman whom he had picked up and brought back with him; it has been submitted that “consideration for his parents’ sensibilities would have required the suppression of this misadventure”.
Whoever reduced Orwell to destitution did him a good turn; his final ten weeks in Paris sowed the seed of his first published book.
Whether through necessity or just to collect material, and probably both, he undertook casual work as a dishwasher in restaurants. In August 1929 he sent a copy of “The Spike” to the Adelphi magazine in London, and it was accepted for publication.
Orwell left Paris in December 1929 and returned to England, going straight home to his parents’ house in Southwold. Later he acted as a private tutor to a disabled child there and also undertook further tramping expeditions, culminating in a stint working in the Kent hop fields in August and September 1931.
After this adventure, he ended up in the Tooley Street kip, which he found so unpleasant that he wrote home for money and moved to more comfortable lodgings.
Publication
Orwell’s first version of Down and Out was called “A Scullion’s Diary”. Completed in October 1930, it used only his Paris material. He offered it to Jonathan Cape in the summer of 1931. Cape rejected it in the autumn.
A year later he offered “a fatter typescript (the London chapters had been added)” to Faber & Faber, where T. S. Eliot, then an editorial director, also rejected it, stating, “We did find it of very great interest, but I regret to say that it does not appear to me possible as a publishing venture.”
It was in the home of Mabel Fierz that Orwell then discarded the typescript. She had, with her husband, a London businessman named Francis, been for a number of years a visitor to Southwold in the summer and was on friendly terms with the Blairs.
Fierz at this point took it to a literary agent, Leonard Moore, who “recognised it as a ‘natural’ for the new house of Gollancz.” Victor Gollancz was prepared to publish the work, subject to the removal of bad language and some identifiable names, and offered an advance of £40.
Orwell complained that one passage that Gollancz asked be changed or cut was “about the only good bit of writing in the book”. The title improvised by Gollancz, Confessions of a Down and Outer, bothered Orwell. “Would The Confessions of a Dishwasher do as well?” he asked Moore. “I would rather answer to dishwasher than down & out.” In July 1932, Orwell had suggested calling the book The Lady Poverty, in reference to a poem by Alice Meynell; in August 1932, he suggested In Praise of Poverty.
At the last minute, Gollancz shortened the title to Down and Out in Paris and London. The author, after possibilities including “X,” “P.S. Burton” (an alias Orwell had used on tramping expeditions), “Kenneth Miles” and “H. Lewis Allways” had been considered, was renamed “George Orwell.” Orwell did not wish to publish under his own name Eric Blair, and Orwell was the name he used from then on for his main works—although many periodical articles were still published under the name Eric Blair.
Down and Out in Paris and London was published on 9 January 1933 and received favourable reviews from, among others, C. Day Lewis, WH Davies, Compton Mackenzie and JB Priestley. It was subsequently published by Harper & Brothers in New York. Sales were low, however, until December 1940, when Penguin Books printed 55,000 copies for sale at sixpence.
A French translation, which Orwell admired, by RN Raimbault and Gwen Gilbert, entitled La Vache Enragée, was published by Éditions Gallimard, on 2 May 1935, with a preface by Panait Istrati and an introduction by Orwell.
Summary
Chapters 1–23 (Paris)
The scene-setting opening chapters describe the atmosphere in the Paris quarter and introduce various characters who appear later in the book. From Chapter III to Chapter X, where the narrator obtains a job at “Hotel X,” he describes his descent into poverty, often in tragi-comic terms.
An Italian compositor forges room keys and steals his savings and his scant income vanishes when the English lessons he is giving stop. He begins at first to sell some of his clothes, and then to pawn his remaining clothes, and then searches for work with a Russian waiter named Boris—work as a porter at Les Halles, work as an English teacher and restaurant work. He recounts his two-day experience without any food and tells of meeting Russian “Communists” who, he later concludes, on their disappearance, must be mere swindlers.
After the various ordeals of unemployment and hunger the narrator obtains a job as a plongeur (dishwasher) in the “Hôtel X” near the Place de la Concorde, and begins to work long hours there. In Chapter XIII, he describes the “caste system” of the hotel—”manager-cooks-waiters-plongeurs”—and, in Chapter XIV, its frantic and seemingly chaotic workings.
He notes also “the dirt in the Hôtel X.,” which became apparent “as soon as one penetrated into the service quarters.” He talks of his routine life among the working poor of Paris, slaving and sleeping, and then drinking on Saturday night through the early hours of Sunday morning. In Chapter XVI, he refers briefly to a murder committed “just beneath my window [while he was sleeping …. The thing that strikes me in looking back,” he says, “is that I was in bed and asleep within three minutes of the murder [….] We were working people, and where was the sense of wasting sleep over a murder?”
Misled by Boris’s optimism, the narrator is briefly penniless again after he and Boris quit their hotel jobs in the expectation of work at a new restaurant, the “Auberge de Jehan Cottard,” where Boris feels sure he will become a waiter again; at the Hotel X, he had been doing lower-grade work.
The “patron” of the Auberge, “an ex-colonel of the Russian Army,” seems to have financial difficulties. The narrator is not paid for ten days and is compelled to spend a night on a bench—”It was very uncomfortable—the arm of the seat cuts into your back—and much colder than I had expected”—rather than face his landlady over the outstanding rent.
At the restaurant, the narrator finds himself working “seventeen and a half hours” a day, “almost without a break,” and looking back wistfully at his relatively leisured and orderly life at the Hotel X. Boris works even longer: “eighteen hours a day, seven days a week.” The narrator claims that “such hours, though not usual, are nothing extraordinary in Paris.” He adds
by the way, that the Auberge was not the ordinary cheap eating-house frequented by students and workmen. We did not provide an adequate meal at less than twenty-five francs, and we were picturesque and artistic, which sent up our social standing.
There were the indecent pictures in the bar, and the Norman decorations—sham beams on the walls, electric lights done up as candlesticks, “peasant” pottery, even a mounting-block at the door—and the patron and the head waiter were Russian officers, and many of the customers titled Russian refugees. In short, we were decidedly chic.
He falls into a routine again and speaks of quite literally fighting for a place on the Paris Métro to reach the “cold, filthy kitchen” by seven. Despite the filth and incompetence, the restaurant turns out to be a success.
The narrative is interspersed with anecdotes recounted by some of the minor characters, such as Valenti, an Italian waiter at Hotel X, and Charlie, “one of the local curiosities,” who is “a youth of family and education who had run away from home.” In Chapter XXII, the narrator considers the life of a plongeur:
A plongeur is one of the slaves of
