His work is servile and without art; he is paid just enough to keep him alive; his only holiday is the sack […. He has] been trapped by a routine which makes thought impossible. If plongeurs thought at all, they would long ago have formed a labour union and gone on strike for better treatment. But they do not think, because they have no leisure for it; their life has made slaves of them.
Because of the stress of the long hours, he mails to a friend, “B,” back in London, asking if he could get him a job that allows more than five hours’ sleep a night. His friend duly replies, offering a job taking care of a “congenital imbecile,” and sends him some money to get his possessions from the pawn. The narrator then quits his job as a plongeur and leaves for London.
Chapters 24–38 (London)
The narrator arrives in London expecting to have the job waiting for him. Unfortunately the would-be employers have gone abroad, “patient and all.”
Until his employers return, the narrator lives as a tramp, sleeping in an assortment of venues: lodging houses, tramps’ hostels or “spikes,” and Salvation Army shelters.
Because vagrants can not “enter any one spike, or any two London spikes, more than once in a month, on pain of being confined for a week,” he is required to keep on the move, with the result that long hours are spent tramping or waiting for hostels to open.
Chapters XXV to XXXV describe his various journeys, the different forms of accommodation, a selection of the people he meets, and the tramps’ reaction to Christian charity: “Evidently the tramps were not grateful for their free tea. And yet it was excellent [….] I am sure too that it was given in a good spirit, without any intention of humiliating us; so in fairness we ought to have been grateful—still, we were not.”
Characters in this section of the book include the Irish tramp called Paddy, “a good fellow” whose “ignorance was limitless and appalling,” and the pavement artist from the Embankment, Bozo, who has a good literary background and was formerly an amateur astronomer. He has a “dreadfully deformed” right foot and has fallen prey to a succession of similar misfortunes, in his trade and his life.
The final chapters provide a catalogue of various types of accommodation open to tramps, including the four penny coffin. The narrator offers some general remarks, concluding,
At present I do not feel that 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.
Fact and fiction
One of the debates surrounding Down and Out is whether it was a piece of factual autobiography or part fiction. Orwell wrote in the Introduction to the 1935 French edition: “I think I can say that I have exaggerated nothing except in so far as all writers exaggerate by selecting.
I did not feel that I had to describe events in the exact order in which they happened, but everything I have described did take place at one time or another.” In Chapter XXIV, it is “clear that Orwell did distort facts by claiming on his return from Paris he found himself down and out in London and had not ‘the slightest notion of how to get a cheap bed’.
This of course heightens the tension […] but the truth is that in Paris he had already written his first substantial essay, “The Spike”, describing a night spent in a Notting Hill tramps’ hostel. Before his departure from England he had voluntarily lived among tramps for some time.”
In The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell referred to the tramping experiences described in Down and Out, writing that “nearly all the incidents described there actually happened, though they have been re-arranged.”
Some measure of the work’s veracity may be gleaned from a marked-up copy, containing sixteen annotations, which Orwell gave to Brenda Salkeld. Of the descent into poverty from Chapter III, he wrote, “Succeeding chapters are not actually autobiography but drawn from what I have seen.”
Of Chapter VII, however, he wrote, “This all happened;” of Hotel X, “All as exact as I could make it;” and, of the Russian restaurant, “All the following is an entirely accurate description of the restaurant.” On the personalities, Orwell’s own introduction to the French edition states that the characters are individuals, but are “intended more as representative types.”
The luxury hotel in which Orwell worked in the autumn of 1929 was identified as the Crillon by Sonia Orwell, as recounted by Sam White, the London Evening Standard’s Paris correspondent in his column for 16 June 1967. The writers Stansky and Abrahams suggested, in their study of Orwell, that it was the Hotel Lotti.
Reactions
Within a month of publication, Humbert Possenti, “a restaurateur and hotelier of forty years,” had written to The Times complaining that the book was unfairly disparaging to the restaurant trade. The Times Literary Supplement had previously reviewed Down and Out in Paris and London, describing it as “a vivid picture of an apparently mad world.”
Orwell responded to the restaurateur’s criticism with a letter to the same newspaper: “I do know that in our hotel there were places which no customer could possibly have been allowed to see with any hope of retaining his custom.”
In France, political outlook very much determined the reception of La Vache enragée. The left welcomed it as an indictment of health hazards in commercial kitchens.
The right accused Orwell of Francophobia. A middle of the road paper surmised that Orwell’s account was likely to “give a retrospective retch to Americans” who had patronized Parisian restaurants.
In the Adelphi, C. Day Lewis wrote, “Orwell’s book is a tour of the underworld, conducted without hysteria or prejudice […] a model of clarity and good sense.” JB Priestley, in the Evening Standard, considered it “uncommonly good reading.
An excellent book and a valuable social document. The best book of its kind I have read in a long time.” Compton Mackenzie wrote of Orwell’s “immensely interesting book […] a genuine human document, which at the same time is written with so much artistic force that, in spite of the squalor and degradation thus unfolded, the result is curiously beautiful with the beauty of an accomplished etching on copper. The account of a casual ward in this country horrifies like some scene of inexplicable misery in Dante.”
Following the American publication, James T. Farrell, writing in The New Republic, called it “genuine, unexaggerated and intelligent,” while Herbert Gorman wrote for the New York Times Book Review, “He possesses a keen eye for character and a rough-and-ready ‘styleless style’ that plunges along and makes the reader see what the author wants him to see.” In contrast, the reviewer for New English Weekly wrote, “This book […] is forcefully written and is very readable, yet it fails to carry conviction. We wonder if the author was really down and out. Down certainly, but out?”
Cyril Connolly later wrote, “I don’t think Down and Out in London and Paris is more than agreeable journalism; it was all better done by his friend Henry Miller. Orwell found his true form a few years later.” Orwell agreed with this assessment. Henry Miller’s controversial work Tropic of Cancer (1934) is based on his own experiences in Paris around the time Orwell was there.
In an essay for the 1971 The World of George Orwell, Richard Mayne considered the book as typical of something that was true of a great deal of Orwell’s later writing: his “relish at revealing behind-the-scenes squalor.
He was always taking the lid off things—poverty, parlour Socialism, life in a coal mine, prep-school tyranny, the Empire, the Spanish Civil War, the Russian Revolution, the political misuse of language. He might well have echoed W.H. Auden: All I have is a voice/To undo the folded lie.”
The narrator’s comments on Jews in the book are cited by a journalist for Haaretz when considering what he terms “Orwell’s latent anti-Semitism”.
Some suggest the work may have been Orwell’s parody of his own social upbringing and social class, noticing the narrator has both racist and anti-racist outbursts. Another commentator cites the book as evidence that anti-Semitism was much more prevalent in Paris than in London.
