Down and Out in Paris and London
Ratings69
Average rating4
15
Ratings69
Average rating4
'You have talked so often of going to the dogs – and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them.' George Orwell's vivid memoir of his time among the desperately poor and destitute in London and Paris is a moving tour of the underworld of society. Here he painstakingly documents a world of unrelenting drudgery and squalor – sleeping in bug-infested hostels and doss houses, working as a dishwasher in the vile 'Hotel X', living alongside tramps, surviving on scraps and cigarette butts – in an unforgettable account of what being down and out is really like.
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I didn't really know what to expect going into this, but I enjoyed it. I liked the characters and setting of the Paris part and the information in the London part. Will want to reread, but very good.
Pretty good stuff. I liked the Paris section much better than the London section because it was more interesting to read about the behind-the-scenes of hotels and restaurants rather than the toils of tramp life.
The ‘down and out' chapters were good - sympathetic, without being rose-tinted.
The grammar, and policy chapters were strangely placed; they both broke the flow of the narrative and seemed better suited as appendices.
Orwell's writing is just astounding. Deceptively simple, and beautiful.
His descriptions are so evocative. For example, describing the character of the street (the Rue du Coq d'Or) where his Paris lodgings were located:
Quarrels, and the desolate cries of street hawkers, and the shouts of children chasing orange-peel over the cobbles, and at night loud singing and the sour reek of the refuse-carts, made up the atmosphere of the street. It was a very narrow street - a ravine of tall leprous houses, lurching towards one another in queer attitudes, as though they had all been frozen in the act of collapse.
plongeur
Everywhere in the service quarters dirt festered - a secret vein of dirt, running through the great garish hotel like the intestines through a man's body.
Then the boat drew alongside Tilbury pier. The first building we saw on the waterside was one of those huge hotels, all stucco and pinnacles, which stare from the English coast like idiots staring over an asylum wall.
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.
Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well. But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people know about poverty? ...From this ignorance a superstitious fear of the mob results quite naturally. The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day's liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. ‘Anything,' he thinks, ‘any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose.' He does not see that since there is no difference between the mass of rich and poor, there is no question of setting the mob loose. The mob is in fact loose now, and - in the shape of rich men - is using its power to set up enormous treadmills of boredom, such as ‘smart' hotels.
1984
