جرج اورول در این کتاب شرح سال های در به دری و فقر خود در پاریس و لندن را ارائه می نماید . در این سالها او در اوج فقر به سر می برده ، مدتی ظرف شو بوده ، گاهی خدمتکار ، گاهی ولگرد و ..... شرحی است بر نحوه زندگی و گذران عمر ولگردها از زبان کسی که این نوع از امرار معاش را کاملا درک نموده است .

قسمت هایی از کتاب
- فقر آنها را از رعایت اصول طبیعی رفتار آزاد ساخته است ، همان طور که پول انسان را از کار کردن بی نیاز می کند .
- خیلی زود متوجه شدم که تردید داشتن و رو راست بودن چه قدر احمقانه است .
- هرگز برای گارسون ها تاسف نخورید . بعضی وقت ها که شما در رستوران نشسته اید و نیم ساعتی به غذا خوردن مشغولید ، در حالی که وقت مقرر رستوران پایان یافته ، گمان می کنید که گارسون خسته که در اطراف شما پرسه می زند متوجه شماست و تحقیرتان می کند یا تاسف می خورد اما در واقع این طور نیست . در عین حال که ممکن است شما را نگاه کند ابدا به شما نمی اندیشد که پیش خود بگوید عجب آدم نادان و پرخوری است . او با خود فکر می کند روزی که توانستم پول کافی داشته باشم ، خواهم توانست از سبک غذا خوردن این مرد تقلید کنم .

واضح‌ترین تصویری که میشد از فقر و زندگی مردم فقیر تو دوتا از خاص‌ترین شهرهای دنیا داد! اینکه این‌بار با یه نگاه دیگه زندگی آدم‌ها تو دوتا از شهرهای موردعلاقم رو می‌دیدم بی‌نهایت جذاب بود.
تو بخش اول کتاب اورول از کار پر مشقت تو رستوران‌ها و هتل‌های پاریس میگه. و بخش دوم تو لندن و زندگی با خیابان‌خواب‌ها میگذره. همه و همه تجربه‌ی دقیقی از چیزیه که خود نویسنده گذرونده. نکته اصلی این کتاب روایت صادقانه و همراه با طنزشه؛ جوری که انگار این مسیر سخت و این زندگی سرشار از فقر رو با اون آدم‌ها شریکی.
خیلی دوسش داشتم، و حقیقتا فکر نمیکردم اینقدر خوب باشه ولی بود!

At a time when there is considerable discussion of income inequality or structured social inequality in the United States and elsewhere around the world, an encounter with George Orwell's Down & Out In Paris & London represents a reminder that this disparity has long been with us.



A key difference is that Orwell was an Eton grad, hardly a natural anarchist or from a precinct in the British slums but nevertheless spent considerable energy delving deeply into the nature of poverty. In fact, this novel is at times more like an ethnographic study than a novel, with George Orwell in mufti, living the life of a plongeur or dishwasher at a five star hotel in Paris and later as a tramp in search of nightly lodgings in London.

If financially bereft, one suspects that Orwell could have availed himself of friends or relatives in the late 1920s but he identified with the underclass and wanted to understand their plight as fully as possible, much as he did when he became a coal miner, an experience that later translated into another very compelling Orwell book, The Road To Wigan Pier, a novel that resembles an anthropological study.

In Paris, the author finds his role as a plongeur not just a case of long hours for minimal pay but degrading work and yet in spite of the occasional chaos, unsanitary conditions, noise & infighting by the other hotel kitchen workers, there are occasional moments when the workers pull together and have at least a limited pride in the various functions required to provide first class meals for wealthy patrons.



This spirit is completely lacking when Orwell is down & out in London, scuffling with other lost souls for food, a place to stay and a sense of worth. To accomplish a parity with his fellow London tramps, the author pawns his passable clothes for filthy, ill-fitting garments so that he can blend into the throng of dispossessed Londoners, 90% of whom are men, staying at congested, disgusting, bug-ridden flophouses & occasional Salvation Army way-stations. Orwell somehow manages to assimilate with other tramps & senses that tramps are not regarded as fully human but seen as a potentially unruly mob to be feared.

It is this fear of a supposedly dangerous mob that makes people conservative in their opinions. A rich man if intellectually honest comments:

The mob are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure. We know that poverty is unpleasant but we don't expect to do anything about it. We are sorry for the lower classes as we are sorry for a cat with mange but we will fight like devils against any change in your condition. We feel that you are much safer as you are and the present state of affairs suits us, so much so that we are not going to risk setting your free.

However, Orwell feels that fear of the mob is a superstitious fear that is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich & poor, as though they were different races. But in reality, the mass of the rich & the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else. According to the author, the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.

There are rather discomforting examples of Antisemitism within the text, perhaps not that unusual for the time & place but nonetheless difficult to endure in reading Down & Out In Paris & London and particularly since Orwell seemed to identify so readily with the underclass, especially its British manifestation. In the novel, he also casts similar aspersions on other non-British characters who cross his path, including Poles and Americans as well as Jews.

The novel is at times one-sided but it offers a portrait of a side of life that many would prefer to ignore and Orwell presents sensitive cameos of an underclass that remains very much with us 85 years after the novel first appeared. There are no prescriptions for long-term solutions within the novel but one senses considerable compassion on the part of the author as a result of sharing in their circumstances and Orwell continued to speak on behalf of the poor & homeless throughout his life.



It has been said that George Orwell can best be described as a perpetual English rebel. According to a biography by Robert Colls, Orwell was "an intellectual who did not like intellectuals, a Socialist who did not trust the state, a Protestant who did not believe in God even though he believed in the value of religion and a lifelong dissenter who believed in the right to dissent from dissent."

The author was often hard to peg but it was also felt that none of Orwell's political beliefs were inconsistent with being a Liberal, though apparently that did not make him one. Ultimately he identified foremost with working class people, little valuing wealth or fame. George Orwell also had a ingrained sense of being an exile, even while taking pride in almost all things English, apparently excepting the game of Cricket. In many ways his profile may resemble that of Graham Greene. And curiously perhaps, his tombstone indicates,"Here lies Eric Arthur Blair", with no mention of Mr. Orwell.

George Orwell was a journalist who lived with impoverished people in Paris and London to give an insider's report on the lives of the desperately poor. In Paris, he worked a low-paying job as a "plongeur," a dishwasher who also does other lowly kitchen tasks. His job was in an upscale hotel restaurant where the filth inside the kitchen was a contrast to the beauty of the dining room. The good thing about the job was that they were fed well, but the difficult part was that they were multitasking for long days in a hot basement kitchen. Life became a constant work-sleep cycle with no time to even think. However, Orwell manages to infuses the story of his Paris job with quite a bit of humor.

In London, Orwell's arranged job was postponed so he had to survive for a month on a few pounds that he had borrowed. He sold some good clothes for a tramp's outfit, and walked with tramps to find shelter for the night. The tramps lived on an unhealthy diet of tea and bread, and slept in filthy, crowded conditions. Most of the men wanted to work, but were unable to find employment in the depressed 1930s. The system of laws and charity kept people permanently in an unhealthy, dirty condition and constantly walking.

Published in 1933, the book is a revealing look at a neglected segment of society. Orwell ended the book with some suggestions about having English shelters (called spikes) grow their own healthy food by using the labor of the homeless men on small farms. It would be more productive compared with wasting energy walking for miles each day from shelter to shelter for "a cup of tea and two slices." Writing from personal experiences, Orwell was a champion of the poor and downtrodden.

اووه! جرج اورول به قدري قشنگ توضيح داده همه چي رو و توصيف کرده که من کاملا خودمو توي اون زيرزمين نمور و دم گرفته و تاريک هتل پيش ظرفشورها مي ديدم، بوي نوانخانه هاي کثيف لندن رو مي شنيدم و حتي طعم اون چاي بدرنگي رو که از تفاله هاي چاي درست ميکردن و دست بي خانمان ها ميدادن، روي زبونم حسش ميکردم...اورول جوري گرسنگي رو درست و کامل شرح ميداد که من روزه گرسنه تر مي شدم! عالي بود، همين.

This book was truly eye-opening. You have no idea what a bad day is, unless you walk a day in the shoes of anyone that is talked about in this book. Orwell Gives his opinion about why things are the way they are, but beyond all else he reports on what he sees. It’s incredible to see how the poor had to survive just a mere hundred years ago.

Nedavno sam pročitala Hamsunovu Glad i sam početak ovog Orvelovog romana me toliko asocirao na novinara koji tako gordo pokušava da sakrije svoju glad i siromaštvo i nosi u zalagaonicu svoje stvari, iščekujući priliku da objavi još koju kolumnu, ne bi li odložio gladovanje na nekoliko dana... Ako ste ikada iskusili nešto slično, znate koliko malo gladi i besparice treba da bi se teškom mukom očuvalo dostojanstvo!
Tako se i Orvel jednog jutra probudio i odlučio da se pretvori u bubašvabu. Šalim se, naravno, nije on isto što i Gregor Samsa, koga je baš takav život pretvorio u bubašvabu. Orvel je baš hteo da bude Niko, to jest otišao da provede svoje dane „na dnu“ u Parizu i Londonu i da sve o čemu razmišlja pogleda iz prve ruke.
Ako želite da čujete da li je baš ovde, mnogo pre nego što je napisao „Životinjsku farmu“, došao na (uvek aktuelne) ideje da su sve životinje jednake, ali su neke jednakije od drugih, te da je u neznanju moć, pa je sigurnije držati rulju u neznanju pod budnim okom Velikog brata, što će postati osnova „1984“, preporučujem da pročitate Orvelov prvi roman.

“It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs — and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it.”



While best known for 1984 and Animal Farm, George Orwell is a fantastic essayist. In Down and Out in Paris and London, he chronicles the struggles of those barely getting enough to survive. At the time, that included our narrator/a fictional version of George Orwell. The narrator details his own trajectory as he slides into near starvation. Orwell approaches this slide from a psychological perspective that was both fascinating and a punch in the gut. In the last section of the book, Orwell discusses his ideas for alleviating this extreme poverty.

“If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, "I'm a free man in here" - he tapped his forehead - "and you're all right.”

“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.” — George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

I am a staunch George Orwell fan. I think he’s absolutely amazing and if you’re limiting yourself to his classic novels (Animal Farm, 1984), you are doing yourself a disservice. His essays and non-fiction books are amongst his best works.

Down and Out is Orwell’s account of the time he spent almost penniless in the Paris slums, and then in London, sleeping in workhouses and cheap hostels when he had a little more money. He talks of the people he met, the places they frequented, his opinion on the jobs he worked and those of his fellow down-and-outs, who are often homeless. I picked up the book knowing I’d enjoy it — it is Orwell, and I’d be hard-pressed to not love him — but the book gave me more than that.

It makes you think. And I mean really think, not sort of graze your mind on the surface of a problem. I have, quite thankfully, never been in the position of wanting. My parents have provided the comforts we need or want and I have been blessed. My father, however, came from no money. He’s a self-made man. He will often talk about the struggles he faced trying to juggle making money with attending university. He would tell us how he’d have to wear two pairs of socks with a plastic bag in between them so that the snow wouldn’t sink right through. He’d tell us of having to go to work at 5am to scrub dishes at a restaurant to make money, and then begin attending his lectures at noon straight to midnight. So hearing about Orwell stuck in a hotel, washing dishes, is not a difficult leap for me to make. I have been raised to respect money, to respect those trying to make their way of life, and to try and respect every job that someone does.

This is going to sound immodest, but I want to say it because it has a lot to do with this book. I never thought I was unaware of poverty. I may not have experienced it, but I believed we did our part, in awareness and other matters, and I could not be called naive. I have never thought that anyone was better than any other person based on their income, and all in all I thought my stance on poverty and wealth was a healthy one.

It wasn’t. I was still grossly unaware of what so many people go through. As I sat and read through the experiences of this remarkable man, I thought of how much I didn’t know, how naive I really was, and how I needed to understand much more than I do. Then came the sucker punch — at the end of the book, after everything he has told us, Orwell says, “At present, I do not feel that I have seen more than the fringe of poverty.” And you realise, suddenly, that that’s true — but what does that say of you? If he thought he only knew the fringe, that means I know nothing.

The film Midnight in Paris begins with some beautiful scenes of Paris: the Louvre, Notre Dame, the Seine, the Sorbonne, the Eiffle Tower, the arc de triomphe. And before long, arrives a parade of artistes from the 1920s milieu - Hemmingway, Bunuel, Dali, etc, - all speaking *SparkNotes*. But in the distant background (very distant) I hear a faint sound of et in arcadia ego and Orwell protests “say, I was there in the 1920s too - I saw all that. And I wrote a damn fine book about it”.

That book is Down and Out in Paris and London, written later on in England (he wrote 2 books while in Paris but he destroyed them after one rejection. He regretted doing that).

If I were to take a stroll, à la “Midnight in Paris”, I might find myself on 6 rue du Pot de Fer, 1928:

n  n

‘Salope! Salope! How many times have I told you not to squash bugs on the wallpaper? Do you think you’ve bought the hotel, eh? Why can’t you throw them out of the window like everyone else? Putain! Salope!’ The woman on the third floor: ‘Vache!’

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. All the houses were hotels and packed to the tiles with lodgers, mostly Poles, Arabs and Italians.

At the foot of the hotels were tiny bistros, where you could be drunk for the equivalent of a shilling. On Saturday nights about a third of the male population of the quarter was drunk. There was fighting over women, and the Arab navvies who lived in the cheapest hotels used to conduct mysterious feuds, and fight them out with chairs and occasionally revolvers.

At night the policemen would only come through the street two together. It was a fairly rackety place. And yet amid the noise and dirt lived the usual respectable French shopkeepers, bakers and laundresses and the like, keeping themselves to themselves and quietly piling up small fortunes. It was quite a representative Paris slum.

n  

n   

n      n   

n  

n

No Peugeots here. Orwell was not living a glamourous life. He had recently thrown away a promising career in Burma, and was determined to make it as a writer or die trying.

He published a few articles, but soon runs out of money and must find work. He takes a job (as a foreigner, “not seriously illegal”) washing dishes at the luxury hotel Lotti in 1929. That experience is the ‘Paris’ segment of the book.

n

He returns to England at the end of the year and “tramps” around with the down and out for the ‘London’ part.

The lifestyle of a tramp was unhealthy and mean. One "ate cat's meat, and wore newspaper instead of underclothes, and used the wainscoting of his room for firewood, and made himself a pair of trousers out of a sack".

It is boring, "a tramp's sufferings are entirely useless. He lives a fantastically disagreeable life, and lives it to no purpose whatever."

It is exhausting, "he had not eaten since the morning, had walked several miles with a twisted leg, his clothes were drenched, and he had a halfpenny between himself and starvation."

And it is no fun, "tramps are cut off from women".

n  

n    n  

n

On the bright side, "poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work."

“It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have thought so much about poverty—it is the thing you have feared all your life, the thing you knew would happen to you sooner or later; and it, is all so utterly and prosaically different.

You thought it would be quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be terrible; it is merely squalid and boring. It is the peculiar lowness of poverty that you discover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the complicated meanness, the crust-wiping.”

The first version of Down and Out is completed by Oct 1930, under the name George Orwell (used for the first time, to protect his upper lower middle class parents). The French translation La Vache Enragée is published in 1935.

Orwell’s inspirations for this book, indeed this life:

The Lower Depths
Maggie, a Girl of the Streets and Selected Stories
The People of the Abyss
The Road
The Life of Mr. Richard Savage, Son of the Earl Rivers
Germinal

Themes:
impoverishment, failure, privation, penury, leftovers, overextended, pennilessness, beggary, pauperism, difficulties, reduced circumstances, hunger, lack, want, dearth, depletion, exhaustion, vacuity, meagerness, dogged, indigent, impecuniousness, need, hardship, suffering, misery, dirt, filth, grime, lowness, grunge, muck, dust, rats, bugs, vermin, trapped, penury, destitution, greasiness, smelly icky slums, vagrancy, exiguity, mendicancy, down, out, crust-wiping, and all things squalid

Orwell’s take on destitution was every bit as good as I expected it to be: beautifully phrased, meticulous, honest, funny, but also moving, and along with his own vivid experiences of living a hand to mouth existence he blends the testimonies of other refugees and homeless people in Paris and London. This book might not have even come about had it not been for a thief who pinched the last of an ailing Orwell’s savings from his Paris boarding room in 1929, thus leading him to search for dishwashing work in the kitchens of the French capital. Yes Paris was indeed a tough place to find shelter between the wars and even though Orwell eventually found a job at the anonymous Hotel X, a place where dirty roast chickens were served, and chefs spat in soup, he remained without pay for ten days and so was forced to sleep on a bench until he had enough to cover rent. Throughout the book, when he did manage to find somewhere to stay, some of the beds even had blocks of wood for pillows.

“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,” he wrote then, although his sympathies were firmly with his fellow “beggars”.

The book both illuminates the huge change between 1933 and now and exposes horrifying similarities. As Orwell reveals the cruelty of a lack of workers’ rights, where livelihoods are lost overnight or jobs not secure from one day to the next day, a modern audience cannot help but hear the words ‘zero hours contracts’. Job insecurity is still a major driver of homelessness nearly 90 years later. When in London Orwell describes the police arresting rough sleepers or ‘moving them on’, he foreshadows recent events such as the cleansing of the streets of Windsor before the royal wedding, and fines presented to beggars in Coventry. As he describes “the stories in the Sunday papers about beggars…with two thousand pounds sewn into their trousers” we can hear the headlines from this very year in a national newspaper proclaiming “fake homeless are earning £150 a day”.

Orwell’s books, however, are more than just treatises aiming to right the political wrongs. Aside from his political intentions, much of Orwell’s appeal has always rested in his brilliance as a writer: his ability to distil vast ideas or injustices into the most perfect phrases, his descriptive passages artfully conjuring the slum backstreets of 1930s Paris, and his sense of the preciousness of humanity, bringing clarity and colour to people's lives. through all all the filth, dirt, and smelly bodies, Orwell writes here and there with small moments of beauty, that at first don't feel immediately apparent. And when he writes of the people he meets in Down and Out are “just ordinary human beings”, he is stating a simple and obvious fact – but one that, even today, is still too often forgotten.

The seriousness of poverty really makes you sit up and take notice, yet it's not a depressing book, which I thought it might be. I found it all really fascinating, and it's just as much an important book now as it was back then. A must read.

This was a very powerful book, and while I didn't care for the first part of it when he finally got a job in a restaurant, I felt I had to read the details of his job and the abuse he received while working there. The remainder of the book was very good, especially when he moved to London.

This and the book "Nickel and Dimed" would be good for high school teachers to give to their students to read and to discuss. It may change some people's views that the poor are lazy or all are drug addicts. In some ways "Nickel and Dimed" has a lot in common with this book, even though one was written about the 1920s and "Nickel and Dimed" is about the working poor here in America.

Orwell's character, that was based on his time in Paris and London, worked 17 hours a day in a restaurant and had to deal with the abuse and the lack of sleep. "Nickel and Dimed" is about people who work two jobs and can't afford an apartment, nor can they make ends meet. Some sleep in their cars.

What grabbed me also was the fact that some places that fed the poor in London made the homeless listen to a prayer and a sermon before they were served a meal. The homeless didn't like it back then, and they don't like it now. Where I live there are church organizations that feed the poor that will not allow the prayers or the preaching, but there is one that does or should I say, did. I was volunteering for this group until they started this; I quit. Then they had more board meetings, nothing to do with my quitting, and they decided to stop with the prayers. So I am going back to help, if indeed they have stopped. What I find about this is how disgraceful it is when people push their religion off onto others. It is especially so when they do this with the homeless because the homeless need the food and will put up with this in order to be fed. It is also condescending to think that people are homeless or poor because they don't have Christ, and I think that this is what they are trying to say to them when they start with the prayers. Also, it is blackmail: No prayer, no preaching, no food.

Back to the book: Some of the conditions in the Lodging Inns in London were a disgrace. While it was nice that they put a roof over the heads of the poor, they had to sleep in dirty blankets and sheets, and bugs crawled all over the rooms, the bathrooms were filthy, and then because everyone slept in the same room some people would keep others awake all night and sometimes someone would vomit in the room. Of course Orwell described these conditions in so much detail that you felt like you were sleeping in one of those places.

Now, the narrator of this story always looked for work, but often it was not to be found, and so he talks about the many ways that he had to survive. Many of the homeless today can't work for various reasons. I have a friend whom I met on an online forum who was trying to get disability, and while that was pending he got welfare, but it wasn't enough to pay rent. He slept in the bushes of a LA library. He emailed me almost daily from a library computer, and it took him 4 years to get his disability, as the judge just kept refusing him. Just before getting his disability he had refused housing from a group that was trying to help him. He was afraid that they would take away his money. He was also afraid to sleep in shelters or to even go to a Mission to get food. The next time he was offered a home I told him to take it because LA is expecting a lot of storms that winter. He took the apartment; the rains didn't come, California is still in a drought, but he now has a roof over his head. Then a few months later he won his disability case, the new judge saw his need. He and I are still friends, but he is in a better state of mind now, and for that I am glad.