Down and Out in Paris and London

Description

George Orwell”s vivid memoir of his time living among the desperately poor and destitute, Down and Out in Paris and London is a moving tour of the underworld of society.

”You have talked so often of going to the dogs – and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them.”

Written when Orwell was a struggling writer in his twenties, it documents his ”first contact with poverty”. Here, he painstakingly documents a world of unrelenting drudgery and squalor – sleeping in bug-infested hostels and doss houses of last resort, working as a dishwasher in Paris”s vile ”Hôtel X”, surviving on scraps and cigarette butts, living alongside tramps, a star-gazing pavement artist and a starving Russian ex-army captain. Exposing a shocking, previously-hidden world to his readers, Orwell gave a human face to the statistics of poverty for the first time – and in doing so, found his voice as a writer.