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.
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
ISBN: 9780141393032
Number of pages: 224
Weight: 137 g
Dimensions: 181 x 112 x 13 mm
The white-hot reaction of a sensitive, observant, compassionate young man to poverty - Dervla Murphy
Orwell was the great moral force of his age - Spectator
After picking up Catch 22 this month and failing miserably to become involved in it, I turned back to another classic author I knew would not fail to captivate me, George Orwell. Down and Out in Paris and London, is a... More
Down and Out in Paris and London is an eye opening account from George Orwell that really makes you think - from something so simple as how one will never eat in a posh restaurant in Paris ever again, to how... More
An example of factual storytelling at its best. George Orwell manages to make his daily struggles to earn a living in Paris and London feel really quite interesting and pull the reader through a really rather horrible... More
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