Down and out in Paris and London by George Orwell

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This early work of Orwell displays all the quality of writing that you would expect and many of the social themes common to his work get expression here.

However there was for me a tension, Orwell is writing of poverty as a “lived experience” but in certain ways I wonder about the true authenticity of his experience. There is an aspect that makes him feel more of a voyeur that a true participant.

This is particularly true of second half of the book when he has returned to England on the promise of a job arranged by a friend. On arrival in England it turns out there will be a delay of a month before he can take up the position, and so he spends that month tramping around. It calls to mind the song “Common People” by Pulp, especially the lines “you'll never get it right, 'cos when you're laid in bed at night watching roaches climb the wall, If you call your Dad he could stop it all.” Orwell's experience of poverty was ultimately finite while I think a virtual characteristic is exactly the lack of opportunity of escape from the situation.

The other aspect which I struggle with, which I had encountered before in some of his other writings, was his reflection on the different the experience of being a tramp within the “causal wards” of the workhouse for the educated and uneducated man/mind. He feels the enforced idleness of the “causal ward” is a particular hardship on the uneducated who, beyond manual activity, have in Orwell's view no capacity to occupy their minds. The educated man, aka Orwell, could spend this idleness in reflection on Opera, the great works of literature, thinking of Old Masters, etc, and so escape the boredom. Now at one level this is a reasonable conclusion but the differential does not sit easily with me – is there some implied or inherent value judgement lurking here? He seems to be advocating work not education as the solution. I can't quite put my finger on it – is it saying there is a class of people for whom manual labour is a liberating experience, and a class for whom perhaps educated “idleness” is the proper state.