Book Freak 163: Down and Out in Paris and London
George Orwell's firsthand account of poverty in two great European cities
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This week, I’m featuring George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, a semi-autobiographical memoir about living in poverty in the early 20th century. Published in 1933, it was Orwell's first full-length work and draws on his own experiences of living in destitution in Paris and London. (Animal Farm was published in 1945 and Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1949, just a year before he died from tuberculosis at the age of 46.)
The book captures the squalid conditions, daily struggles, and colorful characters he encountered while living on the margins of society. Here are three excerpts I recalled from reading it over ten years ago:
Bozo: The Resilient Philosopher of the Streets
A homeless pavement artist named Bozo was one of the most fascinating characters Orwell encountered during his time on the streets of London. Bozo had a severely deformed right leg and had to walk with the assistance of two sticks. Despite his physical challenges and extreme state of poverty, Bozo had a positive outlook and curiosity about science and art. Orwell was impressed by Bozo's resilience and his ability to maintain his dignity and sense of self.
[Bozo] If you’ve got any education, it don’t matter to you if you’re on the road for the rest of your life.
[Orwell] Well, I’ve found just the contrary. It seems to me that when you take a man’s money away he’s fit for nothing from that moment.
[Bozo] No, not necessarily. If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can still 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 Frantic Life of a Plongeur
While Orwell was in Paris, he worked as a plongeur — a combination dishwasher/kitchen assistant — in various restaurants. He said the job was both physically demanding (he calculated that he walked 15 miles a day) and mentally draining:
One has to leap to and fro between a multitude of jobs–it is like sorting a pack of cards against the clock. You are, for example, making toast, when bang! down comes a service lift with an order for tea, rolls and three different kinds of jam, and simultaneously bang! down comes another demanding scrambled eggs, coffee and grapefruit; you run to the kitchen for the eggs and to the dining-room for the fruit, going like lightning so as to be back before your toast burns, and having to remember about the tea and coffee, besides half a dozen other orders that are still pending; and at the same time some waiter is following you and making trouble about a lost bottle of soda-water, and you are arguing with him. It needs more brains than one might think.
The Unsavory Truth Behind Fancy Restaurant Kitchens
One of my favorite passages in the book is about the unsanitary conditions of expensive restaurants:
It is not a figure of speech, it is a mere statement of fact to say that a French cook will spit in the soup – that is, if he is not going to drink it himself. He is an artist, but his art is not cleanliness. To a certain extent he is even dirty because he is an artist, for food, to look smart, needs dirty treatment. When a steak, for instance, is brought up for the head cook’s inspection, he does not handle it with a fork. He picks it up in his fingers and slaps it down, runs his thumb round the dish and licks it to taste the gravy, runs it round and licks it again, then steps back and contemplates the piece of meat like an artist judging a picture, then presses it lovingly into place with his fat, pink fingers, every one of which he has licked a hundred times that morning. When he is satisfied, he takes a cloth and wipes his fingerprints from the dish, and hands it to the waiter. And the waiter, of course, dips his fingers into the gravy–his nasty, greasy fingers which he is forever running through his brilliantined hair. Whenever one pays more than, say, ten francs for a dish of meat in Paris, one may be certain that it has been fingered in this manner. In very cheap restaurants it is different; there, the same trouble is not taken over the food, and it is just forked out of the pan and flung onto a plate, without handling. Roughly speaking, the more one pays for food, the more sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it.
Three takeaways
Everything I’ve read of Orwell's continues to be relevant today, and Down and Out in Paris and London is no exception. Here are three key lessons from the book:
Poverty is more complex than it appears
"Poverty is not simply a lack of money, but a state that profoundly affects one's entire way of life and thinking."Human dignity persists in the harshest conditions
"Even in the depths of poverty, people find ways to maintain their humanity and individuality."Society's structures perpetuate inequality
"The systems and attitudes of society often trap people in poverty, making it extremely difficult to escape."
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What a fantastic deep dive into a great book!
This is an excellent book!