Down and Out in Paris and London

by George Orwell

Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work. Some

For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future.

Besides washing up, I had to fetch the waiters’ food and serve them at table; most of them were intolerably insolent, and I had to use my fists more than once to get common civility.

His work gives him the mentality, not of a workman, but of a snob.

Roughly speaking, the more one pays for food, the more sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it.

Everywhere in the service quarters dirt festered–a secret vein of dirt, running through the great garish hotel like the intestines through a man’s body.

Work in the hotel taught me the true value of sleep, just as being hungry had taught me the true value of food. Sleep had ceased to be a mere physical necessity; it was something voluptuous, a debauch more than a relief.

But they do not think, because they have no leisure for it; their life has made slaves of them.

Essentially, a ‘smart’ hotel is a place where a hundred people toil like devils in order that two hundred may pay through the nose for things they do not really want.

I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think.

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.

For what do the majority of educated people know about poverty? In my copy of Villon’s poems the editor has actually thought it necessary to explain the line ‘Ne pain ne voyent qu’aux fenestres’ by a footnote; so remote is even hunger from the educated man’s experience.

The mob is in fact loose now, and–in the shape of rich men–is using its power to set up enormous treadmills of boredom, such as ‘smart’ hotels.

There are, indeed, many things in England that make you glad to get home; bathrooms, armchairs, mint sauce, new potatoes properly cooked, brown bread, marmalade, beer made with veritable hops–they are all splendid, if you can pay for them. England is a very good country when you are not poor; and, of course, with a tame imbecile to look after, I was not going to be poor.

For the first time I noticed, too, how the attitude of women varies with a man’s clothes. When a badly dressed man passes them they shudder away from him with a quite frank movement of disgust, as though he were a dead cat.

The sheets stank so horribly of sweat that I could not bear them near my nose.

The crowds were better dressed and the faces comelier and milder and more alike, without that fierce individuality and malice of the French.

Homosexuality is general among tramps of long standing, he said.

But two years of bread and margarine had lowered his standards hopelessly. He had lived on this filthy imitation of food till his whole mind and body were compounded of inferior stuff. It was malnutrition and not any native vice that had destroyed his manhood.

The fact is that the Salvation Army are so in the habit of thinking themselves a charitable body that they cannot even run a lodging-house without making it stink of charity.

We loitered the day in Trafalgar Square, looking for a friend of Paddy’s who never turned up, and at night went to a lodging-house in a back alley near the Strand. The charge was elevenpence, but it was a dark, evil-smelling place, and a notorious haunt of the ‘nancy boys’.

‘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.’

There was, clearly, no future for him but beggary and a death in the workhouse. With all this, he had neither fear, nor regret, nor shame, nor self-pity. He had faced his position, and made a philosophy for himself.

He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him), and took a sort of pleasure in thinking that human affairs would never improve.

He is honest compared with the sellers of most patent medicines, high-minded compared with a Sunday newspaper proprietor, amiable compared with a hire-purchase tout–in short, a parasite, but a fairly harmless parasite.

Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised.

London slang and dialect seem to change very rapidly. The old London accent described by Dickens and Surtees, with v for w and w for v and so forth, has now vanished utterly.

No born Londoner (it is different with people of Scotch or Irish origin) now says ‘bloody’, unless he is a man of some education. The word has, in fact, moved up in the social scale and ceased to be a swear word for the purposes of the working classes. The current London adjective, now tacked onto every noun, is ‘fucking’. No doubt in time ‘fucking’, like ‘bloody’, will find its way into the drawing-room and be replaced by some other word.

For example, ‘fuck’. The Londoners do not now use, or very seldom use, this word in its original meaning; it is on their lips from morning till night, but it is a mere expletive and means nothing. Similarly with ‘bugger’, which is rapidly losing its original sense.

The man who really merits pity is the man who has been down from the start, and faces poverty with a blank, resourceless mind.

It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.

A man receiving charity practically always hates his benefactor–it is a fixed characteristic of human nature; and, when he has fifty or a hundred others to back him, he will show

This kind of victimisation is a regular part of a tramp’s life, and it will go on as long as people continue to give meal tickets instead of money.

This tramp-monster is no truer to life than the sinister Chinaman of the magazine stories, but he is very hard to get rid of.

Of course a tramp is not a nomadic atavism–one might as well say that a commercial traveller is an atavism. A tramp tramps, not because he likes it, but for the same reason as a car keeps to the left; because there happens to be a law compelling him to do so.

Quite apart from experience, one can say a priori that very few tramps are dangerous, because if they were dangerous they would be treated accordingly.

One cannot imagine the average Englishman deliberately turning parasite, and this national character does not necessarily change because a man is thrown out of work.

His high opinion of Englishmen is lovely, but I'm not sure it was true then.

The result is that nearly every tramp is rotted by malnutrition; for proof of which one need only look at the men lining up outside any casual ward. The second great evil of a tramp’s life–it seems much smaller at first sight, but it is a good second–is that he is entirely cut off from contact with women.

The evil of poverty is not so much that it makes a man suffer as that it rots him physically and spiritually.

The other great evil of a tramp’s life is enforced idleness.

But the important point is that a tramp’s sufferings are entirely useless. He lives a fantastically disagreeable life, and lives it to no purpose whatever.

The problem is how to turn the tramp from a bored, half-alive vagrant into a self-respecting human being.

This law is evidently a piece of wilful offensiveness. Its object, so it is said, is to prevent people from dying of exposure; but clearly if a man has no home and is going to die of exposure, die he will, asleep or awake.

Here legislation could accomplish something. At present there is all manner of legislation by the LCC about lodging-houses, but it is not done in the interests of the lodgers.