Down and Out in Paris and London & the Road to Wigan Pier

by George Orwell, Will Jonson (Editor)

Both of Orwell's searing reportage accounts of poverty in the 1930s in one volume.

Genres: Classics

260 pages, Paperback

First published October 23, 2014

About the author

Eric Arthur Blair was an English novelist, poet, essayist, journalist and critic who wrote under the pen name of George Orwell. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to all totalitarianism (both fascism and stalinism), and support of democratic socialism.

Orwell is best known for his allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), although his works also encompass literary criticism, poetry, fiction and polemical journalism. His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working-class life in the industrial north of England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences soldiering for the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), are as critically respected as his essays on politics, literature, language and culture.

Orwell's work remains influential in popular culture and in political culture, and the adjective "Orwellian"—describing totalitarian and authoritarian social practices—is part of the English language, like many of his neologisms, such as "Big Brother", "Thought Police", "Room 101", "Newspeak", "memory hole", "doublethink", and "thoughtcrime". In 2008, The Times named Orwell the second-greatest British writer since 1945.

Reviews

[Lewis Woolston · Rating 5 out of 5]

This review is for the Wordsworth Classics edition which contains two novels and some short essays.

I love Orwell. I love his clarity of mind, i love his insight, i love his easy readability, i love his thought provoking ideas and his disdain for hypocrisy and nonsense.
First up is Down and Out in Paris and London which tells the story of his time in poverty. The description of how commercial kitchens operate is classics and will make you re-think ever eating at a restaurant again. The petty indignities and grim desperation of the English tramps is some of the most brilliant writing ever committed to paper.
The Road to Wigan Pier is an examination of the lives of the unemployed industrial workers of the north of England. It starts off with the best report ever written of the conditions of working class life, then it discusses the problem politically. Orwell takes his own side (the left) to task for their political failures. His chapters discussing the absolute state of the socialist movement read like they could have been written today.
The short essays at the end i have mostly read before in other collections but are still quality stuff.
Highly recommended, there is never a bad time to read Orwell.

[Gail Harper · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this and found it interesting to read more about Orwell's real life as well as his message for what he learned through these experiences. Everyone, especially anyone who has worked in the restaurant business should read this book. Humor, social commentary, and mostly truth--what more could you want from the English rebel?

[fourlegs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quotes from Down and Out in Paris and London

Introduction
(xli) Thomas Hardy, writing his final novel Jude the Obscure at the end of the nineteenth century, explores brilliantly the whole question of the unseen life. In this passage, even as he writes about Jude’s invisibility, he is making him visible to us as readers. Jude is a stonemason in Christminster, where his cousin Sue is living, and he is in the act of helping to hoist a heavy block of stone upward:

“All of a sudden, as he lifted, his cousin stood close to his elbow, pausing a moment on the bend of her foot till the obstructing object should have been removed. She looked right into his face with liquid, untranslatable eyes, that combined, or seemed to him to combine, keenness with tenderness, and mystery with both, their expression, as well as that of her lips, taking its life from some words just spoken to a companion, and being carried on into his face quite unconsciously. She no more observed his presence than that of the dust-motes which his manipulations raised into the sunbeams.”

This is the obverse of the Orwell passage in one sense; Sue simply looks straight through him (he is a workman), while the meaning he takes from her look is not intended for him at all, but for her companion. Hardy cleverly implicates Jude’s job in his invisibility; Sue doesn’t even see the stone dust his labour is raising, let alone him. But to the reader, Jude is made startlingly visible because the scene is written from his point of view. It is Sue who recedes, becomes lesser for her lack of seeing. This is one of those moments in literature which can change us, and change the way we look at others. Likewise with Orwell. He wouldn’t want, I think, to be seen as the voice of our ‘moral conscience’. But we can share his ‘moral effort’, and his frank, compassionate way of seeing.

(4) There were eccentric characters in the hotel. The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people - people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work.

[Barry Avis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is really three books in one. It starts with Down and Out in Paris and London which is Orwells’ account of his time spent as a ‘tramp’ in and around those cities. In Paris he worked in low paid jobs such as a Plongeur or dish washer in a low-price hotel living on bread and wine and in London he lived as an unpaid homeless person moving between ‘Spikes’ and other establishments that catered for the homeless in those days living of bread, margarine and tea. In the Road to Wigan pier, written several years later in 1937 he lived in the north of England with miners and documented their poor state due to poor wages and extortionate rents for extremely poor lodgings. Finally there are five short stories/articles the first called ‘The Spike’ is included in down and out as part of his adventures in London, the others include a study of antisemitism and a recount of hiss time in a hospital suffering from pneumonia (presumably around the time of Down and out in London.
Orwell is one of those socialist writers who you feel really understands the working class, having lived with the poorest in society as one of them and it would be interesting to see the difference between then and now with the extinction of work houses and spikes. There are still similarities with the poorest being labelled as lazy and workshy by the greedy rich just as they were then. There is even less help for the homeless now then there was then and without charity led foodbanks the poorest would again be living on bread or in jail.
Orwell was also a bit of a hypocrite with his references to “jews” in his early books not being flattering and falling into the stereotypical themes of the day and then later writing an article on antisemitism referencing several of his fellow writers but at no point with reference to his own work.
Although I have read 1984 and Animal Farm in my youth I decided to complete all of Orwells’ books to fully understand his views, at least from his writing point of view. So far these have no disappointed and I would recommend them.

[Alistair · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had mixed feelings about this which tags together 2 accounts of Orwell getting down with poor people and some other essays .

Both the main essays could do with some serious editing . A large part of the Paris section is a simple account of the routine of a luxury hotel below stairs which I found boring . Moving to London gives a much better impression of being on the streets and being a tramp . Having nothing to do all day and finding accomodation for the night is to the sole occupation and his fellow tramps include a pavement artist who brings real life to Orwell's street life .

Road to Wigan Pier particularly when it sticks to the workers in the mines and their family life such as it is, is quite shocking particularly since this was in the thirties . The latter part needs editing as it drifts into musings about his feelings of playing a false role . His accent and manners give him away instantly as having a well educated middle class background but he convinces himself that the miners don't mind . I wonder . He also expands his analysis to wonder whether middle class southern suburbanites with their limited ambition and routine safe lives really have better lives
There is a good deal of the noble savage idealism in Orwell's sociological analysis .

That is a fundamental problem . At any point he can give up his experiment and walk away having picked up material for his writing

There are in all the essays some pretty disturbing anti -semitic comments much more explicit than that for which T.S Eliot has been heavily criticised but then he was not a left wing hero

I have read Coming up for Air which reveals a lot about the real and more appealing Blair

[Claire Pickett · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's tough to give the great George Orwell a ***. I just could not get past the anti-Semitism in this story. The narrator is obviously autobiographical, so all the excuses just do not wash for me. No, no and no. End of story. No racism, no anti-semitism ever. I've heard all the excuses, so don't bother.

However, Orwell's empathy and clear thinking about low-end jobs and homelessness is appreciated and before its time. We are wrestling with these issues now. The pace in these restaurants is Keystone cops crazy and the filth is beyond disgusting. Having read the goings-on in the Hotel X in Paris, one would be leery of eating in ANY food establishment. It goes on. My sister worked in a high-end place in Massachusetts in the 60s making salads in 6 inches of watery slop on the floor, insects buzzing about. Orwell suggests that if low-end workers unionized, things would get better. Employers are still fighting that, e.g. Starbucks.

This city endured, it's hard to believe that London is depicted as so much worse. A homeless person could not even sit down by the side of the road or in a park. They had to trek from one shelter to another constantly, one night's stay was the rule. Struggling persons were also at the mercy of religious groups who gave them a cup of tea and a bun but then made them attend a service or listen to a sermon.

There are many empathetic characters in the novel, such as Boris, the optimistic Russian in Paris and Bozo the Screever in London. This is a "tale of two cities" but without anything to feel good about.

[Livia Damaceno · Rating 4 out of 5]

passando perrengue em paris e londres é ótimo, o outro livro é meh