How does Orwell tell his story?
Poverty and genre in 'Down and Out in Paris and London'
Throughout our serialization of Down and Out in Paris and London, we have been sharing further reading - digging deeper into different aspects of the book, its context, and its reception. Our next piece, ‘Poverty and genre in Down and Out in Paris and London’ was first published in Nathan Waddell’s ‘Reading Orwell’ series, a teaching project designed for secondary school students and university undergraduates.
“I’m interested in how Orwell’s books are internally structured” [Waddell writes] “—in how their ideas, motifs, styles, themes, and registers have a conceptual and formal logic.” An audio version of the article is available here.
Poverty and genre in Down and Out in Paris and London
Nathan Waddell
Edition used: George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), ed. Peter Davison, introd. Dervla Murphy (London: Penguin, 2001), and is referred to as DOPL. Note: this discussion assumes you’ve read the book.
Orwell states at the end of Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) that the account he’s just finished giving is ‘a fairly trivial story’, adding that he hopes ‘it has been interesting in the same way as a travel diary is interesting’ (DOPL, p. 229). These are telling remarks. It’s up to individual readers to decide whether or not Down and Out in Paris and London is ‘trivial’, but what isn’t in doubt is that the book is ‘storied’ in the sense that it draws on and deploys the techniques of story-telling, at which Orwell would increasingly prove himself so adept. Orwell’s three major works of reportage—Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), and Homage to Catalonia (1938)—are all stories, all works that mingle fact and fiction, that re-present the world in representing it. Like all texts of memoir and autobiographical commentary, they offer a particular version of events that mixes ‘what really happened’ with strategic redescriptions of events that make for good reading. If the simple, trimmed-down style of Down and Out cuts against what the text itself refers to as ‘oratorical ways’ (DOPL, p. 108) of writing and speaking, it’s simplicity nevertheless should not be taken naively as some kind of unprejudiced clear window on events. The book is a compendium of stories, all told artfully by Orwell, the then-recently-agreed-upon pseudonym of Eric Blair, and by the various characters recalled in its pages: Charlie the young runaway; Boris the Russian waiter; Paddy the tramp; and Bozo the pavement artist, among others. If in one sense Down and Out is a book about the stories told to Orwell by the ‘local curiosities’ (DOPL, p. 6) he encountered during his time on the streets, it’s also a book that encourages readers to think very carefully about how to tell, and why people consume, stories of poverty and pain.
The other generic indicator Orwell mentions is the travel diary. Down and Out is an imaginative work of reportage concerned with ‘disguising oneself as a member of a poorer social group in order to gather information about it.’ For this reason, as Luke Seaber writes, it can be thought of as an ‘incognito social investigation text’, a body of writings ‘wherein authors’ lives are written under the guise of describing the lives of others; these are texts wherein authors record themselves changing without their realizing it, and record other lives, the lives of “the poor”, sometimes better than they are perhaps aware that they are doing and sometimes far worse than they can understand.’[1] Orwell’s choice of term suggests that we might think about these shifting perspectives as modes of actual and metaphorical travel between real and conceptual spaces: between countries, as the Dickensian title of the book implies;[2] between streets, cafés, hotels, restaurants, kitchens, and lodging houses; between ways of thinking about the condition, prospects, and importance of people who have fallen on hard times; between modes of imagining the writer doing the imagining of these things. In all these respects Down and Out is an ethnographic book, a work conveying Orwell’s desire ‘to understand what really goes on in the souls of plongeurs [dish-washers] and tramps and Embankment sleepers’ (DOPL, pp. 229-30), among other kinds of vagrants. Orwell confesses at the end of the book that he doesn’t feel he’s ‘seen more than the fringe of poverty’, but he admits to having learned ‘one or two things […] by being hard up’ (DOPL, p. 230). Writing and researching Down and Out in Paris and London gave Orwell a knowledge of poverty and an expanded vocabulary of disgust. Both served him well, personally and imaginatively, for the rest of his career.
One way to think about Down and Out, structurally speaking, is as a sequence of what Orwell calls ‘object-lesson[s] in poverty’ (DOPL, p. 5). He learned, or had reiterated to him, during his time in Paris and London that poverty frees people ‘from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work’ (DOPL, p. 3); that the sight and thought of poverty makes the affluent think they can preach at and pray over those who have fallen on hard times (DOPL, p. 195); and that poverty tends to be compounded randomly by bad luck, such as just missing out on job opportunities, or having a bug fall into your milk (DOPL, p. 15). Orwell found in the contrast between Paris and London the realization that ‘England is a very good country when you are not poor’ (DOPL, p. 134, my emphasis), just as he cottoned on to the legal irony that 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’ (DOPL, p. 217). Perhaps the most important insight Orwell took from his time in the two cities, an insight that would be reiterated to him during his journeys in the industrial north of England, is the knowledge that ‘some people spend whole decades’ at ‘thoroughly odious job[s]’, such as the sixty-year-old woman who stood at the sink in the Hôtel X. washing tableware ‘thirteen hours a day, six days a week, the year round’—and this all while being ‘horribly bullied’ by the hotel’s waiters (DOPL, p. 70). Orwell’s repeated insistence on his inability to put up with such things—as in his remark about not being able to cope with a seventeen-hour day, even though ‘there are plenty of people who think nothing of it’ (DOPL, p. 118)—indicates that he had a very particular hope for Down and Out in Paris and London. He hoped that the book might help those complaining about their privileged lot in life see that there are others quite accustomed to situations of extreme physical and psychological hardship.
Another emphasis that clearly carried a lot of weight for Orwell is what he calls ‘the secrecy attaching to poverty’ (DOPL, p. 14), a secrecy that’s tightly bound up with the wider question of prestige. Down and Out in Paris and London turns on several occasions to the extraordinary complications that poverty entails. Among these are the ‘net of lies’ (DOPL, p. 14) in which poverty ensnares the poor, because it forces them to pretend that everything is as it would be if they had the means assumed of them by a more comfortable middle class. The book also addresses the importance of appearance, or the performance of appearance, in the midst of lack, along with the importance of making good impressions (DOPL, p. 51). Both emphases are encapsulated in Boris’s inking of his ankles to cover up the holes in his socks (DOPL, p. 28). Secrecy, here, means the secrecy of pretence—of making others think that everything is fine when in fact everything is on the brink of collapse. How carefully one manages the situation determines how easily one can avoid disaster by entering the hierarchies of ‘prestige’ (DOPL, p. 73) attached to the social systems in the modern city’s cafés and hotels. Yet secrecy has another meaning in Down and Out in Paris and London, which emphasizes the misleading idea that ‘there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor’—an idea maintained at all costs, and in secret, by a culture doing all it can to hide the fact that most ‘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’ (DOPL, p. 127). The falseness of the distinction is brought into sharp relief by the sight of ‘customers in all their splendour’ sitting in the Hôtel X.’s dining room, with the plongeurs, in all their ‘disgusting filth’ (DOPL, p. 169), just a few feet away.
Each of these ‘lessons’, among others, gave Orwell a gradually more extensive understanding of what poverty meant not only for him but also for society at large. A book of ‘question[s]’ (DOPL, p. 124) as much as stories, Down and Out organizes the personal as the social, the one standing in representatively for the other. So while much of the book recounts Orwell’s views on the nitty-gritty details of existing in dire straits and seeking work in Paris and London, it also uses these insights as the basis for reflections on poverty’s more general meanings. Douglas Kerr has interpreted this dimension of the book as a form of attempted self-purification in the wake of Orwell’s imperial experiences in Burma. Writing about Orwell’s ‘A Hanging’ (1931), Kerr adds: ‘The “secret vein of dirt” (to use one of Orwell’s recurrent figures) had to be purged, and anyone can see that his various passages through the labyrinths of powerlessness, poverty and distress—the filthy sculleries of Paris hotels, the mines of the north, the Spanish trenches—are part of his own attempts at a personal catharsis.’[3] The attempts at catharsis, arguably, were lifelong, running up to the research and writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). In Down and Out in Paris and London, these attempts are structured around Orwell’s suspicion that the forms of slavery attaching to particular kinds of low-paid and precarious employment, with their ‘mountains of useless drudgery’, are a displaced ‘fear of the mob’ (DOPL, p. 126).
This aspect of Down and Out lets us see one of its most intriguing formal contradictions, which has something to do not only with the background of its author, Orwell, but also with the traditions of travel writing from which the text itself borrows. The imperial freight or cargo of Down and Out is barely visible at the overt level of the book’s ‘story’. At first glance, this is an account of travelling to Paris and to London in search of unusual experiences—and, through those experiences, a more informed grasp of the lived realities of poverty and precarious labour. Explicit references to the imperial politics sitting behind or above these things are few and far between. An aside like Orwell’s remark about the staff lavatory in the Hôtel X. being ‘worthy of Central Asia’ (DOPL, p. 85) is a small clue to the fact that his reactions to his experiences in Paris are recorded in terms intimately bound up with his knowledge of empire as he saw it in British-ruled Burma. A book written as an ‘attempt at a personal catharsis’, as Kerr puts it, will show at different levels and in different ways the inspiration for this very same attempt—the cause here being Orwell’s time as, and his regrets over having agreed to be, an imperial policeman. If we think about Down and Out in Paris and London in these terms, then we might see in its attention to the economically dispossessed the signs of a wide-ranging moral consciousness. Orwell’s efforts to counteract the ‘fear of the mob’, to question the labelling of people in desperate circumstances as a mob in the first place, is a displaced repudiation of the corresponding logic that enables entire peoples to be viewed as ‘inferior’, and in need of the quote-unquote ‘civilizing’ light of empire.
Yet this search for catharsis cuts against one of the generic identifications that Down and Out itself provides. Orwell’s attention to the dispossessed works on one level as a sincere effort to understand their plight. On another, it counter-intuitively reintroduces at least some of the ideological investments of empire that Orwell otherwise appears to resist. His hope that the text is ‘interesting in the same way as a travel diary is interesting’ does more work than at first glance might seem to be the case. For although this line doesn’t say that Orwell wrote Down and Out in Paris and London as a travel diary per se, it underplays the extent to which the book draws on the ethnographic, implicitly imperial traditions of travel writing during the height of empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. References to elaborately hierarchical systems of ‘caste’ (DOPL, p. 72), which carry an echo of the caste structures Orwell observed in Burma, abound in the book, which repeatedly sketches out the attributes, manners, and rituals of apparently ‘strange’ groups of people in the mode of a colonial adventurer travelling through an ostensibly ‘foreign’ land.[4] Down and Out resists the heroic idioms of imperial exploration, and in this respect can’t be pigeonholed as an ‘imperial’ text pure and simple. But there are just enough loaded phrases in the book to suggest that it carries an imperial ‘freight’—in its methodical recording of the ‘typical’ (DOPL, p. 95) lives of those in underground cellars; in its attention to the enigmatic ‘technique[s] of London begging’ (DOPL, p. 181); and in the idea of Paris as a ‘foreign city’ (DOPL, p. 134), with the ‘strange purplish gleam’ (DOPL, p. 94) of its street lamps, among other emphases. Orwell’s concluding remark about wanting more thoroughly to ‘explore’ (DOPL, p. 229) the world of poverty only further highlights how intimately bound up with the metaphors of empire the book’s narrative mode seems to be.
If the generic self-positioning of Down and Out in Paris and London as an account of ‘“exotic” exploration’ doesn’t quite undo Orwell’s efforts to work through his lingering shame about having participated in the machinery of empire, this aspect of the book should nevertheless remind us how visibly (and invisibly) Down and Out is shaped by Orwell’s background.[5] Mixing anecdote-laden memoir with more theoretical and polemical stretches of morally conscious socio-economic analysis, Down and Out shows itself to be consistently guided, in its large-scale form and in its sentence-level phrasing, by Orwell’s tastes and experiences. These dimensions of the book govern its reportage in often obvious but also quite subtle ways. Writers always write about the world in the terms of what their life has led them to see as important, or worthy of being noticed. But when Orwell claims, for example, that the ‘black tailcoat and white tie, fresh face and sleek brown hair’ of Valenti, the waiter at the Hôtel X., makes him look ‘just like an Eton boy’ (DOPL, p. 68), he gives away more of himself than he had, perhaps, intended. The remark draws on public knowledge of what students wear at one of Britain’s most elite private schools, but it also hints at Orwell’s intimate insider-knowledge of the Eton uniform, given his attendance at the school from 1917 until 1921.[6] All of which is simply to some degree to make the obvious point that Orwell’s view of poverty, as articulated in Down and Out in Paris and London, is a personal one. Yet it’s possible to acknowledge this fact while remaining alert to how the book emerges from the contours of Orwell’s particular socio-economic position, a tension brought much more overtly into focus a few years later in The Road to Wigan Pier.
Another detail of Down and Out which reveals this subjective condition of the text is its recurrent deployment of cultural knowledge. Poverty gave Orwell object lessons in the implications of economic destitution and the psychological impoverishments it generates. But poverty is itself, in Orwell’s hands, an object seen through the lens of his prior cultural conditioning. The book’s epigraph, taken from Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Prologue, implicitly signals this from the outset. When Orwell admits to imagining the members of the shadowy and bogus ‘Russian secret society in Paris’ (DOPL, p. 46), speaking like ‘characters in Russian novels’ (DOPL, p. 49), he reveals the constricting presence of a cultural worldview, just as his comparison between the expletive-laden scullions in the Hotel X. and Shakespeare’s Hamlet (DOPL, p. 78) does the same. References in this vein include Orwell’s yearning to be like the French novelist Émile Zola in describing ‘the dinner hour’ (DOPL, p. 66); Orwell’s casual reference to his copy of the poetry of François Villon (DOPL, p. 128); his invocations of the Roman Emperor Vespasian (DOPL, p. 172), the Roman historian Marcus Cato (DOPL, p. 126), and the Greek playwright Aristophanes (DOPL, p. 191); and his offhand citations of Charles Dickens, Robert Smith Surtees, and Herman Melville (DOPL, p. 188). The combined effect of these references is to reveal the cultural membrane through which Orwell perceives the worlds of urban poverty in England and France. The late reference to Jack London’s books on ‘American tramping’ (DOPL, p. 218) extends the idea still further, putting Down and Out into a tradition of incognito social investigation (to return to Seaber’s phrase) that preceded and would outlast him.
Orwell wrote about his experiences of poverty in a sincere way. Down and Out is, in the end, a genuine effort to cut through the layers of cliché and myth that tend to form around entrenched opinions about poverty and about what it means for those it directly affects. Even so, the text can’t quite get out from underneath Orwell’s shadow, as it were. One of the more surprising insights that Orwell took from his time in Paris—surprising to him, that is to say—is the fact that, as he puts it, poverty contains a ‘great redeeming feature’: its capacity to ‘annihilate’ the future (DOPL, p. 17). By this Orwell means that poverty, even as it sends you into a form of ‘craven panic’, installs in you a form of cool unconcern: ‘a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs—and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety’ (DOPL, p. 18). Such an insight comes on the face of it from Orwell’s genuine experience of the counterintuitive revelation that ‘the less money you have, the less you worry’ (DOPL, p. 18). But as John Rodden reminds us, discussing the question of Orwell’s ‘down-and-outery’ more broadly, Orwell ‘was never really down and out’:
He could always rely on his parents for help and often returned home to them (or to friends and relatives such as Ruth Pitter) after a night in the abyss. In Paris, his Aunt Nellie was always available in an emergency (though he never seems to have asked for her assistance). Blair [i.e. Orwell] was at times penniless, but he was never without a means of extricating himself from poverty, or just getting a hot meal and a warm bath.[7]
Orwell’s remarks about the apparent indifference to worry to which pennilessness leads can itself be interpreted as an indifference to his own relatively cosy position as a researcher of poverty. He admits as much by the end of Down and Out in Paris and London, which turns throughout, as we’ve seen, on the shifting status of its author’s commentary.
I want to stress, in conclusion, that the ‘great consolation in poverty’ (DOPL, p. 18) Orwell found in its capacity to ‘annihilate the future’ led at the same time, in certain cases, to an ‘eventless life of crushing boredom’ (DOPL, p. 193). Orwell recognized this in the life of the lodging-house he tracks throughout the second half of Down and Out. He reiterated it in connection with workhouse casual wards, filled with yawning men and stinking of world-weariness (DOPL, p. 212), and in his claim that the core ‘evil of poverty is not so much that it makes a man suffer as that it rots him physically and spiritually’, both deriving in some measure from ‘enforced idleness’ (DOPL, p. 220). So while Down and Out is in many respects shot through with tensions in genre and perspective, Orwell’s background and linguistic choices making the text work against itself, it’s also a book of integrity that tries hard to clarify the meanings of poverty for a culture all too eager and able to look the other way. The modesty with which the book ends, with its claim that the ‘one or two things’ Orwell learned by being down and out represent a ‘beginning’ (DOPL, p. 230), cuts things down to size. Orwell knew that Down and Out in Paris and London wouldn’t change the world. He wished, perhaps, that the book might alert more people than before to the privileges he had enjoyed in making a study of socio-economic fragility. Like Boris hearing of a possible job at the Hôtel X., Orwell saw a ‘gleam of hope’ (DOPL, p. 51) in the simple act of telling people about the world as he found it.
Nathan Waddell works in the English Department at the University of Birmingham
[1] Luke Seaber, Incognito Social Investigation in British Literature: Certainties in Degradation (Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature / Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 1, 2-3.
[2] Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859) is similarly concerned with London and Paris, albeit during the French Revolution.
[3] Douglas Kerr, Eastern Figures: Orient and Empire in British Writing (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008), p. 110. The phrase ‘secret vein of dirt’ is from Down and Out in Paris and London (see DOPL, p. 84).
[4] The classic account of this Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992).
[5] Ben Clarke, Orwell in Context: Communities, Myths, Values (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 23.
[6] There is a related, albeit differently accented, episode in The Road to Wigan Pier, in which Orwell evokes the image of a middle-class Communist, Eton educated, who ‘would be ready to die on the barricades, in theory anyway’, but ‘still leaves his bottom waistcoat button undone’ (see The Road Wigan Pier (1937), ed. Peter Davison, introd. Richard Hoggart (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 126).
[7] John Rodden, The Unexamined Orwell (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2011), p. 242.