Down and Out in Paris and London
George Orwell's vivid memoir of his time living among the desperately poor, Down and Out in Paris and London, is a moving tour of the underworld of society from the author of 1984, published with an introduction by Dervla Murphy in Penguin Modern Classics.
'You have talked so often of going to the dogs - and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them.'
Written when Orwell was a struggling writer in his twenties, it documents his 'first contact with poverty'. Here, he painstakingly documents a world of unrelenting drudgery and squalor - sleeping in bug-infested hostels and doss houses of last resort, working as a dishwasher in Paris's vile 'Hôtel X', surviving on scraps and cigarette butts, living alongside tramps, a star-gazing pavement artist and a starving Russian ex-army captain. Exposing a shocking, previously hidden world to his readers, Orwell gave a human face to the statistics of poverty for the first time - and in doing so, found his voice as a brilliant writer.