Down and Out in Paris and London
Ratings66
Average rating4
'You have talked so often of going to the dogs – and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them.' George Orwell's vivid memoir of his time among the desperately poor and destitute in London and Paris is a moving tour of the underworld of society. Here he painstakingly documents a world of unrelenting drudgery and squalor – sleeping in bug-infested hostels and doss houses, working as a dishwasher in the vile 'Hotel X', living alongside tramps, surviving on scraps and cigarette butts – in an unforgettable account of what being down and out is really like.
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I didn't really know what to expect going into this, but I enjoyed it. I liked the characters and setting of the Paris part and the information in the London part. Will want to reread, but very good.
Pretty good stuff. I liked the Paris section much better than the London section because it was more interesting to read about the behind-the-scenes of hotels and restaurants rather than the toils of tramp life.
The ‘down and out' chapters were good - sympathetic, without being rose-tinted.
The grammar, and policy chapters were strangely placed; they both broke the flow of the narrative and seemed better suited as appendices.
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