'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.
George Orwell's first published work, Down and Out in Paris and London, is a vivid, sensitive account of the time he lived as one of the poor in the late twenties. In a bug-infested hotel, surviving only between the pawnbroker and a little teaching and writing, Orwell shocked the middle-class establishment with his observation of the misery, the hopelessness and the despair of the poor of a previously unexplored Paris and London.
