This is Orwell's record of a period in the late 1920s when he lived among the tramps of London and Paris. Orwell's publishers initially took the book as a sign of him abandoning Socialism, but this was denied by the author himself. The book attempts to offer insights, rather than solutions.

'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 'H tel X', living alongside tramps, surviving on scraps and cigarette butts - in an unforgettable account of what being down and out is really like.

Details

ISBN13: 9780141184388
Format: Paperback / softback
Number of Pages: 256
Edition:
Publication Date: 02 Nov 2001
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Publication City, Country: London, United Kingdom
Dimensions (cm): 19.7(H)x12.8(L)x1.5(W)194
Weight (gm): 194

Author Biography

Eric Arthur Blair (1903-1950), better known by his pen-name, George Orwell, was born in India, where his father worked for the Civil Service. An author and journalist, Orwell was one of the most prominent and influential figures in twentieth-century literature. His unique political allegory Animal Farm was published in 1945, and it was this novel, together with the dystopia of Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which brought him world-wide fame. His novels and non-fiction include Burmese Days, Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia.

Reviews