Book cover for Down and Out in Paris and London

Down and Out in Paris and London

Hardback

Synopsis

Details

04 March 2021
256 pages
9781529032703
Imprint: Macmillan Collector's Library

Reviews

The thief who took the last of an ailing George Orwell’s money from his Paris room in 1929 did a big favour to political literature.
Little that Orwell has written, here and elsewhere, has lost the hum of relevancy, from the causes of poverty and its long-term effects – “it annihilates the future” – to its everyday toll of boredom.
Down and Out is an extraordinary and curious book: beautifully phrased, meticulous, honest and funny. George Orwell’s 1933 memoir, and a study of poverty, is a book both rooted in its era and able to transcend it.
Orwell’s is a plea for empathy for the laborer, the tramp, and the impoverished . . . [it] is a fascinating anthropological study of poverty, its empirical value tarnished by its richly entertaining prose, and overt imposition of Orwell’s political dispositions upon his observations.