Down and out in Paris and London - The Library of the Uncommons

230 pages

English language

Published May 30, 2009 by Penguin Books.

ISBN:: 978-0-14-119391-5
OCLC Number:: 1193484645

(6 reviews)

'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.

63 editions

lovmelovmycats reviewed Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

Review of 'Down and Out in Paris and London' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

George Orwell's first published book: his youth shows, for sure. It's some kind of revelation to him that tramps are people just like everybody else. He at first seems a relatively empathetic and progressive person, but he obviously views women as some other species - definitely not people. It made me so angry, his rhetoric. The astoundingly misogynistic idea that men deserve sex/love/attention from women makes an appearance, (like in that recent mass-murderer's screed). I thought the appalling rape story in the Paris half was to illustrate something in the character who supposedly told it. But it's just more dehumanizing garbage from Orwell himself.
So I do not appreciate this book. But I also know that these disgusting views of women were common in society and literature in the 20th century, even from women authors (looking at you, Agatha Christie).