George Orwell (June 25, 1903 – January 21, 1950) wrote influential moralistic fiction and political outspokenness that has deep roots in his journalistic writing.

Down and Out in Paris and London is the 1933 publication of the journals Orwell kept while living among the poor in Paris and London. In his memoir, Why I Write, Orwell credits this experience with focusing his literary skills on political activity.

You discover what it is like to be hungry. With bread and margarine in your belly, you go out and look into the shop windows. Everywhere, there is food insulting you in huge, wasteful piles.

Of course, the situation was simulated. By the late 1920s, George Orwell, though not established as a novelist, was well-educated, well-known, and firmly middle-class. He generally forewent entitlements to live the impoverished lives of those he observed.   Compare Orwell's diaries to those of Ernest Hemingway, who also lived in Paris in the 1920s and who—unlike Orwell—was quite poor at this time. Hemingway acknowledged constant hunger and equated it to feelings of emptiness, longing.

You discover the boredom which is inseparable from poverty, the times when you have nothing to do and, being underfed, can interest yourself in nothing. For half a day at a time, you can lie on your bed, feeling like your jeune squelette in Baudelaire's poem.

Only food could rouse you. You discover that a man who has gone even a week on bread and margarine is not a man any longer, only a belly with a few accessory organs.

 London.

And yet, in Down and Out, there is a distance between the author and the subject. Orwell reports stabbings, rape, and theft with dispassionate curiosity. The individuals he meets feel slightly shallow, their most exciting traits exaggerated. He treats many as characters, not people. He shoulders the burden of witnessing their lives, but it keeps him apart.

"The Mothers (Die Mutter) from War (Krieg) from 1921-22 woodcut, published in 1923. Käthe Kollwitz's War series focused on the vulnerable members of society affected by social traumas, particularly WWI. Learn more. 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS).

Nevertheless, Down and Out is full of penetrating observation, clear, unadorned writing, and a nascent passion to speak for the socially oppressed. The man who conceived such unique, enduring work as 1984 and Animal Farm is molded here.

When you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future.

This absolute annihilation of hunger and the separation of man from society due to hunger is precisely what Elie Wiesel observes in his clear and horrifyingly true story of imprisonment in Auschwitz. Desperate, sustained hunger—especially at the hands of others—can remove one's humanity by making a man merely a body.

Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

I travelled to England third class via Dunkirk and Tilbury, which is the cheapest and not the worst way of crossing the channel. You had to pay extra for a cabin, so I slept in the saloon, together with most of the third-class passengers. I find this entry in my diary for the day:

'Sleeping in the saloon, twenty-seven men, sixteen women. Of the women not a single one has washed her face this morning. The men mostly went to the bathroom; the women merely produced vanity cases and covered the dirty with powder.'

"Woman Entrusts Herself to Death" lithograph, 1934. Käthe Kollwitz was born in Russia but lived in Germany. This print is part of Kollwitz' "Death" series of secondhand victims of WWI. Learn more. © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS).

A novelist is often tempted by a need to see and gather "truth," even fodder for their story. Compare Down and Out to the journalist and travel writing of novelists John Steinbeck (who wrote Travels with Charley at the end of his career) or Laurie Lee (who wrote nostalgically of his hometown in the Cotswolds).