Down and Out in Paris & London

George Orwell's vivid memoir of his time living among the desperately poor and destitute, Down and Out in Paris and London, is a moving tour of the underworld of society.

"You have talked so often of going to the dogs - and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them."

Written when Orwell was a struggling writer in his twenties, this memoir captures his 'first contact with poverty.' Through painstaking detail, he reveals a world of unrelenting drudgery and squalor:

• Sleeping in bug-infested hostels and doss houses of last resort
• Working as a dishwasher in Paris's vile 'Hôtel X'
• Surviving on scraps and cigarette butts
• Living alongside tramps, a star-gazing pavement artist, and a starving Russian ex-army captain

Exposing a shocking, previously-hidden world to his readers, Orwell gave a human face to the statistics of poverty for the first time. In doing so, he not only shed light on the harsh realities of the impoverished but also found his voice as a writer.