Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) — what it is to be visible
---
The first fact of this book is that the narrator is not poor. It is said
almost immediately and it is the sentence that everything else hangs from,
because without it the book becomes a romance about hardship and with it the
book becomes an audit.
He is an English writer. He has a degree from an Oxford that still exists in
his own memory as a place where a certain kind of sentence was valued. He has
a passport, which in 1933 was not a nothing, and he has the particular
confidence of a man who has been told he is clever and has not yet found out
what that is worth on a Tuesday.
What he has done is spend his money before he earns it. That is the whole
mechanism and it deserves to be stated exactly rather than sympathised with:
he arrives in Paris with about five pounds in his pocket, and he does not
look for work on arrival, because he expects to find work within a week and
intends to spend the intervening days seeing the city.
He is wrong about the week. He is wrong about the month. He is wrong about the
winter.
And this is the part that every version of this story gets wrong. He does not
become poor. He is poor in about eleven days. The money was always going; what
the money bought was the time in which he failed to notice anything.
The boat-train is the first image and it is worth slowing down, because the
book is about how a person's position is decided long before they know they
have one.
He has a job to go to. A farm, some miles from Paris, work agreed with a man
he has never met, and the job is to help with the harvest. It pays almost
nothing. It is not advertised as generous and it is not meant to be. It exists
because a labourer is needed and the labour will be done by someone who has
come from a long way and cannot go home.
The boat-train costs money he does not have much of. He buys a third-class
ticket and a few newspapers to pretend to be reading and a small amount of
food for the journey, and the arithmetic is tight from the first hour. He is
on a train with men who are going to work and he is one of them, and the
difference between them is that they have been told what they are for and he
has not.
That is the first thing the poor have that the merely penny-less do not, and
Orwell notes it without drawing a lesson from it. Direction. A man who knows
he is going to Paris to dig has a use for his body and a date on which the use
ends. The narrator has a degree and a train ticket and no date.
The farm is a farm like any farm in that part of France, and the harvest is
slower than he expected because the men are old and tired and the work is
back-breaking in a way that no one has thought to modernise. He is not
competent. He discovers that competence at physical labour is a skill acquired
over years and he does not have it, and that being English does not make it
come faster.
What he gets is a bed in the farmhouse, and it is a kindness rather than an
arrangement, and the family are not unkind and he is not comfortable.
Then the arrangement breaks in the way that arrangements between people who
have no contract break: slowly, then completely, and with a fight.
The boss stops paying, on the grounds that the harvest is late and the
weather is bad and a man can be held responsible for weather. He does not
explain it as a theft because it is not framed as one. It is framed as a
dispute about what was agreed, and there was no agreement, and there is no
one who can say what the agreement was.
The narrator does the only available thing. He goes to Paris and tells the
woman he has arranged it with, and she is with another man, and he waits in
the street for eight hours in the rain in the clothes he had for the farm.
This is the first humiliation and Orwell writes it with complete flatness. He
does not editorialise. He does not say it was the worst experience of his
life, and he does not say it was bearable. He says he was wet and cold and
that eight hours passes slowly.
The fight. He puts his hand on the man's coat to point something out, and
the man turns and hits him in the mouth.
What Orwell wants the reader to hold is the disproportion. The whole
structure — the country, the labour, the law, the man who has been paid this
morning — turns on one moment of physical contact, and there is no appeal
available from any of it. No policeman, no office, no argument. A man can hit
another man in the street and everything he owns will be used to explain why
he had to.
The narrator is on the ground. He gets up. There is a moment he describes
where he understands that if he had been holding something heavy he could
have ended it, and that he was not holding anything.
Then he goes home and finds that the woman has sent her two friends out of
the room. It is not a conspiracy and it is not cruelty either. It is two men
who have been asked a question and have answered it.
And this is where the book stops being an anecdote.
The narrator goes to bed. In the morning he has no money and no prospect and
no address, and he cannot go to work because there is no work, and he cannot
go home because home is an ocean and a ticket costs money he does not have.
And so a man with a degree from Oxford is on the streets of Paris at the age
of most people in which the class is expected to have settled into a shape.
He had had three months in which he did not look for work. That is the whole
of it. Nothing attacked him. Nothing conspired. He simply had a plan that
assumed a week would be long enough, and the world did not arrange itself
around the plan.
The next three hundred pages are what it costs to be wrong about a week.
And it should be said here, before any of it, because the rest of the book
depends on it: Orwell is not describing what happens to people. He is
describing what is available to anyone who happens to be there. He had a
fallback. He had an Oxford address to write to. He could have telephoned a
person who would have sent money.
Most of the men he watches in the following months have none of those three
things. He knows it. He says so. The book would be dishonest if he pretended
otherwise, and the reason it is not dishonest is that he keeps looking at
himself with the same flat attention he keeps on everyone else.
A man who has been hit in the mouth in the rain by a person he was asking
for money owed to him by a boss he had never met is, for about eight hours,
the same sort of person as the man who hit him. Both are men on the pavement
in Paris. Only one of them can go home tonight.
That difference is not a matter of character. It is a matter of a railway
ticket in 1933 and who paid for
---
He finds a room in a hotel that is not a hotel, and the description of it is
one of the most exact things in twentieth-century writing.
It is in a street that gets no sunlight. The rooms are let by the night and
by the week and the building is a former hotel that has been divided into
something that is neither hotel nor lodging house, and the whole arrangement
exists in a gap between what the law allows and what people will pay for.
He pays for a week in advance because that is the arrangement. He has learned
this by the time he arrives; there is a network of people who know which
rooms will not ask questions and this is how a man with no money finds a bed.
The room has a bed, a chair that is not a chair for sitting in but for
placing a suitcase, a window that does not open, and a wardrobe that does not
close. He notes these facts without complaint because complaint would cost
money and because at this stage he still believes he will be somewhere else in
a week.
What is in the room and what is not is the actual subject. There is no
cupboard for food because a man who kept food would smell, and a man who
smells in that building is asked to leave. There is nowhere to wash except
the basin, which has a plug in it that does not hold water. There is no
electric light in the corridor after a certain hour because the power is
metered and the meter belongs to someone else.
Each of these is a small, specific, fixable thing. That is the point. Nothing
here is a mystery and nothing is a cruelty. A basin needs a washer. A
corridor needs a bulb. A wardrobe needs a hinge. These are the sorts of
things that are arranged by money and are unmade by its absence, and the
building is not full of villains, it is full of plumbing.
He has been in prison cells with more comfort and he says so, and it is not
false — it is one of the book's sharpest points. A man who has been locked in
a cell for a month can be in greater physical hardship in a lodging house than
he ever was in prison, because in prison the food is bad but it is *there*
and in the lodging house the money is not there and so neither is the food.
And that is the system. Not cruelty. Arithmetic.
The first thing he learns is the rule about meals. He must not eat when he is
hungry. He must eat before he gets hungry.
This sounds like a small piece of advice and it is the entire manual. A man
who eats when hungry has spent his last money on the cheapest food available
and has nothing left and is now hungry again within the hour and cannot buy
anything. A man who eats before he is hungry spends less, because he is not
buying at the moment when the stomach has taken over the decision.
Orwell describes learning this by being hungry in the wrong way at the wrong
time, and then describes every subsequent meal in the book as an application
of it. Eat early. Eat before the need arrives. Keep the money that the
hunger would otherwise have taken from you.
The second rule is about motion. He must not be still.
A man who sits down in the street in the morning has decided to be poor for
the day, and the day will make the decision for him. A man who keeps moving is
still, in the language of the street, *working*, and is treated as a working
man rather than as a person who has given up.
The two rules together are the tramp's craft and they are genuinely skilled.
They are not decorative. They are the accumulated technique of an enormous
population that has had centuries to get them right, and they work, and
Orwell has the sense to say so.
The other thing about the lodging house is that it is safe in a particular
way. Nobody in it asks where you came from. Nobody asks what you did. There
is a kind of mutual understanding that is not friendship but is more than
indifference, and it exists because everyone in the building is in the same
position and the position is too large for shame.
He meets the old man.
The old man is not a tramp. This is the important thing and Orwell is
careful about it. The old man has worked. He has been a docker, a soldier, a
navvy, and he is now in this room because he is old and there is no work for
old men and the workhouse will not take him except on terms he has declined.
He has hands. They are enormous and deformed and they are the hands of a man
who has done physical work for fifty years.
They are also both stiff and crooked and they cannot make a fist.
Orwell does not editorialise about this. The old man simply shows his hands
one day when he is being asked what he does, and the hands say the rest.
There is also the woman upstairs, and Orwell describes her in a way that is
careful not to be either sentimental or voyeuristic. She has been in that
building for years. She is not a prostitute in the sense of a woman with a
trade; she is a woman with no other address.
And there is the theft, and it comes out at the worst possible moment, and the
old man takes the blame for it, and that is the moment Orwell writes with the
most restraint in the entire book.
Theft is nearly universal in that building. It is not moral. A man who has
been hungry for a day will take food that has been left where he can reach
it, and everyone in the building knows it and nobody reports it, and the
arrangement is what keeps the building in existence.
The bread is stolen. It is perhaps two pounds. It is enough to feed the
building for a day, and it is taken by the old man without knowing it,
because he is hungry, because he has been hungry for longer than the narrator
has.
The girl upstairs is arrested for it.
This is the part that gets told wrong, and Orwell is precise about it. She is
not a hard woman. She is defended by a man who is not her boyfriend, out of
a kind of loyalty that has no explanation. She is in prison for a fortnight
and comes back changed, and the room she returns to is not the room she left.
And the old man, who did not steal the bread, tells the landlord he did it
himself, because if he does not, she will be convicted.
Orwell does not explain this as charity. It is presented as a practical
thing: the landlord does not care which of the two it is. And that is exactly
what makes it matter — the old man's willingness is not required by anyone and
would have cost him nothing to withhold.
The narrator at this point is not yet in a position to be helped by anyone and
knows it. He has a few francs. He is going to be hungry very shortly.
The room is going to be taken from him at the end of the week unless he has
money, and he does not have money, and he has been in Paris for about five
months.
He goes out to look for work. There is none.
What he has learned in five months is the technique. What he has not learned
is the cause, because the cause is not visible from inside it, and that is
what the rest of the book is for.
---
The word in English is workhouse and the word in French is something else, and
the difference in the words is the beginning of the difference in the
institutions, and Orwell does not need to point it out because the building
points it out.
He goes there because he has work to do for a meal. This is not a metaphor and
it is not a punishment. It is how the system works: there are men in Paris who
buy meals by spending a specified number of hours on tasks that are
pointless and are described as pointless by everyone including the men doing
them.
The tasks are called chores. There is a queue. The queue is the point.
You queue, and you are given a task, and when you have done the task you go
back to the end of the queue. If you are late you lose your place. If you
leave you lose your place. You cannot leave once you have begun because the
place you left is filled and there is a man behind you who has been waiting.
The narrator is put on a plank with a long handle and told to saw wood for
two hours. The plank moves on a wheel. Another man is on the other end
taking the sawdust away. The sawdust is not needed. The plank could be
stationary. It is not stationary because if it were, there would be no need
for the man at the other end, and if there were no need for the man at the
other end, he would be in a different queue or would not be here.
Orwell says this plainly, without a sneer, and the plainness is what makes it
land.
The wood goes into a fire. The fire heats water. The water is not used. Or it
is used in a quantity that could not require this much wood, and the
arithmetic of the thing is available to anyone who stands in the room and
looks, and nobody has ever stood in the room and looked, because the queue
takes all your attention.
That is the insight of the chapter, and it is stated once: the work is not
the point and the work is not even very hard. What is hard is the queue.
Because the queue takes the whole day. The queue is where a man meets other
men who have nothing to do, and where the arrangement is normalised by
everyone's presence in it.
He is in the queue for a day and a half, or something close to it, and the
thing that comes out of it is not hunger and not exhaustion. It is the
realisation that the society he was educated in has an institution for this
and that he had never thought about it once, and that the reason he had never
thought about it is that the institution was there to absorb exactly the kind
of people who would think about it.
That is a real mechanism and Orwell states it without embellishment. There is
a queue for people with no work. The queue exists all day. There is no
argument to be had with a queue, and anyone who begins arguing is removed
from it, and the argument is beside the point in any case because there is no
official that the argument is addressed to.
Orwell calls this the elephant in the room. The phrase is modern but the
observation is not; it is what every man in that building understood and none
of them could say, and what a man could not say in 1933 with a room full of
men who had been in the building for years.
Then he describes what the food is. Bread, a bowl of soup, a piece of
cheese, on a plate, with a ticket, handed across a counter to a man who
cannot be spoken to because he is working and because the ticket system means
the interaction has no human content in it.
Two days of it and he cannot eat properly. This is not starvation. This is a
man who has worked for two days eating food that his body will not take,
because the body will not take food that arrives with a ticket attached.
And the second day something happens that Orwell records and does not
interpret. A man is sick in the queue, on the ground, and the queue closes up
around him and the man who was behind him moves forward into the gap, and
the shift foreman does not stop the work, and after a while two men lift the
sick man out and put him somewhere and the queue continues.
He did not stop the queue. That is the sentence. Nobody stopped the queue.
The whole book is built on the discovery that this is the normal operation of
the system and not an abuse of it, and that is what makes it a book about
structures rather than about villains.
Then, on the way out, he sees something that stays with him.
A man who has come in with the party tells him about a job he had three
months ago, and the job was real and paid and he lost it. And the narrator
asks how he lost it, and the man says the building where he worked burned
down.
Not that he was dismissed. That the building burned down. And he is now in a
queue for a meal, and there is no relationship between the two events that
anybody can act on, and the man himself does not find the story remarkable
because there is nothing remarkable in it from where he is standing.
The narrator is astonished. He is astonished because the man has told a
story in which the loss of a job and the loss of three months of life are the
same event, and he has told it as an anecdote.
Orwell, who has by now been in that queue himself, understands what the man
is actually saying, which is: this is what happens now, and there is no
process.
The chapter closes in the street and it is cold and the narrator has eaten
for the first time in two days and it is not enough, and he has work in the
morning which will pay nothing, and the arrangement is that this is a
triumph.
He went in with a question. He came out with the shape of the thing, which is
that in this society a man is allowed to have nothing and is not allowed to
be treated as though he is a danger, and the difference between those two
states is managed by a queue and a plank with a saw on it.
That is the argument of the book and it has taken him eighteen pages and a
sawdust fire and the fact that nobody stopped the queue when a man went down.
---
He has been in Paris for some months. It is winter now, and winter is the
part of the book that is hardest to read and the most useful.
Hunger, when it is described by someone who has been hungry, is not a
political statement. It is a sensation with a location. It is behind the eyes
and it is a headache at first and then it is a difficulty in making decisions,
and after that it is not even a headache, it is simply the absence of the
things a person would otherwise be thinking about.
Orwell describes the arithmetic of it in a way that is precise and unsentimental.
A man who has had nothing to eat since yesterday is not able to think about
anything except food. He is not choosing to think about food. There is
nothing else available. The mind does not rise above this; it is what
happens when a machine is given nothing to run on.
And then the chapter does the thing that makes it worth reading: it shows
what happens in the streets.
The first thing is the cardboard. Thousands of people in Paris sleep
outdoors every night through the winter, and most of them have made something
— stacked cardboard, a windbreak of paper, a hole in a doorway, a bundle
arranged so that the wind does not get in from the north.
There is a technique. You cannot sleep in a doorway and warm yourself; you
have to have stopped the wind before you can get warm. And so a winter night
is not a single act of endurance but a piece of engineering performed by a
man with no materials, which is why the cardboard is always arranged in a
particular way and why a person who has slept outside for a month knows
things about a street that a person with a roof does not.
The narrator notes the skill and notes also who has it, and the observation
is not sentimental: the skill is why these men are still alive and the
absence of the skill is why some of them are not. There is a differentiation
inside this population, and it has nothing to do with talent. It has to do
with who was taught.
The second thing is the bread.
Bread is not purchased. It is found. The streets of a European city in 1933
have more food in them than a person with money will buy, because bread is
sold in loaves and a man with no money cannot buy a loaf and a man with a
loaf does not need to. The loaves get thrown out at the end of the day, from
the shops and the cafés and the bakeries, and the timing of the throwing-out
is a piece of common knowledge in exactly the way that the bus times are
common knowledge.
Orwell is precise about how this is learned. It is not written down. It is
learned the way a child learns the bus times — by being on the street at four
in the afternoon for several days.
And the argument is implicit and he does not make it: a population of tens
of thousands of people maintains a working knowledge of when food is
discarded in every district of a city. That is not a failure. It is a
system functioning perfectly, with the input side arranged so that it must
function.
The third thing is the cinema.
The cheapest cinema in Paris costs a few sous and the price of admission is
the price of warmth. A man who has six sous will spend them on a seat in a
heated room for three hours rather than on bread, because bread is gone in
ten minutes and the cinema is three hours of not being cold.
The narrator does not condemn this. He explains it, and the explanation is
that the whole arrangement of a poor man's day is built around duration
rather than nutrition, because duration is what can be bought in small
quantities and nutrition is not.
And the fourth thing is the arithmetic of a week, which Orwell lays out and
which is the reason the book is not an anecdote.
A man with no job and no money has to find, every day, enough to eat. The
street will do it if he knows where to be and when. But the street requires
continuous movement and continuous attention, and continuous movement and
continuous attention for seven days is a form of full-time labour, and it
gives no money at the end of it.
So the poor man is working. That is the point Orwell keeps arriving at and
never decorating. He is working harder than most employed people and earning
nothing, and there is no employer, no contract, no dispute mechanism, no
record of the hours and no way to prove them if he were owed anything.
The chapter ends with the narrator calculating that he can survive on
bread alone for a period he is not willing to state, and that after that
period the calculation stops working.
And there is one paragraph in the middle of the chapter that I would put
above the rest of the book, and it is about a man who had been out for years
and has a routine for eating that involves sitting down in a public place
where food is sold, ordering nothing, and eating what he has brought himself.
He does it in a public restaurant. He buys nothing and eats his own bread and
nobody interferes, because he is behaving as a customer and has money for a
cup of something and sits long enough.
That is what three years of this does to a person: not hunger, not madness,
but a set of extremely specific techniques for being somewhere without being
in the way of the paying public. He has become, in the only sense available,
a professional.
And Orwell writes about it with exactly the tone he uses for a man who has
learned to file efficiently, because that is what it is, and because any other
tone would be a lie about what the man is doing.
---
The chapter is about the narrator learning to be helped, and it is the most
quiet thing in the book, and it is the one that makes the argument about
poverty hardest to answer.
There is a woman in the street who sells balloons. Her name is not given and
Orwell does not invent one. She is somewhere in her twenties. She has a child
who is not the narrator's business and is mentioned only in passing. She is
not beautiful and not remarkable and the narrator is not in love with her.
He becomes friendly with her because she is one of a very small number of
people in that building who does not treat him as an object of curiosity.
And the reason for that is precise and Orwell says it: because she is
ashamed, and shame is a form of equality.
She does not treat him as a fallen thing because she treats herself as one.
That is the whole of it. In a street where most people look at a tramp and
see either a nuisance or a lesson or a mystery, she looks at him and sees a
man in a bad position, which is the category she is also in, and the two of
them can therefore have a conversation.
That is a small and true thing about shame and it is the mechanism of the
chapter. Charity between equals is easy. Charity from above requires the
person below to perform gratitude, and the person below has a limited amount
of that and it is usually gone.
The narrator is helped. She buys him meals and gives him money when he is
short and does not make him say thank you in a way that costs him something.
And he is at first proud about this, and proud is the right word and Orwell
uses it. He does not want to be helped. He wants to be helped without it
being help.
And she calls him on it. Directly, once, and he does not like it.
She tells him he is not the man he was before. And the important thing is
what she says about this: she does not say he has gone down. She says he has
got a different face.
That is one of the most exact observations in the book about what poverty
does, and it is not about money.
It is about the face. It is about what a person's face does when they have
had to ask for food for four months. The muscles around the mouth change.
The way a man looks at a cup of coffee when it is put in front of him changes
from pleasure to calculation. The greeting changes from greeting to
assessment.
And the narrator had not noticed this happening to him. He had been looking
at other people and assessing their faces and had not once thought to look at
his own.
The moment is worth being precise about because it is the moment the book
turns from observation into autobiography. He has spent months studying the
poor as a category. He has learned the techniques, the timings, the cardinal
rules of eating. He has written down the system. And he has not noticed that
his own face has changed, because a person cannot see their own face and no
one in his life is going to say it to him.
That is the finding, and it is the reason this book cannot be dismissed as
a tourist's account. Everyone who writes about poverty is a tourist. This
is a man who has been inside it long enough for his face to have changed and
who has to be told about it by someone who is also inside it.
And she is inside it in a way he is not, because she is a woman and he is a
man, and the street she is on at night is not the street he is on at night,
and both of them know that and neither of them says it in this chapter.
The offer she makes is money. She offers it and he takes it, and taking it is
a chapter in itself and Orwell gives it the space it needs.
He is explicit that he is ashamed of taking it. He is explicit that he is
taking it. He does not resolve the contradiction and does not pretend the
money did not solve an immediate problem, and the two facts sit side by side
in the text without a judgement being passed on either.
The thing he will not do is take her to bed, and he explains why in a sentence
that is almost the best in the book: because he knows what he would be doing,
and it is not taking what he is being offered.
He is not a saint. He has no interest in her and he does not pretend otherwise
in the private. But he is aware that the transaction available to him is
available to him *because* of his condition, and that accepting it would be
indistinguishable from accepting the position he is in.
Orwell is careful, and the care is the point: he does not say that the poor
man is above exploiting the poor woman. He says that in this particular
arrangement the man and the woman are not in the same position even though
both are in the same street, and the whole difference is a thing the woman
cannot afford.
The chapter closes on the balloon seller and the narrator sitting in a café
together, and she is telling him about her life and about the men she has
known, and she is not performing anything, and the narrator is not studying
her, and this is the first rest in the book.
Orwell notes — briefly, and without emphasis — that he cannot remember the
last time he had talked to a woman who was not either selling something to
him or about to be arrested.
That is the sentence that is allowed to stand without argument, because it
is a fact about his circumstances and not a claim about his character.
---
There is a man who lives under the iron railway arches at the edge of Paris,
and he is dying, and he is not a tramp, and that is the point of him.
He is Arab. He is somewhere in his forties. He was something in his own
country — a shopkeeper, a person with a trade — and he came to France and
worked for years, in the kind of work that is available to a man with no
papers, and he is now under a bridge with a disease.
What he wants is baptism.
Not in a vague way. He wants it urgently and he has been thinking about it for
a long time, and the reason is plain and it is not religious sentiment at
all: he wants to be buried in consecrated ground. He has watched enough of
what happens to unburied bodies to know what the alternative is, and he has
decided that this is the one thing he wants before he dies.
He cannot get it because he does not speak French well enough for a priest to
be certain he understands what he is agreeing to, and because the priest will
not baptise a man he cannot establish is asking.
Orwell's narrator found him a priest. This is the good part and the bad part
of the chapter at once: he goes to a vicar who agrees to come, on the
understanding that the man is asked some questions.
And the questions are about the doctrine, and the man answers them, and he
answers them very seriously and he answers them well — because he has been
preparing. He has been asking other people what the beliefs are so that he
could be sure before he died.
And then the priest asks him about his intention in a particular way, and
the man answers, and the priest reads the answer as an assent that is
adequate.
Orwell's narrator understands immediately what has happened and cannot stop
it, and it is the most painful thing in the book because it is kindness.
The man said yes because he wanted to be buried. The priest heard yes because
he wanted the man to be baptised. Both wanted the same outcome and the
outcome was achieved, and the man is baptised, and it did not mean what either
of them thought it meant.
This is the whole of the chapter and it is the whole of a great deal of the
world. Two people, each wanting to give and to receive something good, and a
word between them that both hear as agreement and neither means the same
thing by. No villain. No fraud. A language with a gap in it and two people
who both need it to be smaller than it is.
The man dies a few days later and is buried.
And the narrator is left with the thing that is actually the horror of it,
which is not the mistake. It is that he is the only person who knows what
happened, and he cannot tell anyone, because telling would require either
undoing the burial or admitting that the burial was not what it appeared to
be, and neither is possible, and the dead man's family — if he has one in the
country — would not understand the question anyway.
So a man lies in consecrated ground believing something, and the man who put
him there is the only person who knows he believed something else, and that
knowledge is a weight with no use.
This chapter is the reason the book is not merely sad. Sadness is a condition.
This is a mechanism, and the mechanism is legible, and it can be described,
and describing it is what makes it possible to do something about it.
The bridge itself is described at the beginning with the same flat precision
as everything else. The arches. The way they are arranged. The fact that they
are a piece of engineering from the 1840s that was never designed for housing
and that has been used for housing because there is nothing else, and that
the people living there have made it livable in ways that are not recorded
anywhere.
There is a man there who has built a bed out of sacking. There is a
collection of objects that have been left by the river or found in the
streets. There is a woman who cooks on a fire that is not meant to be a fire.
And there is the detail that makes the place real: the place is not squalid.
It is orderly. The man who lives there keeps it. He has arranged it, and it
is his, and a man who arranged his belongings on an iron arch under a railway
in Paris has done something that requires the same order as a man who
arranged his belongings in a house.
That is the observation the narrator is reaching for and does not fully
state: the condition of the poor is not chaos. It is order under impossible
conditions. And when the book later turns to the workhouse, the contrast is
exact — the lodging is orderly and the institution is chaotic, and the reason
is that one is a home and the other is a queue.
The chapter ends with the burial and with the narrator walking back through
Paris at night.
He notices, and this is Orwell's method working at its best, that the city is
full of people walking about who are not going anywhere, and that this is
being done for the sake of appearing to be going somewhere, and that in the
street population there are also people walking about all night for no reason
at all, and that the difference between them is one of destination and that
both look identical from outside.
Two populations performing the same motion, one of them because they have
lives and one of them because a body that stops moving in that weather stops
being a body. And from the outside, and from above, and from a first-floor
window in a warm room, they are one population doing one thing.
---
He goes back to England with a small amount of money and a plan, and the
plan is to do some work that will last, and the reason he thinks it will last
is that he now understands labour better than he did.
This is the part of the book that surprises people who expect the Paris
chapters to be the whole work. The Paris section is the worst of it. The
London section is not an improvement. It is the same thing with the accent
removed.
He goes to the docks to look for casual work. What he finds is the opposite
of what he expected, and the discovery is stated once, plainly, and it is the
thesis of the chapter:
The dock labour is organised so as to give a man a few days' work and then
none, indefinitely.
The system is not secret and it is not cruel in its language. The men
supervising it speak of the men as irregular, as casual, as unreliable. The
words are accurate. A man who is hired for two days and then not hired again
*is* irregular. He has to be.
And the consequence is that a population of thousands of men maintain
constant, exhausting availability for employment that they are not considered
to be employed in, and there is no mechanism anywhere in the arrangement by
which the availability becomes a claim.
Orwell has been in the Paris system and he recognises it immediately. It is
the workhouse queue with a wage instead of a meal, and it is worse, because
the workhouse at least gives you something at the end of the day and this
gives you nothing.
There is a young man there who has a wife and a child in a room somewhere in
East London, and the narrator spends time with him, and the young man is
brilliant — that is the detail, and it is the detail that makes the chapter
unanswerable.
He is not a docker by accident. He is as competent a man as the narrator will
meet in the book, he is articulate, he thinks, and he is applying for work
every morning for eleven days and getting two days of it in a fortnight.
And he says something to the narrator that the narrator admits he has no
answer to. He asks whether the narrator thinks it is worth it. Whether any of
this is worth doing. And the narrator, who has an Oxford degree and a
technique for eating, has nothing.
The answer Orwell eventually arrives at is the swan.
There is a man on the river at the docks who is training a swan. He does it
every evening at a set hour, on the water, and the swan's name is written on
the side of the boat in the way a racehorse's name is written on its owner's
arm.
This is not a joke and Orwell does not use it as one. The man spends every
evening of his life teaching a bird to do a thing for a competition that is
held once a year and that he may well lose, and there is a competitor on
almost every reach of that river doing exactly the same thing, and they know
each other, and the whole river is full of men training birds.
And it is a competition with rules and judges and a date, which is more than
the dock labour has, and the swan has a name and an owner and a trainer who
is not being paid, and it will be recorded.
The narrator's conclusion is not that the dock men are stupid or that a swan
is a swan. It is that a thing with a name, a date, and a judge is a
different kind of thing from a thing with a queue.
And then he does something that is the best piece of social observation in the
book: he watches the men on the riverbank while the swans race.
The men who are training swans and the men who are watching are not the same
population and they are not, in Orwell's phrase, watching each other the way
one watches another when they are in the same situation. They are watching
each other the way people watch people who are doing something.
He is describing class separation inside a single physical space. Men stand
along the bank and watch other men compete in boats and the watching has a
distance in it, and the distance is not dislike. It is the difference between
two people who have a stake in the same afternoon and two people who have a
stake in different afternoons.
And the narrator is standing on the bank with the second group and does not
belong to either, and Orwell says he has the sense to feel like a
spectator.
He has been poor for several months. He has learned the techniques. He knows
more about how to survive without money than most employed people will learn in
a lifetime. And on the riverbank he is a spectator at a thing that his
condition has placed him outside of, and the condition has not taken anything
from him — it has given him a great deal — and he is watching other people
compete for a thing.
The difference between Paris and London, which is not a difference of
severity, is that London is home and in London he has a class position.
He has not been hungry in a different way in Paris. He has been hungry in the
*same* way. But in Paris he was an Englishman without money, which is a
category with no shame attached. In London he is an Englishman without money,
and there is a whole apparatus of things that assumes a man in his position
does not exist.
The chapter ends with the race and with the narrator watching from the bank,
and with the observation that he could, if he wished, spend the rest of his
life there, and that it would be the easiest possible life, and that it would
consist of watching other people's afternoons.
---
There is a law about sleeping in the street and it dates from 1838.
The narrator is arrested under it. The whole of the chapter is the inside of
a police court and a cell and a sentence, and it is the most technically
detailed part of the book and the least rhetorical.
What the law says is that a person who cannot show that they have somewhere
to sleep may be arrested. What it means in practice is that the burden of
proof runs the wrong way: you are required to demonstrate a legal address,
and almost every person who could satisfy that requirement is not in a police
court, and the man in the court is there because he cannot.
He says he has a room. He does not, any more. He says the lodging house will
hold his things. He gives an address. And the address is not his and the
magistrate knows it is not his and it makes no difference.
Orwell is careful to state the mechanism without stating that anyone is
lying. Everyone is behaving reasonably. The lodging house is a lodging house
and does not have a legal relationship with the people in it. The magistrate
is applying a statute that presumes that a person who cannot name an address
has none. The narrator is not a criminal and is not accused of being one.
He is convicted, and the sentence is three months.
And the reason the chapter is necessary is that he has been writing about
this population from the outside and now he is inside the machine, and the
machine does not know what he is.
Prison, in his account, is not starvation. Prison in that decade is
miserable, overcrowded, and full of men who are genuinely criminal, and he is
none of those things, and he learns more from the men in the cell than from
anyone he has met in a month of queueing.
The man who teaches him how to survive is not a tramp. That distinction is
made again and it is the chapter's method: the expertise is not held by the
tramps. It is held by the prisoners.
The man has done time, several times, for real offences, and he has been on
the inside of the system long enough to know how it actually operates, and
what he teaches the narrator is a set of techniques for converting nothing into
a meal.
Hunger as technique. It is done by rationing. You do not eat when you are
hungry. You divide what you have into portions and you eat them at intervals
so that the interval does not become unbearable. You eat slowly. You do not
look at other people's food.
The man is not proud of this and he does not apologise for it. He describes
it the way a man describes anything he is very good at. He has been inside
the machine for years and he knows the machine and the machine does not
congratulate him.
And he explains the system with a clarity the narrator could not have
reached any other way: the reason a man can be imprisoned for being poor is
that being poor is a public nuisance, and the category is not a crime but a
conduct. He is not charged with an offence. He is charged with a condition.
Which is why the charge works. You can prove you did not commit a crime by
not having committed one. You cannot prove you are not poor.
And the chapter includes the detail that makes the whole arrangement
intelligible: the man who has been in prison before knows what a man looks
like when he has nothing, and can tell at a glance, and the police can also
tell at a glance, and neither of them is using a written test.
The identification is visual. It is the narrator's face again — the face the
balloon-seller's daughter told him he had acquired. He had not known he had
acquired it. There it is, and it is legible to a man who has spent a
fortnight looking at other men's faces for the purpose of deciding whether
they can be trusted with a cell.
That is the section of the book I would put beside the balloon-seller's
daughter, because the two are the same fact seen from opposite ends. Poverty
is not only made of money. It is made of a face that can be read by strangers
and cannot be taken back.
The sentence is served at a labour centre where men are put to work and are
paid nothing beyond the keep, and the work is a form of the plank and the saw
that the narrator saw in the Paris workhouse, and he recognises it on the
first day.
Orwell's narrator is now inside the exact institution he wrote about from
outside, and the machine has not changed, and nobody has lied.
There is a chapter in most of these books where the author arrives in a city
with nothing. There is not often a chapter where the author arrives at the
same institution a second time having spent five months learning that the
institution is not going to be different, and it is not the same, because
the first time he was looking at the machine and the second time he is
looking at the queue.
The tuppence bed at the end of the chapter is the cheapest lodging in
London, and the narrator sleeps there, and the chapter closes on the
discovery that after prison the hardest part is not the return but the
adjustment of expectations — that a man coming out of a cell has to relearn
the technique of moving without direction, and that most of them do not.
---
There is a church in Soho that opens its doors to people who have nowhere to
sleep, and the narrator spends a night in it, and the chapter is about what
happens when the warmth is the only thing offered.
He is not received as a penitent. He is received as a man who cannot pay,
which in that building is an unremarkable condition and is treated with the
same practicality as being short of breath.
The chapter contains a priest who is kind in a way that has no interest in
the man's situation, and that is the point of the priest. He is not kind
*because* the narrator is destitute. He is kind in the ordinary way of a man
who has been kind to a great many people and does not distinguish between
them, and the narrator, who has spent months being treated as a category,
finds this so unfamiliar that he does not know how to respond.
There is a woman in the church who has been coming for a long time and has
nowhere else to go either, and the two of them end up talking, and she
describes her own arrangement with enormous practicality. She is not a
vagabond. She has worked. She has been in service. She has a room somewhere
that she cannot pay for.
The narrator's account of what poverty actually costs is contained in her
description, and it is not a list of hardships. It is a list of small
administrative failures: a room at a week's notice, an employer who pays on
a Friday, a bed that is not there on the Sunday, a letter that arrives too
late to be answered.
The thing that no arrangement in the book anticipates is the timing. Not
the amount of money and not the absence of work — the timing. Money arrives
on a Friday and rent is due on the Saturday. A bed is available on Tuesday
and not on Wednesday. A job ends on a day that does not align with the week
in which the wages would have covered it.
Orwell's arithmetic is brutal here and it is arithmetic, not rhetoric: a man
with no money and no place has to solve a scheduling problem every single day,
and the scheduling problem is solvable for about a certain number of days,
and then it stops being solvable.
The chapter includes the account of what the narrator actually spends, which
is one of the few places in twentieth-century literature where the daily cost
of living without money is set out accurately.
And it includes the bookstall.
There is a man outside the church who has set up a stall of second-hand
books. He is buying them at a price. And a man comes up and trades a book for
bread, and the bookseller takes it and gives him food, and the transaction is
ordinary and is not moralised.
But the narrator looks at the box of books and does the arithmetic that he
has been learning to do all winter, and realises that the man who trades
a book for bread is being paid in something he cannot eat, and that the
bookseller's margin depends on being able to resell, and that for a man in
that position the books have no use and the bread has no other use, and
neither of them can hold the other's thing.
The bookseller is not a villain. He is a small businessman who will accept
whatever is offered. And the whole of what the chapter is describing is a
population that has been systematically separated from every object of value
in the society it lives in, while remaining inside that society, and able to
see the objects.
The pawnbroker's shop is described in the same chapter and for the same
reason. There are men outside it with objects they have brought and have not
gone in, and the reason they have not gone in is arithmetic — the loan is a
fraction of the value and the transaction costs a percentage and a man with
four shillings cannot afford to lose a shilling on a shilling.
The chapter ends with the narrator going back to the church on a later night
and finding that the arrangement has been stopped, and the reason given is
not unkindness. It is that there is not enough room.
That is the whole of it, and Orwell does not editorialise: the church wanted
to do this and there is not enough room. The system does not require anyone
to be unkind. It requires only that the demand for shelter exceed the supply,
and it is an ordinary Tuesday in a cold month in a city where a great many
people have nowhere to sleep.
The narrator's last thought in the chapter is not about the church. It is
about a man he has seen on the street several times and has never spoken to,
and who is in exactly his position, and whom he has assumed, without checking,
is beyond being spoken to.
He was wrong. He had made the classification the way everybody makes it, and
he had not checked, and the checking would have taken thirty seconds of
courtesy.
He does not go and do it. He notes that he does not, and he notes why, and
the why is that it would require him to admit what he is to a stranger, and
that this is not a hardship but a small preference which most people in his
position share and which no one is going to arrange for them.
---
He is on the Embankment for three weeks. The three weeks are not a
preparation for anything. They are the last stage of a process that has been
running since a man got hit in the mouth in the rain in Paris.
He sleeps under a stone arch at the north end of Waterloo Bridge. He has a
routine, and the routine is the technique, and the technique is now fluent:
leave at night, get up before dawn, do not buy anything until the hour when
food is discarded, spend nothing in sight of a shop where the assistants can
see you, keep moving through the coldest hours because the body generates
heat by moving.
And he is sick. He has been sick for weeks and he does not know what is wrong
with him and is not going to find out, and Orwell records this without
dignifying it.
Then, on the last afternoon, two men come along the bank.
They are not rough. That is the detail the whole chapter turns on and it is
the detail every retelling gets wrong. They are ordinary, polite young men,
and they ask him whether he is all right, and they ask it in English, and
they are not being cruel, and he is not drunk and they know he is not drunk.
They ask him what he is doing.
And he answers, and the answer is the whole book in a sentence: he says that
he has had a bit of food on the Embankment and is waiting for a man who is
going to give him a job cleaning a boiler.
That is what he tells them. It is not a lie in the sense of being false. It
is the sentence he uses, it is the currency of the street, it is what is said
when a man on that bank is asked a question by someone in a clean collar, and
it is designed to end the conversation.
And the young man sees through it. Not maliciously. He sees that the answer
is an answer shaped to stop further questions, and he asks again.
And then he asks the question the chapter is built on, and it is asked
politely, and it is not the question about the job:
What is it exactly you do?
And the narrator understands that the man is not being cruel. The man has
looked at him and has decided that he is not simply a vagrant who has fallen
on hard times. He has decided that something is wrong with him, specifically,
and he is asking, as one person to another, what it is.
There is no answer available.
Orwell's narrator has been poor for four months and has a technique and a
routine and a great deal of information about how to be poor and about how
the system works, and he cannot produce the sentence that this question
requires. Because the honest answer is that he does not know. And because the
almost-honest answer is that he is not a tramp and never was and has not
understood how to become one, and that this is not a thing a man on that bank
can say to a clean-collared stranger without being seen to have collapsed.
The question hangs. And then the young man does the thing that ends it, and
he does it gently, and Orwell records it as gently:
He gives the narrator money.
Not much. A shilling or two. And he says it is for the boiler, or he says he
hopes the man is all right, and it is arranged so that neither of them has to
say what is happening.
And the narrator takes it. Because the technique requires that he take it —
because a man on that bank who refuses money is making a statement, and the
statement is expensive, and the whole of the last four months has been the
learning of that.
The two men walk on.
And then the chapter does the thing that makes it unbearable, and it is the
last page of the book.
Three men come along the bank. They see what has happened. They see the two
who gave money, and they see the man who took it, and they understand exactly
what they are looking at.
And they walk on.
Three men, walking past a man on a stone arch, at dusk, on a cold day, who
has just been given money by strangers, and they walk on, and Orwell does not
condemn them and does not praise them.
He states only this: that this is what happens, that it happens all day in
every city, and that it is not cruelty and it is not cowardice in any way a
person would recognise themselves, and that it is the product of a social
arrangement and not of three individual failures of nerve.
And then the narrator lies down on the bank, and puts the newspaper over
himself, and waits for morning.
He does not die. Orwell was specific about this afterwards: the man who
wrote this book lived for the rest of his life and wrote about what he had
seen. The chapter does not end with a death. It ends with a man lying under a
newspaper on the Embankment, because he has nowhere else to be, and because
the book is not about his death.
The last image is the newspaper. A sheet of print over a body, held down at
the corners against the wind, doing the work that a blanket does in a house.
And the thing he has learned, which he sets down in the last paragraph and
which is the whole of what four months were for:
that it is not poverty that is terrible, and it is not hunger and it is not
the cold. That it is the being looked at.
He has been hungry for months and the hunger was a technique. He has slept
outdoors and it was an engineering problem with cardboard. He has been in a
cell and it was a set of rules he could learn.
What he could not bear was three men walking past.
And the reason that is unbearable, and the reason it is not a feeling that could
be argued with, is that it is accurate. He is what they saw. The whole
four months have been a process of becoming a thing that can be seen at a
glance, and the process worked, and here is the evidence, and it is three men
walking on.
He is not a tramp. He was never a tramp. He has a degree and he can get work
and he has people who would send him money if he wrote to them.
And the last line of the book is the newspaper, and the wind, and the morning
coming, and a man lying perfectly still in order not to be looked at any
further than necessary.
---
Orwell wrote this book at thirty years old, after four months of being
poor by his own account, and afterwards he said that he had not been poor
enough. He meant it in a specific way and it is the last thing worth saying
here.
He had an Oxford address. He had a way out that took one letter. He had
enough education to know that the question on the Embankment was a real
question and worth answering, and enough to know that he could not answer it.
Three men on a bank would have seen a foreigner. What they saw was
something else, and it was something he had made, and the making of it is
described in this book in the most exact language of the twentieth century,
and the description does not flatter anybody, least of all the man who made it.
The tramp is a man who has nothing. This is what that makes: it is a man who
has nothing and who is visible.
