Book description
'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 'H tel X', living alongside tramps, surviving on scraps and
cigarette butts - in an unforgettable account of what being down and
out is really like.
Includes an introduction by Dervla Murphy, as well as definitive
footnotes assigned to Orwell.
Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell) was born in 1903 in India, where
his father worked for the Civil Service. The family moved to England
in 1907 and in 1917 Orwell entered Eton, where he contributed
regularly to the various college magazines. From 1922 to 1927 he
served with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, an experience that
inspired his first novel, Burmese Days (1934). Several years of
poverty followed. He lived in Paris for two years before returning to
England, where he worked successively as a private tutor,
schoolteacher and bookshop assistant, and contributed reviews and
articles to a number of periodicals. Down and Out in Paris and
London was published in 1933. In 1936 he was commissioned by
Victor Gollancz to visit areas of mass unemployment in Lancashire and
Yorkshire, and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) is a powerful
description of the poverty he saw there. At the end of 1936 Orwell
went to Spain to fight for the Republicans and was wounded. Homage
to Catalonia is his account of the civil war. He was admitted to
a sanatorium in 1938 and from then on was never fully fit. He spent
six months in Morocco and there wrote Coming Up for Air. During
the Second World War he served in the Home Guard and worked for the
BBC Eastern Service from 1941 to 1943. As literary editor of the
Tribune he contributed a regular page of political and literary
commentary, and he also wrote for the Observer and later for
the Manchester Evening News. His unique political allegory,
Animal Farm was published in 1945, and it was this novel,
together with Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which brought him
world-wide fame.
George Orwell died in London in January 1950.
