Down and Out in Paris and London, by George Orwell

Orwell lives on "the fringes of poverty" in Paris and London, compares notes.
As usual, I don't know much of his personal history and maybe he was terrible in ways I don't know but... man, Orwell comes across as a really great guy in this book? Just, like, decent and empathetic and observant. Assuming the book is even generally-vaguely-true I respect him a lot for, you know, graduating from Eton and then going off to be a dishwasher and a vagrant.

Something I hadn't known was that tramps in England in Orwell's time were forced to tramp (i.e. walk long distances) because of the legal regime. "I have even read in a book of criminality that a tramp is an atavism to the nomadic stage of humanity. But a tramp tramps for the same reason a car stays on the left: the law compels him! If not supported by the parish he must stay in a spike [casual ward of a workhouse], and the spike will not allow him to stay more than one night." If he did he would be locked up for 7 days. So basically each municipality wanted to avoid responisbility for feeding and housing the homeless, and as a result they were forced to walk a circuit around England so that they never stayed in the same municipality more than one night a month. And you weren't allowed into the spike if you owned more than eightpence, so you had to either hide your money (buried in the ground, or sown into your clothes), or earn and spend it all each day. This is all insane, and Orwell rightly says so. I think this was a rare time when I read a book and really felt a way that things have gotten better in the world, I guess because it felt familiar enough and close enough to my world (through timing, place, and Orwell's style and substance) that it felt viscerally comparable.

Some other observations on tramps: "Tramps are cut off from women because there are none at their level; below a certain level, society is entirely male. One great evil of a tramp's life is enforced celibacy." "The other great evil is uselessness. They expend so much energy for nothing."

Also, Orwell writes something I have always felt about staying in hostels and it's funny to read it written decades before me: "the law should demand that a lodging house be divided into cubicles. It doesn't matter how small they are; the important thing is that a man should be alone when he sleeps." But of course it's not just that the law doesn't-demand this, the law actually forbids it: I talked to a hostel-owner in London once and he said he has to abide by regulations about the angle of sunlight available in every room, and that's why he can't cut his big rooms up into small ones. (I wish Orwell could have seen a capsule hotel, though, I guess he would have liked that).

Orwell seems to have a good grasp on the role of dignity in human life, and seems to me the rare journalist who has something interesting to say about economics. "What is work? Begging is a trade like any other, quite useless of course, but so are many trades. Why are beggars despised then? Because they fail to earn a decent living. Nobody cares if work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic, so long as it is profitable. Money has become the grand test of virtue."

Orwell befriends a stoic screever (pavement artist), whose stoicism is so perfect that I did have to wonder how real the character was (or at least, how much Orwell's view and description of him was shaped by Orwell's classics education). "You can have cartoons of any of the parties but you mustn't have anything in favour of socialism because the police won't stand it." He draws a cartoon of Churchill pushing an elephant representing the budget and captions it "can he budge it?" -- was it ever thus....

Fun but otherwise unplaceable fact: Cockney dialect only emerged in the 1840s and was first described in writing by Herman Melville (?!). "Thirty years ago [from 1933] the rhyming slang was all the rage. Now it is almost extinct". Also: The word bloody had by now moved up the social scale, is only used by the upper class, and ceased to be a swearword for the working classes. The current London "adjective tacked onto every noun is fucking. No doubt in time fucking, like bloody, will find its way into the drawing room, and be replaced by some other." (Incidentally, Orwell says fucking is no longer used to actually refer to fucking -- I guess this is still somewhat-true?, though in some circles I think it's come around again). "Swearing is as irrational as magic; indeed, it is a species of magic." "A word becomes an oath because it means a certain thing, and because it has become an oath it ceases to mean that thing."

Random image: at one of the boarding houses, Orwell sees a naked man who sells newspapers buying all the clothes off another man's body and leaving him with a sheet of newspaper to wrap himself with. I don't know what to do with that but, damn, what an image.

The Salvation Army runs lodging houses which are relatively clean and affordable but run with military discipline.

"Two men were playing chess verbally, not even writing down the moves. They'd been saving up for a long time to buy a board but could never make it."

The tramps are given sixpence meal tickets that are only valid at specific coffeeshops along their route. So they regularly get cheated by the cafes, who only give them fourpence or whatever of tea and toast, because they can't go anywhere else. Was it ever thus, again.

Orwell mocks "the superstition that there is some fundamental difference between rich and poor, like they were two different races, like negros and white men." [Ok so... yeah, admittedly one-half of that is not so progressive. But the other half is well ahead of its time, and well ahead of our time]. Orwell thinks it comes from a fear by the rich and middle-classes that if they gave up their privilege the mob would run loose, but in fact "since there is no difference between rich and poor, the mob is in fact loose now".

Posted without comment: "trust a snake before a Jew, and a Jew before a Greek, but never trust an Armenian". Ok, a comment: I actually wouldn't have expected that ordering!

Anyway. Some things about waitering and dishwashing, from his time in Paris.
"A waiter is ministering to a kind of pleasure he thoroughly understands and admires. That is why waiters are seldom socialists. They are snobs. They see themselves vicariously in their customers' feasts, and hope to become them some day."

"We have made a fetish of manual work [like dishwashing in restaurants]," and "their work is not necessary it is a luxury." Orwell argues this via rickshaw drivers, which he assumes his readers will agree are an unnecessary profession living in hardship so the rich can enjoy a luxury, presumably because his audience is European/American and doesn't have rickshaw drivers -- that makes sense obviously but I found it interesting. Anyway, Orwell says that what makes the work in hotels and restaurants back-breaking is not the essentials but the "shams that are supposed to represent luxury." And that everyone knows you can get a better dinner at home than at any expensive restaurant.

The book also has a bunch of cut-aways to stories that other down-and-outs have told him, including the most disturbing prostitution-and-rape story that I think I've ever read or heard, anywhere. And it struck me that I think if the book was written now with a similar story in it the author would have to be a lot more explicit about condemning it, whereas Orwell just describes it and leaves it at that. Which for me was much more effective, but I don't know if I'm just assuming Orwell felt the same way about it that I did.

Anyway. Recommended across the board, and another one that's very well-read and well-readable in audiobook.