George Orwell 1: The Best Gap Yah, great food writing and Paris hotels: Down and Out in Paris and London

Secret Life of Books

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In the winter of 1927, George Orwell dropped his aitches, pulled on his distressed tailored trousers, and took the first of many trips to the underbelly of London society. Over the following years, he spent long stints amongst the homeless and starving people of both Paris and London. He collected these experiences into his first book Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), conveniently leaving out the weekends and kitchen sups with mater and pater.

Orwell’s intention was partly to draw attention to the appalling social inequality of France and England after the First World War, but also simply to allow his imagination to wallow in scenes of surreal vividness and black humour.

In this - the first in a four-part series about Orwell’s life, work and times - Sophie and Jonty look at the circumstances that lead to his first, and still one of his best-loved, books. They focus on two of his most famous essays that provide unique insights into his early years.

In Such, Such Were the Joys, Orwell wrote about his experience of English boarding school, where he developed an ineradicable sense of himself as intrinsically doomed and disgusting, of a world where bullies will always triumph and where the underdog can never win. In Shooting an Elephant, Orwell recounts his years working for the Indian Police in the 1920s and his realisation that the British Empire was a corrupt, murderous regime.

Finally, Sophie and Jonty follow Orwell into the mean streets of Paris’ 5th arrondissement and London’s Whitechapel, the scenes of brutality that follow and a truly bizarre encounter with another Old Etonian in a slum lodging-house.

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Content warning: mild bad language

Books mentioned:

Orwell: The New Life (2023) by DJ Taylor

WIFEDOM (2023) by Anna Funder

Essays by George Orwell

The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) by George Orwell

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) by George Orwell

David Copperfield (1850) by Charles Dickens

New Grub Street (1891) by George Gissing

Nadja by (1928) Andre Breton

Paris Peasant by (1926) Louis Aragon

Tom Jones (1749) - as ever - by Henry Fielding

Gulliver’s Travels (1726) - as ever - by Jonathan Swift

Tales of Mean Streets (1894) by Arthur Morrison

People of the Abyss (1904) by Jack London

Tropic of Cancer (1934) by Henry Miller

Kitchen Confidential (2000) by Anthony Bourdain

The Tramp Ward (1904) by Mary Higgs

Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908) by WH Davies

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