Down and Out in Paris and London

(Hardback)

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Description

Orwell's first published book, Down and Out in Paris and London, is at once a very personal account, an expos of poverty-stricken lives between the wars, and a call for social and economic reform. Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket-sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition is introduced by writer Lara Feigel. Towards the end of the 1920s, whilst living in Paris, Orwell's few remaining funds are stolen and he falls into a life of severe poverty. Living hand to mouth, with barely a centime to his name, he shares squalid lodgings with Russian-born Boris and, for a while, finds tedious and back-breaking work as a 'plongeur' - washing up in the bowels of Paris restaurants. Back in England he lives as a tramp, finding occasional shelter in dangerous and filthy doss houses.

Reviews

The thief who took the last of an ailing George Orwells money from his Paris room in 1929 did a big favour to political literature. -- Vanessa Thorpe * Observer *
Little that Orwell has written, here and elsewhere, has lost the hum of relevancy, from the causes of poverty and its long-term effects it annihilates the future to its everyday toll of boredom. -- Laurence Mackin * Irish Times *
Down and Out is an extraordinary and curious book: beautifully phrased, meticulous, honest and funny. George Orwells 1933 memoir, and a study of poverty, is a book both rooted in its era and able to transcend it. * Independent *
Orwells is a plea for empathy for the laborer, the tramp, and the impoverished . . . [it] is a fascinating anthropological study of poverty, its empirical value tarnished by its richly entertaining prose, and overt imposition of Orwells political dispositions upon his observations. * Medium *
Books like Down and Out show us that the line between deprivation and success can be a very thin one. The latter is often achieved through learning how to love the former . . . What makes [it] fantastic is his lucid prose. * LA Review of Books *
Have a look at the book and catch the strange fascination of the telling. Vivid and lurid and unappetizing, are the pictures he gives of what goes on behind the scenes, human and otherwise. * Kirkus Reviews *

Author Bio

Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell) was born in 1903 in India, where his father was a civil servant. After studying at Eton, he served with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma for several years, and this inspired his first novel, Burmese Days. After two years in Paris, he returned to England to work as a teacher and then in a bookshop. In 1936 he travelled to Spain to fight for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, where he was badly wounded. During the Second World War he worked for the BBC. A prolific journalist and essayist, Orwell wrote some of the most influential books in English literature, including the dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four and his political allegory Animal Farm. He died from tuberculosis in 1950.