Down and Out in Paris and London
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  • Published: 3 June 2025
  • ISBN: 9781784878993
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $22.99
Categories:

Down and Out in Paris and London

Formats & editions
Paperback
3 Jun 2025
Paperback
25 Sep 2013
Paperback
11 Feb 2013
Paperback
2 Nov 2001
EBook
14 Jan 2021
EBook
2 Nov 2001
Audiobook
7 Jan 2021
Tr. Paperback
30 Aug 2018
Hardback
20 Oct 2020
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Orwell's memoir of living in poverty in Paris during the 1920s.

'You can live on a shilling a day in Paris if you know how. But it is a complicated business'

As a struggling writer in his twenties, Orwell lived as a down-and-out among the poorest members of society. In this, his early memoir, Orwell recalls with vivid clarity his time working as a penniless dishwasher in Paris, pawning clothes to buy a day's worth of bread and wine, sleeping in bug-infested bunks, trading survival skills and cigarette butts with fellow tramps, and trudging between London's workhouse spikes for a few hours' sleep and tea. With all of the sensitivity and compassion that Orwell is known and loved for, he exposed the hardships of poverty and gave readers an unprecedented look at life lived on the fringes of society.

This vivid account is an enduring call to support the world's most vulnerable people and exemplifies his belief that 'The greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty.'

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY KERRY HUDSON
  • Published: 3 June 2025
  • ISBN: 9781784878993
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $22.99
Categories:

Also by George Orwell

Nineteen Eighty-Four
Animal Farm
Fascism and Democracy
Notes on Nationalism
Books v. Cigarettes
Why I Write
Can Socialists be Happy?
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Praise for Down and Out in Paris and London

Orwell was the great moral force of his age

Spectator

An extraordinary and curious book: beautifully phrased, meticulous, honest and funny. George Orwell’s 1933 memoir, and a study of poverty, is a book both rooted in its era and able to transcend it... a book that has inspired countless people to try to understand the personal and political issues at the heart of homelessness – and continues to do so today.

Hannah Price

The white-hot reaction of a sensitive, observant, compassionate young man to poverty'

Dervla Murphy

Vivid and lurid and unappetizing, are the pictures he gives of what goes on behind the scenes, human and otherwise

Kirkus

It was the book of nonfiction in which he becomes George Orwell

D. J. Taylor
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