George Orwell's vivid memoir of his time living among the desperately poor and destitute, Down and Out in Paris and London is a moving tour of the underworld of society
'You have talked so often of going to the dogs - and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them.'
Written when Orwell was a struggling writer in his twenties, it documents his 'first contact with poverty'. Here, he painstakingly documents a world of unrelenting drudgery and squalor - sleeping in bug-infested hostels and doss houses of last resort, working as a dishwasher in Paris's vile 'Hôtel X', surviving on scraps and cigarette butts, living alongside tramps, a star-gazing pavement artist and a starving Russian ex-army captain. Exposing a shocking, previously-hidden world to his readers, Orwell gave a human face to the statistics of poverty for the first time - and in doing so, found his voice as a writer.
- Women's History Month 2025
- Women Write Fiction
- New eBook additions
- Available now
- Most popular
- Childhood Classic eBooks
- Dyslexia
- Unmissable Picture Books
- Try something different
- Crime Doesn't Pay
- Novella & Short Story Classics
- Read-Along
- Out-of-this-world Sci-Fi
- See all ebooks collections
- Women's History Month 2025
- Women Write Fiction
- New audiobook additions
- Books on Film
- Try something different
- Available now
- Read by a Celeb
- Most popular
- New kids additions
- New teen additions
- Interesting Lives: Memoirs & Biographies
- Crime Doesn't Pay
- Popular Audiobooks
- See all audiobooks collections