---
title: "Down and Out in Paris and London"
author: "George Orwell"
languages: [en]
shelf: "Literature"
section: 24 of 38
url: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/24/
cite: "George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, section 24. Scriptura (scriptura.si), https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/24/"
---

# Down and Out in Paris and London

*George Orwell*

> * A Distributed Proofreaders Canada eBook *

> This eBook is made available at no cost and with very few
restrictions. These restrictions apply only if (1) you make
a change in the eBook (other than alteration for different
display devices), or (2) you are making commercial use of
the eBook. If either of these conditions applies, please
contact an FP administrator before proceeding.

> This work is in the Canadian public domain, but may be under
copyright in some countries. If you live outside Canada, check your
country's copyright laws. IF THE BOOK IS UNDER COPYRIGHT
IN YOUR COUNTRY, DO NOT DOWNLOAD OR REDISTRIBUTE THIS FILE.

> Title: Down and Out in Paris and London
Date of first publication: 1933
Author: George Orwell (1903-1950)
Date first posted: Mar. 14, 2018
Date last updated: Mar. 14, 2018
Faded Page eBook #20180314

> This eBook was produced by: Delphine Lettau, Howard Ross
& the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net

> GEORGE ORWELL

> _Down and Out_
    _in Paris and London_

> O scathful harm, condicion of poverte!
       CHAUCER

> PENGUIN BOOKS

> First published by Victor Gollancz 1933

> Copyright 1933 by Eric Blair

> [The end of _Down and Out in Paris and London_ by George Orwell]

## 24. Chapter XXIV

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/24/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/24/#p-N

[¶0] I travelled to England third class via Dunkirk and Tilbury, which is the
cheapest and not the worst way of crossing the Channel. You had to pay
extra for a cabin, so I slept in the saloon, together with most of the
third-class passengers. I find this entry in my diary for that day:

[¶1] 'Sleeping in the saloon, twenty-seven men, sixteen women. Of the women,
not a single one has washed her face this morning. The men mostly went
to the bathroom; the women merely produced vanity cases and covered the
dirt with powder. _Q_. A secondary sexual difference?'

[¶2] On the journey I fell in with a couple of Roumanians, mere children, who
were going to England on their honeymoon trip. They asked innumerable
questions about England, and I told them some startling lies. I was so
pleased to be getting home, after being hard up for months in a foreign
city, that England seemed to me a sort of Paradise. There are, indeed,
many things in England that make you glad to get home; bathrooms,
armchairs, mint sauce, new potatoes properly cooked, brown bread,
marmalade, beer made with veritable hops—they are all splendid, if you
can pay for them. England is a very good country when you are not poor;
and, of course, with a tame imbecile to look after, I was not going to
be poor. The thought of not being poor made me very patriotic. The more
questions the Roumanians asked, the more I praised England: the climate,
the scenery, the art, the literature, the laws—everything in England
was perfect.

[¶3] Was the architecture in England good? the Roumanians asked. 'Splendid!'
I said. 'And you should just see the London statues! Paris is
vulgar—half grandiosity and half slums. But London—'

[¶4] Then the boat drew alongside Tilbury pier. The first building we saw on
the waterside was one of those huge hotels, all stucco and pinnacles,
which stare from the English coast like idiots staring over an asylum
wall. I saw the Roumanians, too polite to say anything, cocking their
eyes at the hotel. 'Built by French architects,' I assured them; and
even later, when the train was crawling into London through the eastern
slums, I still kept it up about the beauties of English architecture.
Nothing seemed too good to say about England, now that I was coming home
and was not hard up any more.

[¶5] I went to B.'s office, and his first words knocked everything to ruins.
'I'm sorry,' he said; 'your employers have gone abroad, patient and all.
However, they'll be back in a month. I suppose you can hang on till
then?'

[¶6] I was outside in the street before it even occurred to me to borrow some
more money. There was a month to wait, and I had exactly nineteen and
sixpence in hand. The news had taken my breath away. For a long time I
could not make up my mind what to do. I loafed the day in the streets,
and at night, not having the slightest notion of how to get a cheap bed
in London, I went to a 'family' hotel, where the charge was seven and
sixpence. After paying the bill I had ten and twopence in hand.

[¶7] By the morning I had made my plans. Sooner or later I should have to go
to B. for more money, but it seemed hardly decent to do so yet, and in
the meantime I must exist in some hole-and-corner way. Past experience
set me against pawning my best suit. I would leave all my things at the
station cloakroom, except my second-best suit, which I could exchange
for some cheap clothes and perhaps a pound. If I was going to live a
month on thirty shillings I must have bad clothes—indeed the worse the
better. Whether thirty shillings could be made to last a month I had no
idea, not knowing London as I knew Paris. Perhaps I could beg, or sell
bootlaces, and I remembered articles I had read in the Sunday papers
about beggars who have two thousand pounds sewn into their trousers. It
was, at any rate, notoriously impossible to starve in London, so there
was nothing to be anxious about.

[¶8] To sell my clothes I went down into Lambeth, where the people are poor
and there are a lot of rag shops. At the first shop I tried the
proprietor was polite but unhelpful; at the second he was rude; at the
third he was stone deaf, or pretended to be so. The fourth shopman was a
large blond young man, very pink all over, like a slice of ham. He
looked at the clothes I was wearing and felt them disparagingly between
thumb and finger.

[¶9] 'Poor stuff,' he said, 'very poor stuff, that is.' (It was quite a good
suit.) 'What yer want for 'em?'

[¶10] I explained that I wanted some older clothes and as much money as he
could spare. He thought for a moment, then collected some dirty-looking
rags and threw them onto the counter. 'What about the money?' I said,
hoping for a pound. He pursed his lips, then produced _a shilling_ and
laid it beside the clothes. I did not argue—I was going to argue, but
as I opened my mouth he reached out as though to take up the shilling
again; I saw that I was helpless. He let me change in a small room
behind the shop.

[¶11] The clothes were a coat, once dark brown, a pair of black dungaree
trousers, a scarf and a cloth cap; I had kept my own shirt, socks and
boots, and I had a comb and razor in my pocket. It gives one a very
strange feeling to be wearing such clothes. I had worn bad enough things
before, but nothing at all like these; they were not merely dirty and
shapeless, they had—how is one to express it?—a gracelessness, a
patina of antique filth, quite different from mere shabbiness. They were
the sort of clothes you see on a bootlace seller, or a tramp. An hour
later, in Lambeth, I saw a hang-dog man, obviously a tramp, coming
towards me, and when I looked again it was myself, reflected in a shop
window. The dirt was plastering my face already. Dirt is a great
respecter of persons; it lets you alone when you are well dressed, but
as soon as your collar is gone it flies towards you from all directions.

[¶12] I stayed in the streets till late at night, keeping on the move all the
time. Dressed as I was, I was half afraid that the police might arrest
me as a vagabond, and I dared not speak to anyone, imagining that they
must notice a disparity between my accent and my clothes. (Later I
discovered that this never happened.) My new clothes had put me
instantly into a new world. Everyone's demeanour seemed to have changed
abruptly. I helped a hawker pick up a barrow that he had upset. 'Thanks,
mate,' he said with a grin. No one had called me mate before in my
life—it was the clothes that had done it. For the first time I noticed,
too, how the attitude of women varies with a man's clothes. When a badly
dressed man passes them they shudder away from him with a quite frank
movement of disgust, as though he were a dead cat. Clothes are powerful
things. Dressed in a tramp's clothes it is very difficult, at any rate
for the first day, not to feel that you are genuinely degraded. You
might feel the same shame, irrational but very real, your first night in
prison.

[¶13] At about eleven I began looking for a bed. I had read about doss-houses
(they are never called doss-houses, by the way), and I supposed that one
could get a bed for fourpence or thereabouts. Seeing a man, a navvy or
something of the kind, standing on the kerb in the Waterloo Road, I
stopped and questioned him. I said that I was stony broke and wanted the
cheapest bed I could get.

[¶14] 'Oh,' said he, 'you go to that 'ouse across the street there, with the
sign "Good Beds for Single Men". That's a good kip [sleeping place],
that is. I bin there myself on and off. You'll find it cheap _and_
clean.'

[¶15] It was a tall, battered-looking house, with dim lights in all the
windows, some of which were patched with brown paper. I entered a stone
passage-way, and a little etiolated boy with sleepy eyes appeared from a
door leading to a cellar. Murmurous sounds came from the cellar, and a
wave of hot air and cheese. The boy yawned and held out his hand.

[¶16] 'Want a kip? That'll be a 'og, guv'nor.'

[¶17] I paid the shilling, and the boy led me up a rickety unlighted staircase
to a bedroom. It had a sweetish reek of paregoric and foul linen; the
windows seemed to be tight shut, and the air was almost suffocating at
first. There was a candle burning, and I saw that the room measured
fifteen feet square by eight high, and had eight beds in it. Already six
lodgers were in bed, queer lumpy shapes with all their own clothes, even
their boots, piled on top of them. Someone was coughing in a loathsome
manner in one corner.

[¶18] When I got into the bed I found that it was as hard as a board, and as
for the pillow, it was a mere hard cylinder like a block of wood. It was
rather worse than sleeping on a table, because the bed was not six feet
long, and very narrow, and the mattress was convex, so that one had to
hold on to avoid falling out. The sheets stank so horribly of sweat that
I could not bear them near my nose. Also, the bedclothes only consisted
of the sheets and a cotton counterpane, so that though stuffy it was
none too warm. Several noises recurred throughout the night. About once
in an hour the man on my left—a sailor, I think—woke up, swore vilely,
and lighted a cigarette. Another man, victim of bladder disease, got up
and noisily used his chamber-pot half a dozen times during the night.
The man in the corner had a coughing fit once in every twenty minutes,
so regularly that one came to listen for it as one listens for the next
yap when a dog is baying the moon. It was an unspeakably repellent
sound; a foul bubbling and retching, as though the man's bowels were
being churned up within him. Once when he struck a match I saw that he
was a very old man, with a grey, sunken face like that of a corpse, and
he was wearing his trousers wrapped round his head as a nightcap, a
thing which for some reason disgusted me very much. Every time he
coughed or the other man swore, a sleepy voice from one of the other
beds cried out:

[¶19] 'Shut up! Oh, for Christ's—_sake_ shut up!'

[¶20] I had about an hour's sleep in all. In the morning I was woken by a dim
impression of some large brown thing coming towards me. I opened my eyes
and saw that it was one of the sailor's feet, sticking out of bed close
to my face. It was dark brown, quite dark brown like an Indian's, with
dirt. The walls were leprous, and the sheets, three weeks from the wash,
were almost raw umber colour. I got up, dressed and went downstairs. In
the cellar were a row of basins and two slippery roller towels. I had a
piece of soap in my pocket, and I was going to wash, when I noticed that
every basin was streaked with grime—solid, sticky filth as black as
boot-blacking. I went out unwashed. Altogether, the lodging-house had
not come up to its description as cheap _and_ clean. It was however, as
I found later, a fairly representative lodging-house.

[¶21] I crossed the river and walked a long way eastward, finally going into a
coffee-shop on Tower Hill. An ordinary London coffee-shop, like a
thousand others, it seemed queer and foreign after Paris. It was a
little stuffy room with the high-backed pews that were fashionable in
the 'forties, the day's menu written on a mirror with a piece of soap,
and a girl of fourteen handling the dishes. Navvies were eating out of
newspaper parcels, and drinking tea in vast saucerless mugs like china
tumblers. In a corner by himself a Jew, muzzle down in the plate, was
guiltily wolfing bacon.

[¶22] 'Could I have some tea and bread and butter?' I said to the girl.

[¶23] She stared. 'No butter, only marg.,' she said, surprised. And she
repeated the order in the phrase that is to London what the eternal
_coup de rouge_ is to Paris: 'Large tea and two slices!'

[¶24] On the wall beside my pew there was a notice saying 'Pocketing the sugar
not allowed', and beneath it some poetic customer had written:

[¶25] He that takes away the sugar,
    Shall be called a dirty —

[¶26] but someone else had been at pains to scratch out the last word. This
was England. The tea-and-two-slices cost threepence halfpenny, leaving
me with eight and twopence.