---
title: "Down and Out in Paris and London"
author: "George Orwell"
languages: [en]
shelf: "Literature"
section: 25 of 38
url: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/25/
cite: "George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, section 25. Scriptura (scriptura.si), https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/25/"
---

# Down and Out in Paris and London

*George Orwell*

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> 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]

## 25. Chapter XXV

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/25/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/25/#p-N

[¶0] The eight shillings lasted three days and four nights. After my bad
experience in the Waterloo Road[3] I moved eastward, and spent the next
night in a lodging-house in Pennyfields. This was a typical
lodging-house, like scores of others in London. It had accommodation for
between fifty and a hundred men, and was managed by a 'deputy'—a deputy
for the owner, that is, for these lodging-houses are profitable concerns
and are owned by rich men. We slept fifteen or twenty in a dormitory;
the beds were again cold and hard, but the sheets were not more than a
week from the wash, which was an improvement. The charge was ninepence
or a shilling (in the shilling dormitory the beds were six feet apart
instead of four) and the terms were cash down by seven in the evening or
out you went.

[¶1] [3] It is a curious but well-known fact that bugs are much commoner in
south than north London. For some reason they have not yet crossed the
river in any great numbers.

[¶2] -----

[¶3] Downstairs there was a kitchen common to all lodgers, with free firing
and a supply of cooking-pots, tea-basins and toasting-forks. There were
two great clinker fires, which were kept burning day and night the year
through. The work of tending the fires, sweeping the kitchen and making
the beds was done by the lodgers in rotation. One senior lodger, a fine
Norman-looking stevedore named Steve, was known as 'head of the house',
and was arbiter of disputes and unpaid chucker-out.

[¶4] I liked the kitchen. It was a low-ceiled cellar deep underground, very
hot and drowsy with coke fumes, and lighted only by the fires, which
cast black velvet shadows in the corners. Ragged washing hung on strings
from the ceiling. Red-lit men, stevedores mostly, moved about the fires
with cooking-pots; some of them were quite naked, for they had been
laundering and were waiting for their clothes to dry. At night there
were games of nap and draughts, and songs—'I'm a chap what's done wrong
by my parents' was a favourite, and so was another popular song about a
shipwreck. Sometimes late at night men would come in with a pail of
winkles they had bought cheap, and share them out. There was a general
sharing of food, and it was taken for granted to feed men who were out
of work. A little pale, wizened creature, obviously dying, referred to
as 'pore Brown, bin under the doctor and cut open three times', was
regularly fed by the others.

[¶5] Two or three of the lodgers were old-age pensioners. Till meeting them I
had never realized that there are people in England who live on nothing
but the old-age pension of ten shillings a week. None of these old men
had any other resource whatever. One of them was talkative, and I asked
him how he managed to exist. He said:

[¶6] 'Well, there's ninepence a night for yer kip—that's five an' threepence
a week. Then there's threepence on Saturdays for a shave—that's five
an' six. Then say you 'as a 'aircut once a month for sixpence—that's
another three-'apence a week. So you 'as about four an' fourpence for
food an' bacca.'

[¶7] He could imagine no other expenses. His food was bread and margarine and
tea—towards the end of the week dry bread and tea without milk—and
perhaps he got his clothes from charity. He seemed contented, valuing
his bed and the fire more than food. But, with an income of ten
shillings a week, to spend money on a shave—it is awe-inspiring.

[¶8] All day I loafed in the streets, east as far as Wapping, west as far as
Whitechapel. It was queer after Paris; everything was so much cleaner
and quieter and drearier. One missed the scream of the trams, and the
noisy, festering life of the back streets, and the armed men clattering
through the squares. The crowds were better dressed and the faces
comelier and milder and more alike, without that fierce individuality
and malice of the French. There was less drunkenness, and less dirt, and
less quarrelling, and more idling. Knots of men stood at all the
corners, slightly underfed, but kept going by the tea-and-two-slices
which the Londoner swallows every two hours. One seemed to breathe a
less feverish air than in Paris. It was the land of the tea urn and the
Labour Exchange, as Paris is the land of the _bistro_ and the sweatshop.

[¶9] It was interesting to watch the crowds. The East London women are pretty
(it is the mixture of blood, perhaps), and Limehouse was sprinkled with
Orientals—Chinamen, Chittagonian lascars, Dravidians selling silk
scarves, even a few Sikhs, come goodness knows how. Here and there were
street meetings. In Whitechapel somebody called The Singing Evangel
undertook to save you from hell for the charge of sixpence. In the East
India Dock Road the Salvation Army were holding a service. They were
singing 'Anybody here like sneaking Judas?' to the tune of 'What's to be
done with a drunken sailor?' On Tower Hill two Mormons were trying to
address a meeting. Round their platform struggled a mob of men, shouting
and interrupting. Someone was denouncing them for polygamists. A lame,
bearded man, evidently an atheist, had heard the word God and was
heckling angrily. There was a confused uproar of voices.

[¶10] 'My dear friends, if you would only let us finish what we were
saying—!—That's right, give 'em a say. Don't get on the argue!—No,
no, you answer me. Can you _show_ me God? You _show_ 'im me, then I'll
believe in 'im.—Oh, shut up, don't keep interrupting of 'em!—Interrupt
yourself! F— polygamists!—Well, there's a lot to be said for polygamy.
Take the f— women out of industry, anyway.—My dear friends, if you
would just . . .—No, no, don't you slip out of it. 'Ave you _seen_ God?
'Ave you _touched_ 'im? 'Ave you shook _'ands_ with 'im?—Oh, don't get
on the argue, for Christ's sake don't get on the _argue_!' etc. etc. I
listened for twenty minutes, anxious to learn something about Mormonism,
but the meeting never got beyond shouts. It is the general fate of
street meetings.

[¶11] In Middlesex Street, among the crowds at the market, a draggled,
down-at-heel woman was hauling a brat of five by the arm. She brandished
a tin trumpet in its face. The brat was squalling.

[¶12] 'Enjoy yourself!' yelled the mother. 'What yer think I brought yer out
'ere for an' bought y'a trumpet an' all? D'ya want to go across my knee?
You little bastard, you _shall_ enjoy yerself!'

[¶13] Some drops of spittle fell from the trumpet. The mother and the child
disappeared, both bawling. It was all very queer after Paris.

[¶14] The last night that I was in the Pennyfields lodging-house there was a
quarrel between two of the lodgers, a vile scene. One of the old-age
pensioners, a man of about seventy, naked to the waist (he had been
laundering), was violently abusing a short, thick-set stevedore, who
stood with his back to the fire. I could see the old man's face in the
light of the fire, and he was almost crying with grief and rage.
Evidently something very serious had happened.

[¶15] _The old-age pensioner_: 'You —!'

[¶16] _The stevedore_: 'Shut yer mouth, you ole —, afore I set about yer!'

[¶17] _The old-age pensioner_: 'Jest you try it on, you —! I'm thirty year
older'n you, but it wouldn't take much to make me give you one as'd
knock you into a bucketful of piss!'

[¶18] _The stevedore_: 'Ah, an' then p'raps I wouldn't smash you up after, you
ole c—!'

[¶19] Thus for five minutes. The lodgers sat round, unhappy, trying to
disregard the quarrel. The stevedore looked sullen, but the old man was
growing more and more furious. He kept making little rushes at the
other, sticking out his face and screaming from a few inches distant
like a cat on a wall, and spitting. He was trying to nerve himself to
strike a blow, and not quite succeeding. Finally he burst out:

[¶20] 'A —, that's what you are, a — —! Take that in your dirty gob and
suck it, you —! By —, I'll smash you afore I've done with you. A c—,
that's what you are, a son of a — whore. Lick that, you —! That's what
I think of you, you —, you —, you —, you BLACK BASTARD!'

[¶21] Whereat he suddenly collapsed on a bench, took his face in his hands,
and began crying. The other man, seeing that public feeling was against
him, went out.

[¶22] Afterwards I heard Steve explaining the cause of the quarrel. It
appeared that it was all about a shilling's worth of food. In some way
the old man had lost his store of bread and margarine, and so would have
nothing to eat for the next three days, except what the others gave him
in charity. The stevedore, who was in work and well fed, had taunted
him; hence the quarrel.

[¶23] When my money was down to one and fourpence I went for a night to a
lodging-house in Bow, where the charge was only eightpence. One went
down an area and through an alley-way into a deep, stifling cellar, ten
feet square. Ten men, navvies mostly, were sitting in the fierce glare
of the fire. It was midnight, but the deputy's son, a pale, sticky child
of five, was there playing on the navvies' knees. An old Irishman was
whistling to a blind bullfinch in a tiny cage. There were other
songbirds there—tiny, faded things, that had lived all their lives
underground. The lodgers habitually made water in the fire, to save
going across a yard to the lavatory. As I sat at the table I felt
something stir near my feet, and, looking down, saw a wave of black
things moving slowly across the floor; they were black-beetles.

[¶24] There were six beds in the dormitory, and the sheets, marked in huge
letters 'Stolen from No. — Bow Road', smelt loathsome. In the next bed
to me lay a very old man, a pavement artist, with some extraordinary
curvature of the spine that made him stick right out of bed, with his
back a foot or two from my face. It was bare, and marked with curious
swirls of dirt, like a marble table-top. During the night a man came in
drunk and was sick on the floor, close to my bed. There were bugs
too—not so bad as in Paris, but enough to keep one awake. It was a
filthy place. Yet the deputy and his wife were friendly people, and
ready to make one a cup of tea at any hour of the day or night.