---
title: "Down and Out in Paris and London"
author: "George Orwell"
languages: [en]
shelf: "Literature"
section: 31 of 38
url: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/31/
cite: "George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, section 31. Scriptura (scriptura.si), https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/31/"
---

# 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]

## 31. Chapter XXXI

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/31/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-down-and-out-fp20180314/31/#p-N

[¶0] The charge at Bozo's lodging-house was ninepence a night. It was a
large, crowded place, with accommodation for five hundred men, and a
well-known rendezvous of tramps, beggars and petty criminals. All races,
even black and white, mixed in it on terms of equality. There were
Indians there, and when I spoke to one of them in bad Urdu he addressed
me as 'tum'[5]—a thing to make one shudder, if it had been in India. We
had got below the range of colour prejudice. One had glimpses of curious
lives. Old 'Grandpa', a tramp of seventy who made his living, or a great
part of it, by collecting cigarette-ends and selling the tobacco at
threepence an ounce. 'The Doctor'—he was a real doctor, who had been
struck off the register for some offence, and besides selling newspapers
gave medical advice at a few pence a time. A little Chittagonian lascar,
barefoot and starving, who had deserted his ship and wandered for days
through London, so vague and helpless that he did not even know the name
of the city he was in—he thought it was Liverpool, until I told him. A
begging-letter writer, a friend of Bozo's who wrote pathetic appeals for
aid to pay for his wife's funeral, and, when a letter had taken effect,
blew himself out with huge solitary gorges of bread and margarine. He
was a nasty, hyena-like creature. I talked to him and found that, like
most swindlers, he believed a great part of his own lies. The
lodging-house was an Alsatia[6] for types like these.

[¶1] [5] _The French translation has this note (in French)_: In Hindustani,
there are two pronouns for the second person singular. One, _ap_, is the
more respectful and corresponds to our [= _French_] polite use of
_vous_. The other, _tum_, is used only between very close friends or by
a superior to an inferior; it is the equivalent of our _tu_. An
Englishman in India would not tolerate being called 'tu' by a native.

[¶2] [6] _The French translation has this note (in French)_: A name once
given to the district of Whitefriars, which was, in the seventeenth
century, a regular refuge for all kinds of wrongdoers by virtue of a
right of sanctuary which was finally abolished in 1697.

[¶3] -----

[¶4] While I was with Bozo he taught me something about the technique of
London begging. There is more in it than one might suppose. Beggars vary
greatly, and there is a sharp social line between those who merely cadge
and those who attempt to give some value for money. The amounts that one
can earn by the different 'gags' also vary. The stories in the Sunday
papers about beggars who die with two thousand pounds sewn into their
trousers are, of course, lies; but the better-class beggars do have runs
of luck, when they earn a living wage for weeks at a time. The most
prosperous beggars are street acrobats and street photographers. On a
good pitch—a theatre queue, for instance—a street acrobat will often
earn five pounds a week. Street photographers can earn about the same,
but they are dependent on fine weather. They have a cunning dodge to
stimulate trade. When they see a likely victim approaching, one of them
runs behind the camera and pretends to take a photograph. Then, as the
victim reaches them, they exclaim:

[¶5] 'There y'are, sir, took yer photo lovely. That'll be a bob.'

[¶6] 'But I never asked you to take it,' protests the victim.

[¶7] 'What, you didn't want it took? Why, we thought you signalled with your
'and. Well, there's a plate wasted! That's cost us sixpence, that 'as.'

[¶8] At this the victim usually takes pity and says he will have the photo
after all. The photographers examine the plate and say that it is
spoiled, and that they will take a fresh one free of charge. Of course,
they have not really taken the first photo; and so, if the victim
refuses, they waste nothing.

[¶9] Organ-grinders, like acrobats, are considered artists rather than
beggars. An organ-grinder named Shorty, a friend of Bozo's, told me all
about his trade. He and his mate 'worked' the coffee-shops and
public-houses round Whitechapel and the Commercial Road. It is a mistake
to think that organ-grinders earn their living in the street;
nine-tenths of their money is taken in coffee-shops and pubs—only the
cheap pubs, for they are not allowed into the good-class ones. Shorty's
procedure was to stop outside a pub and play one tune, after which his
mate, who had a wooden leg and could excite compassion, went in and
passed round the hat. It was a point of honour with Shorty always to
play another tune after receiving the 'drop'—an encore, as it were; the
idea being that he was a genuine entertainer and not merely paid to go
away. He and his mate took two or three pounds a week between them, but,
as they had to pay fifteen shillings a week for the hire of the organ,
they only averaged a pound a week each. They were on the streets from
eight in the morning till ten at night, and later on Saturdays.

[¶10] Screevers can sometimes be called artists, sometimes not. Bozo
introduced me to one who was a 'real' artist—that is, he had studied
art in Paris and submitted pictures to the Salon in his day. His line
was copies of Old Masters, which he did marvellously, considering that
he was drawing on stone. He told me how he began as a screever.

[¶11] 'My wife and kids were starving. I was walking home late at night, with
a lot of drawings I'd been taking round the dealers, and wondering how
the devil to raise a bob or two. Then, in the Strand, I saw a fellow
kneeling on the pavement drawing, and people giving him pennies. As I
came past he got up and went into a pub. "Damn it," I thought, "if he
can make money at that, so can I." So on the impulse I knelt down and
began drawing with his chalks. Heaven knows how I came to do it; I must
have been light-headed with hunger. The curious thing was that I'd never
used pastels before; I had to learn the technique as I went along. Well,
people began to stop and say that my drawing wasn't bad, and they gave
me ninepence between them. At this moment the other fellow came out of
the pub. "What in — are you doing on my pitch?" he said. I explained
that I was hungry and had to earn something. "Oh," said he, "come and
have a pint with me." So I had a pint, and since that day I've been a
screever. I make a pound a week. You can't keep six kids on a pound a
week, but luckily my wife earns a bit taking in sewing.

[¶12] 'The worst thing in this life is the cold, and the next worst is the
interference you have to put up with. At first, not knowing any better,
I used sometimes to copy a nude on the pavement. The first I did was
outside St Martin's-in-the-Fields church. A fellow in black—I suppose
he was a churchwarden or something—came out in a tearing rage. "Do you
think we can have that obscenity outside God's holy house?" he cried. So
I had to wash it out. It was a copy of Botticelli's Venus. Another time
I copied the same picture on the Embankment. A policeman passing looked
at it, and then, without a word, walked onto it and rubbed it out with
his great flat feet.'

[¶13] Bozo told the same tale of police interference. At the time when I was
with him there had been a case of 'immoral conduct' in Hyde Park, in
which the police had behaved rather badly. Bozo produced a cartoon of
Hyde Park with policemen concealed in the trees, and the legend,
'Puzzle, find the policemen.' I pointed out to him how much more telling
it would be to put, 'Puzzle, find the immoral conduct,' but Bozo would
not hear of it. He said that any policeman who saw it would move him on,
and he would lose his pitch for good.

[¶14] Below screevers come the people who sing hymns, or sell matches, or
bootlaces, or envelopes containing a few grains of lavender—called,
euphemistically, perfume. All these people are frankly beggars,
exploiting an appearance of misery, and none of them takes on an average
more than half a crown a day. The reason why they have to pretend to
sell matches and so forth instead of begging outright is that this is
demanded by the absurd English law about begging. As the law now stands,
if you approach a stranger and ask him for twopence, he can call a
policeman and get you seven days for begging. But if you make the air
hideous by droning 'Nearer, my God, to Thee', or scrawl some chalk daubs
on the pavement, or stand about with a tray of matches—in short, if you
make a nuisance of yourself—you are held to be following a legitimate
trade and not begging. Match-selling and street-singing are simply
legalized crimes. Not profitable crimes, however; there is not a singer
or match-seller in London who can be sure of £50 a year—a poor return
for standing eighty-four hours a week on the kerb, with the cars grazing
your backside.

[¶15] It is worth saying something about the social position of beggars, for
when one has consorted with them, and found that they are ordinary human
beings, one cannot help being struck by the curious attitude that
society takes towards them. People seem to feel that there is some
essential difference between beggars and ordinary 'working' men. They
are a race apart—outcasts, like criminals and prostitutes. Working men
'work', beggars do not 'work'; they are parasites, worthless in their
very nature. It is taken for granted that a beggar does not 'earn' his
living, as a bricklayer or a literary critic 'earns' his. He is a mere
social excrescence, tolerated because we live in a humane age, but
essentially despicable.

[¶16] Yet if one looks closely one sees that there is no _essential_
difference between a beggar's livelihood and that of numberless
respectable people. Beggars do not work, it is said; but, then, what is
_work_? A navvy works by swinging a pick. An accountant works by adding
up figures. A beggar works by standing out of doors in all weathers and
getting varicose veins, chronic bronchitis, etc. It is a trade like any
other; quite useless, of course—but, then, many reputable trades are
quite useless. And as a social type a beggar compares well with scores
of others. He is honest compared with the sellers of most patent
medicines, high-minded compared with a Sunday newspaper proprietor,
amiable compared with a hire-purchase tout—in short, a parasite, but a
fairly harmless parasite. He seldom extracts more than a bare living
from the community, and, what should justify him according to our
ethical ideas, he pays for it over and over in suffering. I do not think
there is anything about a beggar that sets him in a different class from
other people, or gives most modern men the right to despise him.

[¶17] Then the question arises, Why are beggars despised?—for they are
despised, universally. I believe it is for the simple reason that they
fail to earn a decent living. In practice nobody cares whether work is
useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is
that it shall be profitable. In all the modern talk about energy,
efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there
except 'Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it'? Money has
become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this
they are despised. If one could earn even ten pounds a week at begging,
it would become a respectable profession immediately. A beggar, looked
at realistically, is simply a businessman, getting his living, like
other businessmen, in the way that comes to hand. He has not, more than
most modern people, sold his honour; he has merely made the mistake of
choosing a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich.