Down and Out in Paris and London

Published in 1933, and still relevant today, Orwell’s first full-length work is a compassionate and insightful description of the life of the working poor in Paris and the homeless in London.

Written when Orwell was a struggling writer in his twenties, he vividly documents a world of unrelenting squalor – sleeping in bug-infested hostels and doss houses, working as a plongeur in a Paris hotel, surviving on scraps and cigarette butts, living alongside tramps, a 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.

'Orwell was the great moral force of his age' – Spectator