Care to guess the city?
Paris.
Not the city of love, cafés, and leisurely strolls, but Paris as George Orwell saw it.
Down and Out in Paris and London is built from discomfort. It smells, scratches, and refuses to soften its edges. Reading it produces a peculiar mixture of reactions: fascination, irritation, a certain queasy curiosity, and—occasionally—laughter that feels slightly inappropriate. Orwell writes with the bluntness of someone who has been there and hasn’t yet learned how to varnish the truth.
At its simplest, the book is a record of Orwell’s time living in poverty: first among the plongeurs and kitchen drudges of Paris, then among tramps and casual labourers in London. There is no grand plot, no carefully orchestrated arc, only episodes, encounters, and stretches of grinding monotony. People drift in and out, rarely developed into “characters”; they exist as types, roles, temporary companions in misfortune.
What keeps the book from collapsing into pure misery is satire. Orwell’s eye is merciless, but often amused; his tone veers between indignation and something close to grim delight. Institutions, habits, and moral assumptions are quietly dismantled, sometimes with the lightest possible touch. The humour doesn’t erase the horror, only sharpens it.
This is especially noticeable in the early Paris chapters, where Orwell writes about informers and spies as if they were simply another feature of the urban ecosystem.
“If the place were known as a haunt of Communists it was probably watched…”
Exaggeration, a satirical flourish meant to heighten the sense of paranoia...
“…the Paris police are very hard on Communists, especially if they are foreigners, and I was already under suspicion.”
And yet: did you know that Orwell was, in fact, under surveillance?
1984 Head camera by Oleksii Kiashko
It is one of those small historical jokes that only time can afford. George Orwell—a man who would later invent the most famous surveillance state in literature—first met the real thing quietly, and rather badly organised, in 1929. He was not plotting a revolution. He was poor, living in Paris, reading left-wing newspapers in cafés, and trying to sell his services as a writer to Workers’ Life, a Communist paper that paid badly and irregularly. That alone was enough. An informer noticed him. A note was written. A file was opened. MI5, ever cautious, began to watch a man who at that point was mostly guilty of being unemployed and politically curious.
The official reason was simple and very of its time: communism frightened governments, especially when it appeared abroad and spoke English with an educated Eaton accent. Blair had resigned from the Imperial Police in Burma, which already made him suspicious; he mixed with poor foreigners, which made him more so; and he read not-so-trustworthy papers, which practically sealed his fate. The surveillance itself was dull: letters, rumours, second-hand reports, nothing resembling espionage except the tone.
What makes the story quietly comic is that even MI5 never fully believed its own suspicions. Officers repeatedly note that Orwell’s views are “left-wing but unorthodox,” that he dislikes party lines, and authority. Precisely the qualities one might hope for in a loyal Communist.
What matters is that the file did not close when he left Paris. It followed him home. Through the 1930s, MI5 kept Orwell on record in Britain itself. Not under active surveillance, but never quite forgotten.
However, into the war years and later, the tone of the file had changed again. The suspicion thinned, though it never vanished. Even MI5 seemed to accept that Orwell’s hostility to totalitarianism was genuine and deep, and that if he was dangerous at all, it was in the way independent minds usually are—unpredictable, irritating, and immune to discipline. The file remained open until his death in 1949, less as evidence than as habit. Which is perhaps the most Orwellian detail of all: a system that continues to watch long after it has stopped believing, simply because it once began.
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