![]() ![]() Orwell, an aristocrat by birth, refers to this life as “the suburbs” of poverty, and it is worth noting that Orwell’s experiences as a poor man are, in many ways, less desperate than those of the men with whom he keeps company. He subsists on bread and margarine, nutritious food tempts him from shop windows, and he is always just one misfortune away from real disaster. Having spent his last cent on milk, for instance, chances are good a bug will spoil it before he has a chance to drink it. The impoverished man meets misfortune at every turn. Life on six francs a day, Orwell discovers, is a precarious existence, full of daily setbacks and humiliations. Orwell is not left destitute, but nearly so, and thus his first experiences with true poverty begin. His financial situation grows even more dire when a thief robs a number of rooms in the hotel. ![]() Orwell, who supports himself by giving English lessons and writing articles that once in a while get published, is down to his last four hundred and fifty francs. When Down and Out in Paris and London begins, the narrator, George Orwell, a British man in his early twenties, is living in Paris’s Latin Quarter, in a bug-infested hotel run by Madame F and occupied by various eccentrics. ![]()
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