Orwell by Jeffrey Meyers

Englishmen intensely serious and burning with indignation at the very real and very fundamental evils that affected all the world.” 9 Orwell's way of dealing with these evils is to experience them personally and directly, to break out of the emotionally shallow and sheltered state of the middle classes and make contact with physical reality, “to look down at the roots on which his existence is founded.” 10 As Orwell explains in the autobiographical section of
Wigan Pier:
    I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against their tyrants…. Therefore my mind turned immediately towards the extreme cases, the social outcasts: tramps, beggars, criminals, prostitutes…. I could go among these people, see what their lives were like and feel myself temporarily part of their world. Once I had been among them and accepted by them, I should have touched bottom, and—this is what I felt: I was aware even then it was irrational—part of my guilt would drop from me…. And down there in the squalid and, as a matter of fact, horribly boring sub-world of the tramp I had a feeling of release, of adventure, which seems absurd when I look back, but which was sufficiently vivid at the time. (130–131, 134)
    Many of Orwell's most characteristic ideas are stated in this passage: the desire to have immediate and actual experience, to see things from the inside rather than from a purely theoretical viewpoint; to fight, like Dickens, “on the side of the underdog, always and everywhere,” and to agonize over their sufferings; to extinguish, among out-castes, the sense of social class; to feel the pleasurable relief, the anxiety and guilt-annihilating euphoria of going to the dogs and knowing you can stand it; to undergo the excitement of a
sortie
to the lower depths.
    Orwell felt, in Burke's words, “I must see the things; I must see the men.” 11 Books like Johnson's
Life of Savage
, Zola's
Germinal
, Hamsun's
Hunger
, Crane's
Maggie
, Gorki's
The Lower Depths
, Davies’
Autobiography of a Super Tramp
and Jack London's
The Road
, which had vividly portrayed the outcasts at the extreme fringe of society, were pioneering works of intensely personal social protest. But the most immediate influence on
Down and Out
was London's
The People of the Abyss.
In his Preface, London likened himself to an explorer of the underworld and wrote, “what I wish to do, is to go down into the East End and see things for myself. I wish to know how these people are living there, and why they are living there, and what they are living for. In short, I am going to live there myself.” 12
    Orwell lived first in a working class quarter of Paris and worked as a dishwasher (“a slave's slave”) in 1928–29, just after he returned from five years in Burma as a policeman. The similar injustices to the workers in both countries are suggested in
Down and Out
though this idea is not fully developed until
Wigan Pier.
When Orwell writes of the English tramp Paddy, for example, “Seeing him walk, you felt instinctively that he would sooner take a blow than give one” (109), it is clear that this “instinctive” feeling grew directly out of his nasty experiences in Burma where he did the dirty work of Empire, was responsible for “the scarred buttocks of the men who had been flogged with bamboos” and saw “louts fresh from school kicking grey-haired servants.” 13 This made him burn with hatred of his countrymen and of himself. Similarly, the equation of exploitation with luxury in his analysis of the upper class attitude toward the poor—“since evidently you must sweat to pay for our trips to Italy, sweat and be damned to you” (87)—again recalls the colonial parallel: “As the world is now constituted, we are all standing on the backs of half-starved coolies.” 14
    In his summary chapter of