Top Highlights

• We owe the rescue and publication of Down and Out to Mabel Fierz, in whose home Orwell discarded the typescript, requesting his hostess to destroy it but save the paper-clips. Instead, she took it to a reputable literary agent, Leonard Moore, and bullied him into reading it without delay.
• ‘I think if it is all the same to everybody I would prefer the book to be published pseudonymously. I have no reputation that is lost by doing this and if the book has any kind of success I can always use the same pseudonym again.’ Gollancz agreed and so Eric Blair became George Orwell.
• Again, reflecting on his plongeur experiences, he defiantly argues that ‘the mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit… Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well.’
• Mixing on equal terms with the poor was not easy for Orwell–an extremely fastidious man who, even when starving, felt constrained to throw away a saucepan of milk merely because a bed-bug had fallen into it. Moreover, no one of his generation could have outgrown their ‘lower-upper-middle-class’ conditioning, however sincere their longing ‘to get ri...
• But the truth is that in Paris he had already written his first substantial published essay, ‘The Spike’, describing a night spent in a Notting Hill tramps’ hostel.