Poverty
READING
Down and Out in Paris and London, by George Orwell, is an account of the times when he was poor and living in each of the two capital cities.
l BEFORE YOU READ
Read the first three sentences of the text. Predict why Orwell describes being poor as extraordinarily complicated.
Word Bank Turn to page 120.
2 FIRST IMPRESSION
Read the complete text and think about the following:
a) Do Orwell's problems seem like the problems of a poor person today? Why? Why not?
b) Are Orwell's experiences similar to Frank McCourt's? If not, how are they different?
3 READ AGAIN
Explain the following references:
a) it is all so utterly and prosaically different. What is?
b) of course you dare not admit it. Admit what?
c) the laundress catches you in the street and asks you why. What exactly does she ask?
d) This wastes you a franc a day. What does?
e) with such fearful results. Results of what?
DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON
It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have thought so much about poverty - it is the thing you have feared all your life, the thing you knew would happen to you sooner or later; and it is all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would be quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be terrible; it is merely squalid and boring. It is the peculiar lowness of poverty that you discover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the complicated meanness, the crust-wiping.
You discover, for instance, the secrecy attached to poverty. At a sudden stroke you have been reduced to an income of six francs a day. But of course you dare not admit it - you have got to pretend that you are living quite as usual. From the start it tangles you in a net of lies, and even with the lies you can hardly manage it. You stop sending clothes to the laundry, and the laundress catches you in the street and asks you why; you mumble something, and she, thinking you are sending the clothes elsewhere, is your enemy for life. The tobacconist keeps asking why you have cut down your smoking. There are letters you want to answer, and cannot, because stamps are too expensive. And then there are your meals - meals are the worst difficulty of all. Every day at meal-times you go out, ostensibly to a restaurant, and loaf an hour in the Luxembourg Gardens, watching the pigeons. Afterwards you smuggle your food home in your pockets. Your food is bread and margarine, or bread and wine, and even the nature of the food is governed by lies. You have to buy rye bread instead of household bread, because the rye loaves, though dearer, are round and can be smuggled in your pockets. This wastes you a franc a day. Sometimes, to keep up appearances, you have to spend sixty centimes on a drink, and go correspondingly short of food. Your linen gets filthy, and you run out of soap and razor blades. Your hair wants cutting, and you try to cut it yourself, with such fearful results that you have to go to the barber after all, and spend the equivalent of a day's food. All day you are telling lies, and expensive lies. () You discover what it is like to be hungry. With bread and margarine in your belly, you go out and look into the shop windows. Everywhere there is food insulting you in huge, wasteful piles; whole dead pigs, baskets of hot loaves, great yellow blocks of butter, strings of sausages, mountains of potatoes, vast Gruyere cheeses like grindstones. A snivelling self-pity comes over you at the sight of so much food.