Down and Out in Paris and London

The question is, why does this slavery continue?
People have a way of taking it for granted that all work
is done for a sound purpose. They see somebody else
doing a disagreeable job, and think that they have
solved things by saying that the job is necessary. Coal-
mining, for example, is hard work, but it is necessary-we
must have coal. Working in the sewers is unpleasant,
but somebody must work in the sewers. And similarly
with a
plongeur's work. Some people must feed in
restaurants, and so other people must swab dishes for
eighty hours a week. It is the work of civilisation,
therefore unquestionable. This point is worth
considering.

Never worry, mon ami. Nothing is easier to get than money.’

At the beginning of ‘Why I Write’ (1947), he explains that from the age of five or six he knew he would be – must be–a writer.

Still I can point to one or two things I have definitely learned by being hard up. I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant. That is a beginning.

But the important point is that a tramp’s sufferings are entirely useless. He lives a fantastically disagreeable life, and lives it to no purpose whatever. One could not, in fact, invent a more futile routine than walking from prison to prison, spending perhaps eighteen hours a day in the cell and on the road. There must be at the least several tens of thousands of tramps in England. Each day they expend innumerable foot-pounds of energy—enough to plough thousands of acres, build miles of road, put up dozens of houses—in mere, useless walking. Each day they waste between them possibly ten years of time in staring at cell walls. They cost the country at least a pound a week a man, and give nothing in return for it. They go round and round, on an endless boring game of general post, which is of no use, and is not even meant to be of any use to any person whatever. The law keeps this process going, and we have got so accustomed to it that We are not surprised. But it is very silly.

The evil of poverty is not so much that it makes a man suffer as that it rots him physically and spiritually.

A man receiving charity practically always hates his benefactor—it is a fixed characteristic of human nature; and, when he has fifty or a hundred others to back him, he will show it.

It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.

An educated man can put up with enforced idleness, which is one of the worst evils of poverty. But a man like Paddy, with no means of filling up time, is as miserable out of work as a dog on the chain. That is why it is such nonsense to pretend that those who have “come down in the world” are to be pitied above all others. The man who really merits pity is the man who has been down from the start, and faces poverty with a blank, resourceless mind.

The whole business of swearing, especially English swearing, is mysterious. Of its very nature swearing is as irrational as magic—indeed, it is a species of magic. But there is also a paradox about it, namely this: Our intention in swearing is to shock and wound, which we do by mentioning something that should be kept secret—usually something to do with the sexual functions. But the strange thing is that when a word is well established as a swear word, it seems to lose its original meaning; that is, it loses the thing that made it into a swear word. A word becomes an oath because it means a certain thing, and, because it has become an oath, it ceases to mean that thing.