Down and Out in Paris and London

<p>George Orwell's vivid memoir of his time living among the desperately poor and destitute <i>Down and Out in Paris and London</i> is a moving tour of the underworld of society.<br><br>'You have talked so often of going to the dogs - and well here are the dogs and you have reached them.' <br><br>Written when Orwell was a struggling writer in his twenties it documents his 'first contact with poverty'. Here he painstakingly documents a world of unrelenting drudgery and squalor - sleeping in bug-infested hostels and doss houses of last resort working as a dishwasher in Paris's vile 'Hôtel X' surviving on scraps and cigarette butts living alongside tramps a star-gazing pavement artist and a starving Russian ex-army captain. Exposing a shocking previously-hidden world to his readers Orwell gave a human face to the statistics of poverty for the first time - and in doing so found his voice as a writer.</p>