George Orwell (June 25, 1903 – January 21, 1950) wrote influential moralistic fiction and political outspokenness that has deep roots in his journalistic writing. Orwell was born as Eric Blair at the turn of the 20th century to a middle-class family.  In 1914, when he was eleven, he published a poem as a rallying cry for patriotism. Orwell, still known as "Blair", attended the prestigious Eton College. Whatever his career, he was presumably destined for some comfortable living. 

Yet in the late 1920s (when Hemingway was also forming his writer self in the Parisian capital), Orwell moved to Paris to do menial jobs and attempt to write what he said and lived. In his writing memoir, Orwell credits this experience with focusing his literary skills on political activity and fighting injustice.

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.

In 1933, after returning to England to his family and officially adopting his new pen name, the thirty-year old George Orwell published his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London.

You discover the boredom which is inseparable from poverty, the times when you have nothing to do and, being underfed, can interest yourself in nothing. For half a day at a time, you can lie on your bed, feeling like your jeune squelette in Baudelaire's poem.

Only food could rouse you. You discover that a man who has gone even a week on bread and margarine is not a man any longer, only a belly with a few accessory organs.

London. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

And yet, in Down and Out, there is a distance between the author and the subject. Orwell reports stabbings, rape, and theft with dispassionate curiosity. The individuals he meets feel slightly shallow, their most exciting traits exaggerated to be even humorous. He treats many as characters, not people. He shoulders the burden of witnessing their lives, but it keeps him apart from others.  They were apart, and Orwell could return home to his family. Is his journalistic distance inevitable?

"The Mothers (Die Mutter) from War (Krieg) from 1921-22 woodcut, published in 1923. Käthe Kollwitz's War series focused on the vulnerable members of society affected by social traumas, particularly WWI. Learn more. 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS).

Nevertheless, Down and Out is full of penetrating observation, clear, unadorned writing, and a nascent passion for speaking for the socially oppressed. The man who conceived such unique, enduring works as 1984 and Animal Farm - both written in the 1940s, is moulded on these journal pages.

When you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future.

This absolute annihilation of hunger and the separation of man from society due to hunger is precisely what Elie Wiesel observes in his clear and horrifyingly true story of imprisonment in Auschwitz. Desperate, sustained hunger—especially at the hands of others—can remove one's humanity by making a man merely a body. Survival removes all sense of the future, all sense of anything beyond now.

Orwell continues:

I travelled to England third class via Dunkirk and Tilbury, which is the cheapest and not the worst way of crossing the channel. You had to pay extra for a cabin, so I slept in the saloon, together with most of the third-class passengers. I find this entry in my diary for the day:

'Sleeping in the saloon, twenty-seven men, sixteen women. Of the women not a single one has washed her face this morning. The men mostly went to the bathroom; the women merely produced vanity cases and covered the dirty with powder.'

"Woman Entrusts Herself to Death" lithograph, 1934. Käthe Kollwitz was born in Russia but lived in Germany. This print is part of Kollwitz' "Death" series of secondhand victims of WWI. Learn more. © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS).

A novelist is often tempted by a need to see and gather "truth," even fodder for their story. Compare Down and Out to the journalistic and travel writing of novelists John Steinbeck (who wrote Travels with Charley at the end of his career) or Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe, who wrote the world's first journalistic novel detailing witness accounts of the plague in London in the 1660s. In each, the line between fiction and reality is blurred by the author's subjective interpretation.