I. Bailey, his literary agent. Bailey condemned one short story as ‘immature and unsatisfactory’ and added, ‘I think too that you deal with sex too much in your writings.’ Another story brought the comment: ‘You have very good powers of description, but this power becomes tedious when a page of description could be much more effective in a few brief sentences.’ It seems the 25-year-old Orwell’s faults were those common to many literary apprentices.

During this period of essential but apparently unrewarded hard work, Orwell sold only a few articles to obscure journals. Later he recalled, ‘My literary efforts in the first year barely brought me in twenty pounds.’ Then came the theft of the meagre remains of his savings, which had been irregularly augmented by giving English lessons. Probably the thief was not the young Italian described in Down and Out. Orwell subsequently confided to his friend Mabel Fierz that he had been stripped of all his money and most of his possessions by ‘a little trollop he’d picked up in a café’, a girl with whom he had had a relationship for some time. But consideration for his parents’ sensibilities would have required the suppression of this misadventure.

Whoever reduced Orwell to destitution did him a good turn; his final ten weeks in Paris sowed the seed of his first published book.

Most writers who share for a time in the lives of the poor are not genuinely down and out, though they may choose to appear so to their new neighbours. What gives the Paris chapters of Down and Out such pungent immediacy is the fact that Orwell was not then ‘playing a game’. True, he could at once have retreated to his parents’ modestly comfortable home in Southwold and admitted defeat; but after so obstinately quitting a secure career in the Indian Imperial Police that was not an attractive escape route. Also, he could have appealed for help to his favourite (because only) bohemian relative, Aunt Nellie. She was then living in Paris with her mildly dotty lover, Eugène Adam–who had recently founded the Workers’ Esperanto Association of the World–though for obvious reasons her proximity does not emerge in Down and Out. However, Aunt Nellie’s own circumstances were then too straitened for a proud nephew to batten on her. So there really was no alternative to working in the foul kitchens of the fashionable Hôtel Lotti on the Rue de Rivoli.

When Orwell left Paris in December 1929 he did not, in fact, immediately live as a down-and-out in London. Instead, he spent Christmas with his family, whose joy was confined when their penniless son–now aged twenty-six and seemingly an unqualified failure–suddenly reappeared. Defensively he announced to all and sundry that he was working on a book about his time in Paris. But meanwhile he had somehow to earn something and tutoring jobs were found for him near Southwold. Also, he soon began to establish a reputation as a courageously independent-minded reviewer who was not overawed by such ‘Big Names’ as Edith Sitwell or J. B. Priestley.

One of Orwell’s pupils (Richard Peters, later Professor of Philosophy at the Institute of Education, London) has drawn a vivid pen-portrait of his engagingly eccentric tutor:

… a tall spindly young man with a great mop of hair waving on top of a huge head, swinging along with loose, effortless strides… He had a slow disarming sort of smile which made us feel that he was interested in us yet amused by us in a detached impersonal sort of way… He never condescended; he never preached; he never intruded… He was never noisy and lacked the dogmatism of the insecure.

The original version of Down and Out, entitled A Scullion’s Diary, was completed in October 1930 and came to no more than 35,000 words; evidently Orwell had used only his Paris material. When Jonathan Cape rejected it, as being too short and scrappy, he expanded it and tried Cape again–only to be rejected again. A year later he submitted a fatter typescript (the London chapters had been added) to Faber and Faber, whose rejection letter came from T. S. Eliot: ‘We did find it of very great interest, but I regret to say that it does not appear to me possible as a publishing venture.’ At that stage Orwell lost heart, a reaction hardly justified by only two rejections–and those from London’s foremost literary publishing houses. But by 1932 he may have been feeling hostile to Down and Out, an emotion many writers experience when a book has been too long on their mental plate. He was then absorbed in Burmese Days and very likely regarded the much-revised Down and Out as not only a disappointment but an irritating distraction, something he knew he should do more about but preferred to forget.

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. At once he recognised it as a ‘natural’ for the bold new house of Gollancz, and very soon it had been accepted–on condition that certain names were changed and all swearwords deleted. Having swiftly completed this last easy revision, Orwell wrote to Victor Gollancz: ‘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.

Three years after his ignominious return from Paris, Orwell again joined his parents for Christmas, clutching advance copies of Down and Out. It was a handsomely produced volume of 288 pages with the luxuriously wide margins of the day and a running title on the pages–‘Confessions of a Down and Out’–that betrayed how late Down and Out in Paris and London had been adopted as the title.