Orwell’s mother commented primly that the author was not the Eric she knew, and his sister Avril later recalled that their parents were ‘rather surprised at the outspokenness of the language’. The family gave thanks that a pseudonym had been used; in Southwold the originality of Mr and Mrs Blair’s son might not have been generally appreciated.

On 9 January 1933 Down and Out was published at 8s. 6d., which reminds us that hardback books were no less expensive then than now. Generous praise came from C. Day Lewis, W. H. Davies, Compton Mackenzie, J. B. Priestley and many other reviewers. Some 3,000 copies were sold–a reasonable achievement for a first book by an unknown young man–and Orwell made between £150 and £200, spread over two years. He had to wait until 1940, when Penguin printed 55,000 sixpenny copies (accidentally but perhaps fortunately misclassified as ‘fiction’), for Down and Out to become famous.

In The Road to Wigan Pier Orwell analysed his state of mind in 1927, on the eve of his down-and-out phase:

I was conscious of an immense weight of guilt that I had got to expiate. I suppose that sounds exaggerated; but if you do for five years a job that you thoroughly disapprove of, you will probably feel the same… I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against their tyrants. And, chiefly because I had had to think everything out in solitude, I had carried my hatred of oppression to extraordinary lengths. At that time failure seemed to me to be the only virtue. Every suspicion of self-advancement, even to ‘succeed’ in life to the extent of making a few hundred a year, seemed to me spiritually ugly, a species of bullying.

Thus, on his own evidence, the young man who wrote Down and Out was confused and uncertain, trapped in an emotional and intellectual whirlpool from which he escaped only when ‘the Spanish war and other events in 1936–7 turned the scales and thereafter I knew where I stood’. Yet this very whirlpool uncertainty gives Down and Out a naïve power. It is the white-hot reaction of a sensitive, observant, compassionate young man to poverty, injustice and the callousness of the rich. It offers insights, rather than solutions; but always insights have to precede solutions.

No one has ever claimed that Down and Out is its author’s best book, yet many of his admirers describe it as their favourite Orwell. Its flaws are numerous, but oddly endearing. Often we witness Orwell losing his nerve, as at the end of that clumsily inserted and hackneyed account of Charlie’s rape of a prostitute when he lamely explains, ‘I describe him [Charlie] just to show what diverse characters could be found flourishing in the Coq d’Or quarter.’ Again, reflecting on his plongeur experiences, he defiantly argues that ‘the mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit… Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well.’ Then, on the next page, he becomes characteristically self-doubting (with good reason, in this case) and ends his dissertation on ‘the equality of man’ by wondering if it is ‘largely platitudes’.

Mixing on equal terms with the poor was not easy for Orwell–an extremely fastidious man who, even when starving, felt constrained to throw away a saucepan of milk merely because a bed-bug had fallen into it. Moreover, no one of his generation could have outgrown their ‘lower-upper-middle-class’ conditioning, however sincere their longing ‘to get right down among the oppressed’, and Orwell was too honest to affect the sort of camaraderie with tramps that could never come naturally to him. The peculiar flavour of English class-consciousness–at once more ruthless and more muted than Continental variants–comes across most aromatically when he is down and out in London. Yet this handicap did not prevent him from brilliantly documenting an area of human experience that his readers could never have glimpsed, or even begun to imagine, without his guidance. It was an area in which most middle-class readers were then uninterested; and indeed we still have with us a threatening percentage of the well-heeled who prefer not to think about inner-city and kindred problems. What Orwell wrote in 1930 applies to too many nearly sixty years later: ‘Foreseeing some dismal Marxian Utopia as the alternative, the educated man prefers to keep things as they are.’ However, the uncaring percentage has been steadily dwindling since the 1930s and Orwell was in the vanguard of those who brought about this change. Although Down and Out had no great immediate effect on public opinion, it marked the beginning of his ‘water dripping on stone’ influence.

To modern readers, one of the debates provoked by Down and Out–was it a slice of factual autobiography or part fiction?–may seem trivial. Yet Orwell took it seriously and in a somewhat muddled Introduction to the 1935 French edition (entitled La Vache enragée) he tried to be frank about his evolution as a documentary writer and about the tricks of that trade: ‘I think I can say that I have exaggerated nothing except in so far as all writers exaggerate by selecting. I did not feel that I had to describe events in the exact order in which they happened, but everything I have described did take place at one time or another…’ This contradicts what he was soon to write about Down and Out in The Road to Wigan Pier: ‘Nearly all [sic] the incidents described there actually happened.’ And he then went on to assert; ‘All the characters… in both parts of the book are intended more as representative types than as individuals.’ Yet Down and Out’s colourful characters seem the very reverse of ‘representative types’; they interest and entertain precisely because they are such skilfully depicted individuals. Although the then thwarted novelist in Orwell may have tempted him to accentuate the idiosyncrasies of Charlie or Henri or Boris, one never doubts that those men existed. However, the dilemma that prompted Orwell’s self-contradictions is familiar to every writer of documentaries; one feels in honour bound to protect those who served as raw material, while avoiding any distortion of facts.

Only in Chapter XXIV is it clear that Orwell did distort facts by claiming that on his return from Paris he found himself down and out in London and had not ‘the slightest notion of how to get a cheap bed’.