Orwell’s savings proved that he had led an unusually solitary and frugal life in Burma, reading rather than boozing at ‘the Club’, yet they represented only a flimsy life-jacket when he plunged into the deep cold waters of the literary world. Where, for instance, was he to live? Eventually a family acquaintance found him a grotty bedroom in a mean street off the Portobello Road and there he settled down, at the age of twenty-four, to teach himself how to write. His neighbours were impressed by his determination. Week after week he remained in his cramped, unheated bedroom, thawing his hands over a candle when they became too numb to write. Clearly he was prepared to endure any amount of hardship for the sake of learning how to use the English language as effectively as he could.

Writers may be born not made–born, that is, with the will to write. But, for many, even modest success has to be worked for throughout long bleak years littered with rejection slips. In our day this fact is often obscured, to an extent that would have appalled Orwell, by the ease with which semi-literate but efficiently-hyped authors can become famous–and rich. Orwell never thought of his work primarily as a cash-source; many of his best essays were written for the Tribune, which always paid poorly and sometimes paid nothing. As his biographer Bernard Crick has noted, ‘He genuinely valued art more than success.’ In consequence, he was his own harshest critic. Sending the manuscript of A Clergyman’s Daughter to his agent, he sadly remarked: ‘It was a good idea, but I am afraid I have made a muck of it.’ Another hallmark of the born writer was his conviction that those who habitually discuss their writing produce little of worth. And his early dedication to his craft never waned. Fame, when it belatedly came, did not tempt him to demand less of himself as a writer. In Orwell’s case the style was indeed the man, as T. S. Eliot recognised when he referred to his ‘good writing of fundamental integrity’.

In the spring of 1928 Orwell moved to Paris, where the cost of living was then spectacularly low. He settled into a cheap hotel at 6 Rue du Pot de Fer, in the Latin Quarter, and within fifteen months had written two novels and several short stories, all repeatedly rejected and subsequently destroyed. Anxiously and humbly he sought constructive criticism from L. 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.