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.