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. 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.