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.