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’. This of course heightens the tension and may be seen as a harmless literary device, like the omission of Aunt Nellie from his Paris social scene. But the truth is that in Paris he had already written his first substantial published essay, ‘The Spike’, describing a night spent in a Notting Hill tramps’ hostel. Before his departure from England he had voluntarily lived among tramps for some time because ‘I knew nothing about working-class conditions. I had read the unemployment figures but I had no notion of what they implied…’ Had Orwell recorded his adventures among the poor chronologically, Down and Out might have been a more coherent and shapely book–if rather less dramatic.

What Orwell has to say in Chapter XXII about ‘fear of the mob’ seems, at first glance, outdated. Post-war affluence has greatly reduced the size of ‘the mob’ and in Britain the Welfare State has, apparently, placated what remains of it. Physically it is much less gruelling to be down and out now than it was fifty years ago. But psychologically is ‘the mob’ any better off? Orwell’s fellow-tramps existed within an isolated subculture and were only vaguely aware of how the more fortunate lived. Now television makes the unemployed tormentingly aware of the unattainable–by them–affluence that is within reach of the majority of their compatriots. So far Big Sister is winning and ‘the mob’ remains docile. But if Orwell were still around he might well feel uneasy about his country’s future–less because of ‘the mob’s’ potential for destruction than because of the techniques being devised to control it.