The book is divided into two parts, the first being Orwell's experiences in Paris and the lessons he learned, such as how the starving manage to subsist, as he was one of them. In the latter part of his Paris life, Orwell works as a dishwasher in a hotel restaurant kitchen and lives in a slum. He also writes about the conditions at a charity hospital in Paris.
Much of the book features stories about the array of characters he meets along the way along with details of the squalor and indignities people endure to survive. Occasionally, however, he steps back to interpret what he's seen, sharing conclusions he's drawn from his experiences. What's fascinating, disturbing or discouraging (depending on yout point of view) is how relevant these matters remain,
In chapter 22 he questions how there has come to be such a disparty between rich and and poor. More importantly, why do the middle classes side with the rich and separate themselves from the "vermin" who slave away all their waking hours doing work that is demeaning and sometimes useless?
Orwell concludes: I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think.
A little further on he elaborates.
They (middle class) side with the rich because they imagine that any liberty conceded to the poor is a threat to their own liberty. Foreseeing some dismal Marxian Utopia as the alternative, the educated man prefers to keep things as they are. Possibly he does not like his fellow-rich very much, but he supposes that even the vulgarest of them are less inimical to his pleasures, more his kind of people, than the poor, and that he had better stand by them. It is this fear of a supposedly dangerous mob that makes nearly all intelligent people conservative in their opinions.
Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. 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. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?
Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well. But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people know about poverty? In my copy of Villon's poems the editor has actually thought it necessary to explain the line "Ne pain ne voyent qu'aux fenestres" by a footnote; so remote is even hunger from the educated man's experience. From this ignorance a superstitious fear of the mob results quite naturally. The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day's liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. "Anything," he thinks, "any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose."
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What. are your thoughts about Orwell's observations? How are things different? And how are they the same? One thing that appears to have changed over the past century: we seem to have a lot more bread and circuses.
I'm interested in your thoughts. Comments welcome.
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Related Links
Orwell-related blog posts
George Orwell's "How the Poor Die": Exploring Themes of Inequality, Neglect and Other Grim Realities
https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2024/09/george-orwells-how-poor-die-exploring.html
George Orwell on Wells, Hitler and "Patriotism vs. the World State"
https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2021/07/george-orwell-on-wells-hitler-and.html
Orwell on Media Mischief
https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2021/11/orwell-on-media-mischief.html
Orwell's Homage to Catalonia Is Instructive on Many Levels, Plus a Good Read
https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2021/08/orwells-homage-to-catalonia-is.html
Public Introspection: George Orwell's Why I Write
https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2016/08/public-introspection-george-orwells-why.html
Shooting an Elephant
https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2011/05/shooting-elephant.html
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