Down and Out In Paris and London

Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) was George Orwell's first published book, a first-person account of the months he spent living in genuine poverty, first in the slums of Paris and then among the itinerant poor of London. In Paris he works as a plongeur, a dishwasher and kitchen drudge in a grand hotel, and the book's most sustained passages describe the brutal, hidden labor that keeps the luxury of such establishments running, along with the underground kitchens, the filth, the exhaustion, the rigid hierarchy of cooks and waiters and washers. In London he moves through doss houses and spikes, the cheap lodging houses and charity shelters available to men with nothing. The book is documentary in its specificity and plainspoken in its anger, less a memoir of hardship than an argument about what poverty actually consists of and how society prefers not to see it.

Originally published in 1933 by Victor Gollancz, this is a first printing of the 1949 Secker & Warburg Uniform Edition, which reset the text and standardized the design across Orwell's works. Orwell died the following year.

Hardcover. First Edition thus. Octavo, green cloth. "New Edition, reset 1949" stated on copyright. London: Secker & Warburg, 1949. #10312.
Fine in nearly fine dust jacket with short closed tear on rear panel and light rubbing. A bright, lovely copy.