An imagined conversation with George Orwell. I get to ask the questions. He can answer however he wants.
Me: Mr. Blair. Eric. George. Which do you prefer.
Orwell: Whichever pays faster. Let’s keep it short.
Me: Your first book. Paris. The plongeur in the basement of the Hôtel X. Eighty hours a week, washing dishes in a steam room with no ventilation, for wages that barely fed you. You published it in 1933 and the polite English reading public didn’t know what to do with it.
Orwell: They still don’t. That’s why it keeps selling.
Me: Reading it now, in 2026, what I keep noticing is that you’re not complaining. You’re reporting. You take the posture of a field naturalist observing his own starvation.
Orwell: I’d tried complaining. Nobody reads it. A report, they’ll read.
Me: The famous Boris, the ex-Tsarist cavalry officer who kept you alive in Paris — half-mentor, half-albatross. Do you know he’s become one of the most beloved characters in the English tramp literature of the twentieth century?
Orwell: I gathered. He’d have hated that. He considered beloved a bourgeois affliction.
Me: Did he exist?
Orwell: Not exactly. Three men existed. Boris is a composite. If I told you that openly at the time, it would have been scandalous. Now people write whole memoirs that way and call them creative non-fiction.
Me: You were already lying for truth. You just didn’t have the word for it.
Orwell: Nobody did. That was the decade we started needing the word.
Me: Let me ask about the London half. The Paris sections are famous for the kitchen pressure. The London sections are famous for the cold. You describe sleeping on the Embankment, in the workhouse spikes, in the fourpenny coffin-houses — a penny saved you from having to sleep sitting up — and what I notice is that you never sentimentalise the tramps. You treat them as people whose lives have been made smaller by a specific set of laws written by other people, and you report on those laws with more venom than you report on the cold.
Orwell: The cold passes. The laws don’t.
Me: You also have a whole chapter on swearing that is funny. Legitimately funny.
Orwell: I was twenty-nine. I was allowed a chapter.
Me: You said in that chapter that swear words in London had all lost their meaning through overuse. A hundred years later, we have the same problem with outrage generally. Do you think that’s a structural feature of English?
Orwell: Structural feature of empire. Any language spoken too loud to too many people for too long starts to fray. That’s not pessimism. That’s the wear on the tool.
Me: Last question. The book is called Down and Out. Readers come to it expecting misery porn. What they get is closer to a treatise on voluntary invisibility — on what you learn when the social apparatus stops being able to see you. Did you know, when you were writing, that the invisibility was the actual subject?
Orwell: Not at the start. By the end, yes. The book is about what the middle class owes to the people they’ve agreed not to see. My hope was that a middle-class reader couldn’t walk past a London tramp the same way after reading the book. I don’t know if that hope paid out.
Me: It did not.
Orwell: Then you still need the book.
A related vagobond.com piece: Travel Writing — Dangerous Business.
Readers and fans of Down and Out in Paris and London will really enjoy Rough Living: Tips and Tales of Vagobond — my own field report from the other side of the economic line. First written in 2003 when it was still possible to live this way without a smartphone, updated in 2026 now that it’s harder and somehow more necessary. The Tips section is the plongeur’s handbook Orwell never got to write. Have a look and let me know what you think.
CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA
CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.
