Down and Out in Paris and London

Also in the book

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  The chef du personnel

  The assistant manager at the Hôtel X. He hires the narrator at the service door, sets what he does all day, and can sack a dishwasher or fine a waiter.

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  Mario

  The Italian in charge of the cafeterie at the Hôtel X. Fourteen years underground, and the reason the breakfast orders go out at all.

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  Morandi

  A waiter at the Hôtel X, accused to his face of being an Italian spy. He does not deny it, and answers with a razor.

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  The Serbian "extra"

  A day labourer hired to cover a sick man at the Hôtel X. He works flat out until noon, then gets himself sacked on purpose, because the wages are already earned.

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  The Magyar

  The fourth man in the basement cafeterie of the Hôtel X, known to the staff only by that nickname. He is not the same person as Jules, the waiter later in the book who is also described as a Magyar.

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  Henri

  A sewer worker lodging in the narrator's hotel who has stopped speaking, except for the purposes of work, for days at a time.

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  Furex

  A stonemason from the Limousin who works steadily all week and drinks himself into a paroxysm on Saturdays. A Communist sober, a patriot drunk.

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  Valenti

  The fourth-floor waiter at the Hôtel X. Twenty-four, looks eighteen, and has been earning his own living since he was twelve.

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  R.

  An Englishman in the narrator's Paris quarter who drinks four litres of wine a day and talks about antique furniture.

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  The Rougiers

  An old, ragged couple in the narrator's hotel who sold postcards on the Boulevard St Michel in sealed packets, as pornography. The photographs inside were of chateaux on the Loire, and the buyers never complained.

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  Bill the moocher

  A tramp the narrator meets at a camp in Kent in the London half of the book: strong, cheerful, openly opposed to work, and living entirely by begging bread from shopkeepers.

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  William and Fred

  Two young ex-fishermen from Norfolk, met in a Kent casual ward. They sing everywhere they land, and they will ruin a pair of boots for the price of the replacements.

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  The woman tramp

  The only woman among the several dozen tramps waiting on the green at Lower Binfield, and the first woman tramp the narrator had seen. She kept apart from the men, and said so when one of them tried to talk to her.

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  Azaya

  A peasant girl who worked fourteen hours a day in a glass factory and sang at the Saturday drinking nights in the bistro below the narrator's hotel.

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  Marinette

  A thin, dark Corsican girl, Azaya's friend, who danced at the same Saturday nights in the bistro below the narrator's hotel.

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  Madame Monce

  The keeper of the hotel opposite the narrator's, whose shouted quarrel with a third-floor lodger about squashing bugs on the wallpaper opens the book.

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  Old Laurent

  A rag merchant in the Coq d'Or quarter who copied his own signature from a slip of paper he carried in his pocket.

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  The young Italian

  A lodger at the narrator's hotel who called himself a compositor, cut duplicate keys during his six nights there, and robbed a dozen rooms on the last one. The theft left the narrator with forty-seven francs, and the poverty the book describes begins from there.

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  Monsieur Jules

  A Roumanian lodger in the Coq d'Or quarter who had a glass eye and would not admit it. A different man from Jules the Magyar, the waiter at the Auberge de Jehan Cottard later in the book.

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  The doorkeeper at the Hôtel X

  The man in the little office beside the service entrance of the Hôtel X. He checked the staff in, searched them for stolen food on the way out, paid their wages by hand, and cheated the narrator of a hundred and fourteen francs in six weeks.

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  The head cook at the Hôtel X

  The head cook of the grand hotel: a scarlet-faced man with big moustaches who stood in the middle of the kitchen calling out several hundred dishes a day from memory. Orwell calls him an insufferable bully and an artist in the same sentence. Not the cook at the Auberge de Jehan Cottard later in the book, who is a Baltic Russian woman.

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  The woman who washed up for the dining-room

  The woman the narrator replaced one day a week at the Hôtel X. She stood at the sink of the dining-room scullery thirteen hours a day, six days a week, the year round, and was quite sixty. The book never gives her a name.

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  The Irishman at Romton

  The old tramp leaning against the pigpens in Romton market-place who teaches the narrator the vocabulary of the road, takes him to a free tea, and walks him to the gate of his first casual ward.

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  Yvonne

  The girl Charlie was living with when his money ran out, and the one who had to carry out his scheme: padded with a borrowed cushion, she claimed the free meals given to pregnant women at a government maternity hospital. Not the Yvonne who wrote Boris a letter refusing him two hundred francs. The book gives the name to two women.

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  The lady at the Romton tea

  The woman in a blue silk dress, gold spectacles and a crucifix who gave free tea and buns to twenty-five tramps in a tin-roofed shed at Romton, then kept them for half an hour of prayers.

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  The old Etonian

  The drunk, educated man who leaned over the narrator's bed in a lodging-house off the Strand to announce that he was an old Etonian, sang the Eton boating song until the room shouted him down, and slept in his boots with a bottle of cherry brandy in his arms.

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  Scotty

  A little hairy Glasgow tramp locked up with the narrator for a Sunday at Lower Binfield, who lost his tin of cigarette ends in the search, was given a smoke, and ran up the road the next morning to pay it back.

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  The young carpenter

  A tramp in a collar and tie, six months on the road for want of a set of tools, who carried a Walter Scott novel in his pocket and told the narrator that tramps were scum.

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  The screever who had shown at the Salon

  A pavement artist Bozo introduced to the narrator: a trained painter who had submitted to the Paris Salon, took up chalk on an impulse one starving night in the Strand, and now copies Old Masters on stone for a pound a week.

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  Shorty

  An organ-grinder who worked the cheap pubs and coffee-shops round Whitechapel with a mate who had a wooden leg, and always played a second tune once the hat had come round.

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  Maria

  The peasant girl at Valenti's hotel who found him starving on the fifth day, noticed the deposit still owing on an empty oil can in the corner, and came back with bread and wine.

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  The man in the Romton cell

  The tramp the narrator was locked in with for his first night in a casual ward: a fitter three years out of work, whose wife left him when the job did.

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  The young clerk at the shelter

  A tall, pale young man boasting to a table of out-of-work clerks in a Salvation Army shelter that he needed nobody's help to get a job. The narrator found him an hour later alone in the reading room, on his knees.

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  Numéro 83

  The old bearded man ahead of the narrator in a Paris pawnshop, whose bundle the clerk shot back across the counter without a word. It fell open on the floor showing four pairs of woollen pants, the room laughed, and he gathered them up and shambled out muttering. Orwell thinks of him again the next time he goes in.

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  The German plongeur

  A kitchen dishwasher at the Hôtel X known through the basement as a débrouillard, the man who gets it done somehow. An English lord asked for peaches late at night when there were none in the hotel and the shops were shut. He went out, came back in ten minutes with four, stolen from a neighbouring restaurant, and the lord paid twenty francs each.

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  Manuel

  A Spaniard at the Saturday drinking nights in the bistro below the narrator's hotel, who pulled the girls to the bar and shook the dice-box against their bellies for luck. When the singing went flat after one in the morning he crossed to the Arab bistro down the street, where the card games ran until daylight.

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  Big Louis

  A bricklayer in the same bistro. Two of his children sat in a corner sharing a glass of sirop while the singing went on. By the small hours he was drunk on the floor, barking and pretending to be a dog, and the others had tired of him and kicked at him as they went past.

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  The girl in the bistro

  A girl in a bistro near the narrator's hotel who worked from seven in the morning until midnight for a whole year, sitting down only for meals. Asked to a dance, she laughed and said she had not been farther than the street corner in months. She was consumptive, and died about the time Orwell left Paris. He puts her in the book as the answer to his own self-pity about a seventeen-hour day.

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  The Lambeth clothes dealer

  The fourth rag-shop owner the narrator tried in Lambeth, a large blond young man very pink all over, like a slice of ham. He felt a good suit between finger and thumb, called it poor stuff, and traded it for a bundle of dirty rags and one shilling. As Orwell opened his mouth to argue he reached out as though to take the shilling back, and the argument ended there.

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  Steve

  A Norman-looking stevedore in the Pennyfields lodging-house, senior enough to be called head of the house: arbiter of disputes and unpaid chucker-out. He explained to the narrator that the ugliest quarrel of the week, between an old-age pensioner and another stevedore, had been about a shilling's worth of bread and margarine.

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  The old-age pensioner

  One of two or three men in the Pennyfields lodging-house living on the ten-shilling old-age pension and nothing else. He costed it out for the narrator: ninepence a night for the bed, threepence for a shave on Saturday, three halfpence a week towards a sixpenny haircut, and about four and fourpence left for food and tobacco. He could imagine no other expenses.

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  The red-nosed man

  A tramp at the free tea in Romton who could say "the dear Lord Jesus" with less shame than anyone Orwell had met, a knack he thought the man had picked up in prison. He pulled the harmonium into place, then dealt out the prayerbooks behind the lady's back like a hand of cards, and was the only man in the room to speak the responses above a whisper.

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  Pip

  A man in the Salvation Army shelter with some nervous trouble, shellshock perhaps, who called out "Pip!" at unpredictable intervals through the night, loud and startling as a small motor horn. He slept there regularly and must have kept ten or twenty people awake every night. The other lodgers had named him after the noise.

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  The white-bearded screever

  An old pavement artist fifty yards along the Embankment from Bozo's pitch, who had drawn the same picture every day for ten years: a dog pulling a child out of the water, captioned "A faithful friend". Bozo, who prided himself on a fresh cartoon daily, held him in complete contempt.

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  The begging-letter writer

  A lodger at Bozo's Lambeth lodging-house who wrote appeals for money towards his wife's funeral, and when one took effect ate the proceeds in single enormous meals of bread and margarine. Orwell talked to him and concluded that, like most swindlers, he believed a good part of his own story.