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.
The book
At a glance
- A dock worker lodging in a common lodging-house in Pennyfields, east London
- Head of the house — arbiter of disputes and unpaid chucker-out
- Ninepence or a shilling a night, paid by seven in the evening
- Between fifty and a hundred, fifteen or twenty to a dormitory
- Chapter XXV, twice
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeThe English writer George Orwell published Down and Out in Paris and London in 1933. It is his own account of washing dishes in Paris and then living on next to nothing in London, and Steve belongs to the London half. He was a dock worker lodging in the same cheap dormitory as Orwell, and the other men there treated him as the man in charge.
Orwell had eight shillings left, which lasted three days and four nights. After a bad night in the Waterloo Road he moved east across London and took a bed in a common lodging-house in Pennyfields. It slept between fifty and a hundred men, fifteen or twenty to a dormitory, at ninepence or a shilling a night, paid in cash by seven in the evening or out you went. It was run on the owner's behalf by a manager called a deputy; Orwell notes that lodging houses like it were profitable businesses owned by rich men. The work of tending the fires, sweeping the kitchen and making the beds was shared out among the lodgers by rotation.
Steve was the senior lodger, and the others called him head of the house. Orwell says what the title meant in practice: he settled arguments, and he threw out anyone who had to be thrown out, without being paid for either job.
Orwell liked the kitchen that Steve was head of. It was a low cellar deep underground, hot and drowsy with fumes from the coke fires, lit only by the two fires that were kept burning day and night all year round. Ragged washing hung on strings from the ceiling. Most of the men were stevedores, and some of them moved about the fires with their cooking pots completely naked, waiting for their clothes to dry. At night there were card games and draughts and singing. Men who had bought a pail of winkles cheap shared them round, and it was taken for granted that anyone out of work would be fed by the others.
On Orwell's last night in the house two lodgers quarrelled in front of everyone. An old-age pensioner of about seventy, stripped to the waist because he had been doing his washing, stood screaming abuse at a short, thickset dock worker for five minutes, making little rushes at him and spitting, until he sat down on a bench, put his face in his hands and cried. The other man walked out. Steve explained afterwards what it had been about: the old man had somehow lost his store of bread and margarine and had nothing to eat for the next three days except what the other lodgers gave him, and the younger man, who was in work and well fed, had taunted him with it. Orwell puts the sum at a shilling's worth of food.
How the book draws them
- What the other lodgers called himHead of the house. That is what Orwell says he was known as: the senior lodger in a place that slept between fifty and a hundred men, run day to day by the lodgers themselves.
- What the job amounted toOrwell describes him as arbiter of disputes and unpaid chucker-out — the man who settled arguments and threw out anyone who had to go, doing for nothing the job a pub pays a doorman to do.
- His tradeA stevedore, meaning a dock labourer who loads and unloads ships. The house was in east London, and Orwell says most of the men round the kitchen fires were stevedores as well.
- How Orwell describes himOrwell calls him a fine Norman-looking stevedore, Norman meaning from Normandy in northern France, and leaves it there. No age, no history, and no account of how he came to be living in a lodging-house.
- The quarrel he explainedAfter the one serious quarrel Orwell saw in the house, it was Steve who told him the cause: a shilling's worth of bread and margarine that an old man living on the old-age pension had lost, and a lodger in work who taunted him about it.