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.
In George Orwell's account, his tools back. He says he is on the road for want of a few pounds' worth of them, and keeps himself visibly apart from the other casuals in the meantime.
The book
At a glance
- A casual at the Lower Binfield spike
- Carpenter, out of work for want of tools
- Six months
- Never given
- Chapter XXXV
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeIt was the middle of the Sunday lock-in at Lower Binfield. George Orwell had spent the morning in the workhouse kitchen and came back at three to a room of men who had been on the benches since eight and were half mad with boredom, too bored to talk. He fell into conversation with a young carpenter who kept a little apart from the others and held himself, Orwell says, more like a free man than a casual. He wore a collar and tie and had a copy of Quentin Durward, by the Scottish novelist Walter Scott, in his pocket.
His case was simple and he was angry about it. He had been six months at the public charge for want of a few pounds' worth of tools. He criticised the system that made a man spend fourteen hours a day inside a spike and the other ten walking and dodging the police, and said it was idiotic. He avoided casual wards unless hunger drove him to them, preferring hedges and the backs of ricks, and along the south coast he had begged by day and slept in bathing huts for weeks at a time.
Then Orwell told him what he had seen in the workhouse kitchen that morning. He had been set to throw away what was left of the paupers' Sunday dinner, and had filled five dustbins with half-eaten joints and bucketfuls of bread and vegetables, all defiled with tea leaves so that nobody could eat it, while fifty men sat in the spike on bread and cheese. The carpenter changed tone at once. They had to do it, he said. Make the places comfortable and all the scum of the country would flock in. These tramps were too lazy to work, and you did not want to go encouraging them. He had been famished with the rest of them an hour before, and he repeated the word scum several times, and told Orwell not to judge such people by the standards of men like the two of them.
How the book draws them
- What a collar means on the roadHis collar and tie are the surest class marker in the London half of the book. Bozo the pavement artist kept one going by patching it with pieces cut from his own shirt tail, a man in the Romton queue is identified as a clerk by his, and the men in the Salvation Army shelter are described as having pawned theirs.
- How he held himselfA collar and tie, and a manner a little aloof from the rest of the room. Orwell says he carried himself more like a free man than a casual.
- Quentin DurwardHe kept Walter Scott's novel in his pocket, which made him unusual in a room where a good many men could not read their own meal tickets.
- Where he sleptUnder hedges and behind ricks by choice, and in bathing huts along the south coast for weeks at a time. He entered a spike only when hunger made him.
- The arithmetic he objected toFourteen hours a day locked in the spike and ten outside it walking and avoiding the police, for the sake of a few pounds' worth of tools he could not buy.
- ScumTold that the workhouse had filled five dustbins with eatable food rather than feed the men he was sitting among, he said it had to be done, and used the word repeatedly of the room around him.