Down and Out in Paris and London - Reactions

Reactions

Within a month of publication, Humbert Possenti, "a restaurateur and hotelier of forty years," had written to The Times complaining that the book was unfairly disparaging to the restaurant trade. The Times Literary Supplement had previously reviewed Down and Out in Paris and London, describing it as "a vivid picture of an apparently mad world." Orwell responded to the restaurateur's criticism with a letter to the same newspaper: "I do know that in our hotel there were places which no customer could possibly have been allowed to see with any hope of retaining his custom."

In the Adelphi, C. Day Lewis wrote, "Orwell's book is a tour of the underworld, conducted without hysteria or prejudice a model of clarity and good sense." JB Priestley, in the Evening Standard, considered it "uncommonly good reading. An excellent book and a valuable social document. The best book of its kind I have read in a long time." Compton Mackenzie wrote of Orwell's "immensely interesting book a genuine human document, which at the same time is written with so much artistic force that, in spite of the squalor and degradation thus unfolded, the result is curiously beautiful with the beauty of an accomplished etching on copper. The account of a casual ward in this country horrifies like some scene of inexplicable misery in Dante."

Following the American publication, James T. Farrell, writing in The New Republic, called it "genuine, unexaggerated and intelligent," while Herbert Gorman wrote for the New York Times Book Review, "He possesses a keen eye for character and a rough-and ready 'styleless style' that plunges along and makes the reader see what the author wants him to see." In contrast, the reviewer for New English Weekly wrote, "This book is forcefully written and is very readable, Yet it fails to carry conviction. We wonder if the author was really down and out. Down certainly, but out?"

Cyril Connolly later wrote, "I don't think Down and Out in London and Paris is more than agreeable journalism; it was all better done by his friend Henry Miller. Orwell found his true form a few years later." Orwell agreed with this assessment. Henry Miller's controversial work Tropic of Cancer (1934) is based on Miller's experiences in Paris around the time Orwell was there.

In an essay for the 1971 The World of George Orwell, Richard Mayne considered the book as typical of something that was true of a great deal of Orwell's later writing: his "relish at revealing behind-the-scenes squalor. He was always taking the lid off things—poverty, parlour Socialism, life in a coal mine, prep-school tyranny, the Empire, the Spanish Civil War, the Russian Revolution, the political misuse of language. He might well have echoed W.H. Auden: All I have is a voice/To undo the folded lie."