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How did George Orwell research the material for Down and Out in Paris and London?
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George Orwell
Known best for his powerful anti-utopian novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), English author George Orwell came to be regarded as a prophetic voice in 20th-century literature.
To research the material for his 1933 autobiographical work Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell sought to expiate the guilt he felt regarding the barriers of race and caste he had witnessed while serving in the imperial police in Burma. He decided to immerse himself in the lives of the poor and outcast in Europe to better understand their conditions.12
His research involved the following experiences:
- In Paris: He lived in a slum and worked as a dishwasher in hotels and restaurants. He also spent time in a charity hospital, which he later described in his essay "How the Poor Die".12
- In London: He dressed as a beggar and lived in cheap lodging houses in the East End among laborers and paupers.12
- Across England: He traveled the roads as a tramp, living and moving with professional hoboes and migrant laborers, and joined working-class people to work in the hopfields of Kent.12
Orwell later rearranged these actual incidents into a fictionalized narrative for the book.12