The second part is a travelogue of life on the road in and around London from the tramp's perspective, with descriptions of the types of hostel accommodation available and some of the characters to be found living on the margins.

In a later account, he said the theft was the work of a young woman whom he had picked up and brought back with him;[7] it has been submitted that "consideration for his parents' sensibilities would have required the suppression of this misadventure".

Whoever reduced Orwell to destitution did him a good turn; his final ten weeks in Paris sowed the seed of his first published book.

Later he acted as a private tutor to a disabled child there and also undertook further tramping expeditions, culminating in a stint working in the Kent hop fields in August and September 1931.

After this adventure, he ended up in the Tooley Street kip, which he found so unpleasant that he wrote home for money and moved to more comfortable lodgings.

She had, with her husband, a London businessman named Francis, been for a number of years a visitor to Southwold in the summer and was on friendly terms with the Blairs.

"[13] Victor Gollancz was prepared to publish the work, subject to the removal of bad language and some identifiable names, and offered an advance of £40.

Down and Out in Paris and London was published on 9 January 1933 and received favourable reviews from, among others, C. Day Lewis, WH Davies, Compton Mackenzie and JB Priestley.

An Italian compositor forges room keys and steals his savings and his scant income vanishes when the English lessons he is giving stop.

After the various ordeals of unemployment and hunger the narrator obtains a job as a plongeur (dishwasher) in the "Hôtel X" near the Place de la Concorde, and begins to work long hours there.

He talks of his routine life among the working poor of Paris, slaving and sleeping, and then drinking on Saturday night through the early hours of Sunday morning.

The narrator is not paid for ten days and is compelled to spend a night on a bench—"It was very uncomfortable—the arm of the seat cuts into your back—and much colder than I had expected"—rather than face his landlady over the outstanding rent.

In short, we were decidedly chic.He falls into a routine again and speaks of quite literally fighting for a place on the Paris Métro to reach the "cold, filthy kitchen" by seven.

The narrative is interspersed with anecdotes recounted by some of the minor characters, such as Valenti, an Italian waiter at Hotel X, and Charlie, "one of the local curiosities," who is "a youth of family and education who had run away from home."

His friend duly replies, offering a job taking care of a "congenital imbecile," and sends him some money to get his possessions from the pawn.

I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant.

In Chapter XXIV, it is "clear that Orwell did distort facts by claiming on his return from Paris he found himself down and out in London and had not 'the slightest notion of how to get a cheap bed'.

This of course heightens the tension [...] but the truth is that in Paris he had already written his first substantial essay, "The Spike", describing a night spent in a Notting Hill tramps' hostel.

[26] 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.

[27] 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.

A middle of the road paper surmised that Orwell's account was likely to "give a retrospective retch to Americans" who had patronized Parisian restaurants.

[30] 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.

"[31] 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.

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.