The main theme is Gordon Comstock's romantic ambition to defy worship of the money-god and status, and the dismal life that results.

At the beginning of 1928 he lived in lodgings in Portobello Road from where he started his tramping expeditions, sleeping rough and roaming the poorer parts of London.

[6] In October 1934, after Orwell had spent nine months at his parents' home in Southwold, his aunt Nellie Limouzin found him a job as a part-time assistant at Booklovers' Corner, a second-hand bookshop in Hampstead run by Francis and Myfanwy Westrope.

The Westropes, who were friends of Nellie in the Esperanto movement, had an easygoing outlook and provided Orwell with comfortable accommodation at Warwick Mansions, Pond Street.

Through his work in the bookshop Orwell was in a position to become acquainted with women, "first as a clerk, then as a friend", and found that, "if circumstances were favourable, he might eventually embark upon a 'relationship' ...

[11] By the end of February 1935 Orwell had moved into a flat in Parliament Hill; his landlady, Rosalind Obermeyer, was studying at the University of London.

At the beginning of 1936 Orwell was dealing with pre-publication issues for Keep the Aspidistra Flying while he was touring the North of England collecting material for The Road to Wigan Pier.

In the titular phrase Orwell uses the aspidistra, a symbol of the stuffiness of middle-class society, in conjunction with the locution "to keep the flag (or colours) flying.

Orwell also used the phrase in his previous novel A Clergyman's Daughter (1935), where a character sings the words to the tune of the German national anthem.

An example of his financial embarrassment occurs when he is desperate for a pint of beer at his local pub, but has run out of money and is ashamed to cadge a drink off his fellow lodger, Flaxman.

Gordon and Rosemary have little time together — she works late and lives in a hostel, and his "bitch of a landlady" forbids female visitors to her tenants.

At their parting, as he takes the tram from Tottenham Court Road back to his bedsit, he is happy and feels that somehow it is agreed between them that Rosemary is going to be his mistress.

Having sent a poem to an American publication, Gordon suddenly receives from them a cheque worth ten pounds, a considerable sum for him at the time (£10 in 1934 equates to £592.20 in 2023.[17]).

Gordon continues drinking, drags Ravelston with him to visit a pair of prostitutes, and ends up broke and in a police cell the next morning.

Determined to sink to the lowest level of society, Gordon takes a furnished bed-sitting-room in a filthy alley parallel to Lambeth Cut.

After two years of abject failure and poverty, he throws his poetic work London Pleasures down a drain, marries Rosemary, resumes his advertising career and plunges into a campaign to promote a new product to prevent foot odour.

As the book closes, Gordon wins an argument with Rosemary to install an aspidistra in their new small but comfortable flat off the Edgware Road.

[18] In the Daily Telegraph he described it as a "savage and bitter book", and wrote that "the truths which the author propounds are so disagreeable that one ends by dreading their mention".

[19] In the New Statesman he wrote that it gave "a harrowing and stark account of poverty", and referred to its "clear and violent language, at times making the reader feel he is in a dentist's chair with the drill whirring".

[20] Orwell wrote in a letter to George Woodcock dated 28 September 1946 that Keep the Aspidistra Flying was one of the two or three of his books that he was ashamed of because it "was written simply as an exercise and I oughtn't to have published it, but I was desperate for money.

[22] For an edition of the BBC Television show Omnibus (The Road to the Left, broadcast 10 January 1971), Melvyn Bragg interviewed Norman Mailer.

"[23] The novel has won other admirers besides Mailer, notably Lionel Trilling, who called it "a summa of all the criticisms of a commercial civilization that have ever been made".