Famished Souls Struggling for Food in George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London

Résumé

Bread and margarine with wine, or “tea-and-two-slices”, presents a choice that triggers vast
contemplations on poverty versus wealth and meaningful versus meaningless life. This paper
aims to highlight how George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London tackles the
centrality of food and the people striving to obtain it. The purpose of this reading is to raise
contemporary readers’ awareness of the inequality between the effort to procure food and the
meagre outcomes, portrayed through a symphony of smells, a shocking juxtaposition of food
abundance and scarcity, and a conflict of states needing interpretation. Orwell sets the two
capitals in a mirroring progression where reflections magnify or diminish depending on people’s
involvement in solving the constant dilemma of survival. While Paris offers the poor a chance
to look for work, London reduces the struggle to mere begging for food, which is officially
banned. The layered perspective brings the reader to a stark realization: a heavenly meal in a
Parisian restaurant may have been prepared in “the hell of” a kitchen. In London, reality unfolds
on a horizontal plane, where charities providing food deprive the poor of the chance to work for
it. The contexts differ, but the props remain the same: filth, famine and an abundance of feelings.