George Orwell - The Complete Works

Table of Contents

Down and Out in Paris and London Down and Out in Paris and London O scathful harm, condicion of poverte! CHAUCER

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Chapter XVI

Chapter XVII

Chapter XVIII

Chapter XIX

Chapter XX

Chapter XXI

Chapter XXII

Chapter XXIII

Chapter XXIV

Chapter XXV

Chapter XXVI

Chapter XXVII

Chapter XXVIII

Chapter XXIX

Chapter XXX

Chapter XXXI

Chapter XXXII

Chapter XXXIII

Chapter XXXIV

Chapter XXXV

Chapter XXXVI

Chapter XXXVII

Chapter XXXVIII

Burmese Days

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

XXV

A Clergyman's Daughter

Chapter I

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

Chapter II

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

Chapter III

I

II

Chapter IV

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

Chapter V

I

II

Keep the Aspidistra Flying

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

The Road to Wigan Pier

Part I

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

Part II

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

Homage to Catalonia

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

Appendix I

Appendix II

Coming Up for Air

Part I

1

2

3

4

Part II

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Part III

1

2

3

Part IV

1

2

3

4

5

6

Animal Farm

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Nineteen Eighty-Four

Part One

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

Part Two

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

Part Three

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

Appendix – The Principles of Newspeak

Essays

The Spike (1931)

A Hanging (1931)

Bookshop Memories (1936)

Shooting an Elephant (1936)

Down the Mine (1937) (From "The Road to Wigan Pier")

North and South (1937) (From "The Road to Wigan Pier")

Spilling the Spanish Beans (1937)

Marrakech (1939)

Boys' Weeklies and Frank Richards's Reply (1940)

Charles Dickens (1940)

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

Charles Reade (1940)

Inside the Whale (1940)

I

II

III

The Art of Donald McGill (1941)

The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (1941)

Part I: England Your England

i.

ii.

iii.

iv.

v.

vi.

Part II: Shopkeepers at War

i.

ii.

iii.

Part III: The English Revolution

i.

ii.

iii.

Wells, Hitler and the World State (1941)

Looking Back on the Spanish War (1942)

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Rudyard Kipling (1942)

Mark Twain—The Licensed Jester (1943)

Poetry and the Microphone (1943)

W B Yeats (1943)

Arthur Koestler (1944)

Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali (1944)

Raffles and Miss Blandish (1944)

Antisemitism in Britain (1945)

Freedom of the Park (1945)

Future of a Ruined Germany (1945)

Good Bad Books (1945)

In Defence Of P. G. Wodehouse (1945)

Nonsense Poetry (1945)

Notes on Nationalism (1945)

Revenge is Sour (1945)

The Sporting Spirit (1945)

You and the Atomic Bomb (1945)

A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray (1946)

A Nice Cup of Tea (1946)

Books vs. Cigarettes (1946)

Confessions of a Book Reviewer (1946)

Decline of the English Murder (1946)

How the Poor Die (1946)

James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution (1946)

Pleasure Spots (1946)

Politics and the English Language (1946)

Politics vs. Literature: an Examination of Gulliver's Travels (1946)

Riding Down from Bangor (1946)

Some Thoughts on the Common Toad (1946)

The Prevention of Literature (1946)

Why I Write (1946)

Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool (1947)

Such, Such were the Joys (1947)

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

Writers and Leviathan (1948)

Reflections on Gandhi (1949)

Down and Out in Paris and London

O scathful harm, condicion of poverte!

CHAUCER

Chapter I

The Rue Du Coq d'Or, Paris, seven in the morning. A succession of furious, choking yells from the street. Madame Monce, who kept the little hotel opposite mine, had come out onto the pavement to address a lodger on the third floor. Her bare feet were stuck into sabots and her grey hair was streaming down.

Madame Monce: 'Sacrée salope! How many times have I told you not to squash bugs on the wallpaper? Do you think you've bought the hotel, eh? Why can't you throw them out of the window like everyone else? Espèce de traînée!'

The woman on the third floor: 'Va donc, eh! vieille vache!'

Thereupon a whole variegated chorus of yells, as windows were flung open on every side and half the street joined in the quarrel. They shut up abruptly ten minutes later, when a squadron of cavalry rode past and people stopped shouting to look at them.

I sketch this scene, just to convey something of the spirit of the Rue du Coq d'Or. Not that quarrels were the only thing that happened there—but still, we seldom got through the morning without at least one outburst of this description. Quarrels, and the desolate cries of street hawkers, and the shouts of children chasing orange-peel over the cobbles, and at night loud singing and the sour reek of the refuse-carts, made up the atmosphere of the street.

It was a very narrow street—a ravine of tall leprous houses, lurching towards one another in queer attitudes, as though they had all been frozen in the act of collapse. All the houses were hotels and packed to the tiles with lodgers, mostly Poles, Arabs and Italians. At the foot of the hotels were tiny bistros, where you could be drunk for the equivalent of a shilling. On Saturday nights about a third of the male population of the quarter was drunk. There was fighting over women, and the Arab navvies who lived in the cheapest hotels used to conduct mysterious feuds, and fight them out with chairs and occasionally revolvers. At night the policemen would only come through the street two together. It was a fairly rackety place. And yet amid the noise and dirt lived the usual respectable French shopkeepers, bakers and laundresses and the like, keeping themselves to themselves and quietly piling up small fortunes. It was quite a representative Paris slum.

My hotel was called the Hôtel des Trois Moineaux. It was a dark, rickety warren of five storeys, cut up by wooden partitions into forty rooms. The rooms were small and inveterately dirty, for there was no maid, and Madame F., the patronne, had no time to do any sweeping. The walls were as thin as matchwood, and to hide the cracks they had been covered with layer after layer of pink paper, which had come loose and housed innumerable bugs. Near the ceiling long lines of bugs marched all day like columns of soldiers, and at night came down ravenously hungry, so that one had to get up every few hours and kill them in hecatombs. Sometimes when the bugs got too bad one used to burn sulphur and drive them into the next room; whereupon the lodger next door would retort by having his room sulphured, and drive the bugs back. It was a dirty place, but homelike, for Madame F. and her husband were good sorts. The rent of the rooms varied between thirty and fifty francs a week.