Down and Out in Paris and London

Down and Out in Paris and London is the first full-length work by the English author George Orwell, published in 1933. It is a memoir in two parts on the theme of poverty in the two cities, which was written deliberately in a non-academic tone. Its target audience was the middle and upper class members of society—those who were more likely to be well educated—and exposes the poverty existing in two prosperous cities: Paris and London. The first part is an account of living in near-destitution in Paris and the experience of casual labor in restaurant kitchens. 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.

Even though Orwell’s most popular novels are deservingly Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, his voice rings true on other subjects besides totalitarianism and political freedoms. What I find most comforting and disturbing about Orwell’s work is his ability to make the reader feel extremely entertained and “above” the concepts and situations in his novels when depicting fairly-possible, real-life scenarios. We read his work with the perception we would never be fooled on such a grand scale, we would recognize such managements  or exploitations and fight against them, rally the masses, while at the same time instilling the fear of the futility of resistance to such manipulations.

    And when he writes more openly and less figuratively, although maintaining his masterful social commentary, as he does in the above novel, we experience similar feelings as we read, being entertained all the while. If you have not been touched, affected, or changed after reading an Orwell novel, you have not actually read it…or you are a perfect example of what Orwell himself most likely feared the most. 

Animal Farm

Animal Farm is an allegorical and dystopian novella by George Orwell, first published in England on August 17, 1945. According to Orwell, the book reflects events leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and then on into the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union. Orwell, a democratic socialist, was a critic of Joseph Stalin and hostile to Moscow-directed Stalinism, an attitude critically shaped by his experiences during the Spanish Civil War. The Soviet Union, he believed, became a brutal dictatorship, built upon a cult of personality and enforced by a reign of terror. In a letter to Yvonne Davet, Orwell described Animal Farm as a satirical tale against Stalin, and in his essay “Why I Write” (1946), wrote Animal Farm was the first book he tried with full consciousness of what he was doing “to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole.”

     The original title was Animal Farm: A Fairy Story; U.S. publishers dropped the subtitle when they published it in 1946, and only one of the translations during Orwell’s lifetime kept it. Other titular variations include subtitles such as “A Satire” and “A Contemporary Satire.”

Nineteen Eighty-Four

Nineteen Eighty-Four, often published as 1984, is a dystopian novel by English author George Orwell published in 1949. The novel is set in Airstrip One (formerly known as Great Britain), a province of the superstate Oceania in a world of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance, and public manipulation, dictated by a political system euphemistically named English Socialism (or “Ingsoc” in the government’s invented language, Newspeak), under the control of a privileged elite of the Inner Party, persecuting individualism and independent thinking known as “thoughtcrimes.”

     The tyranny is epitomized by Big Brother, the Party leader who enjoys an intense cult of personality but who may not even exist. The Party “seeks power entirely for its own sake. It is not interested in the good of others; it is interested solely in power.” The protagonist of the novel, Winston Smith, is a member of the Outer Party, who works for the Ministry of Truth (or Minitrue in Newspeak), responsible for propaganda and historical revisionism. His job is to rewrite past newspaper articles, so the historical record always supports the party line. The instructions the workers receive specify the corrections as fixing misquotations and never as what they really are: forgeries and falsifications. A large part of the ministry also actively destroys all edited documents not containing the revisions; in this way, proof does not exist how the government is lying. Smith is a diligent and skillful worker but secretly hates the Party and dreams of rebellion against Big Brother.