Penguin Modern Classics

George Orwell''s vivid memoir of his time living among the desperately poor and destitute, Down and Out in Paris and London is a moving tour of the underworld of society

''You have talked so often of going to the dogs - and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them.''

Written when Orwell was a struggling writer in his twenties, it documents his ''first contact with poverty''. Here, he painstakingly documents a world of unrelenting drudgery and squalor - sleeping in bug-infested hostels and doss houses of last resort, working as a dishwasher in Paris''s vile ''Hôtel X'', surviving on scraps and cigarette butts, living alongside tramps, a star-gazing pavement artist and a starving Russian ex-army captain. Exposing a shocking, previously-hidden world to his readers, Orwell gave a human face to the statistics of poverty for the first time - and in doing so, found his voice as a writer.