George Orwells 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 Pariss vile Hotel 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.