George Orwell: 'Down and Out in Paris and London.', London, ...

Estimate

£250 - £350

George Orwell: 'Down and Out in Paris and London.', London, Victor Gollancz, 1933, 1st edition, 3rd impression, original black cloth (slightly bumped/worn), yellow lettering to spine, neat contemporary ownership signature on front end paper dated 1933, some light, sporadic foxing to leaves, else leaves clean/VGC. Orwell's first full length book, a 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. Having been refused by Jonathan Cape and Faber and Faber it was finally published by the fledgling house of Gollancz. After rejection by Cape and Faber & Faber, Orwell discarded the typescript, but it was subsequently taken by a family friend of the Blairs to the literary agent Leonard Moore, who "recognised it as a 'natural' for the new house of Gollancz". Victor Gollancz was prepared to publish the work, subject to the removal of bad language and some identifiable names, and offered an advance of £40. After several months of wrangling over the title of the book, at the last minute, Gollancz shortened the title to 'Down and Out in Paris and London'. Orwell did not wish to publish under his own name Eric Blair, and after possibilities including "X," "P.S. Burton" (an alias Orwell had used on tramping expeditions), "Kenneth Miles" and "H. Lewis Allways" had been considered, was renamed "George Orwell", thus becoming his nom de guerre from then on for all his main works. Scarce in any of the first three impressions issued in January 1933, the original impression was issued in early January 1933 and consisted of 1,500 copies, many of which sold to the circulating libraries. A second impression of 500 further copies was issued shortly thereafter, followed by a final third impression consisting of a further 1,000 copies also in January 1933, after which the type was dispersed and the book was not published again in the UK until the Penguin paperback edition of 1940. 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.