Down and Out in Paris and London was Orwell’s first published work. It’s a memoir of his experience finding his feet as a writer and struggle to generate a stable income, forcing him out onto the streets and constantly looking for work in 1920’s Paris and in the latter half of the memoir London. Despite being a non-fiction memoir, Orwell’s writing read surprisingly like a narrative, and though in such narrative the fate of Orwell and the various individuals in poverty he meets don’t have any such narrative arc, often describing the endless and unstable search for work and struggles of starvation, it provides a harrowing first-hand insight into the lives of those in poverty. Orwell’s remarks for social change in his later works and political values so frequently portrayed are easily explained and empathised with as a consequence of his experiences in Down and Out, and there are also numerous interesting passages on the conditions of ‘spikes’, more commonly known as workhouses and how they could’ve improved or one on the intricacies of London working class slang which was a curious discovery on how language adapts, or even returns with the hindsight of reading in the 21st century. Orwell did however at one point use the phrase “wash my teeth” rather than brush and I’m not sure I can forgive him for that.