Poverty is Unnecessary Theme Analysis

Orwell argues that there is no reason for poverty to exist. People live in poverty only because of selfishness and greed, the norms of consumption, and the social hierarchies that structure the world.

One way that Orwell attacks the logic of poverty is to weigh its costs against its benefits. He does this by contrasting the life of the poor with the luxurious lives of those who employ poor people. Orwell, who himself worked as a plongeur at Hotel X in Paris, describes the life of the plongeur as one of long hours, bad pay, and mind-numbing, frenetic activity. At the end of a shift (which is typically 11 hours but sometimes more), one only has time to rush home, eat a hurried meal, and go to bed. The plongeur then wakes up and does it all over again. As such, there is not enough time in the day for a plongeur to even consider getting an education or starting a family. Rather, plongeurs live like indentured servants, often until they die. Orwell then contrasts this joyless existence of the plongeur to the few hours of flimsy opulence that the rich experience at the restaurants where the plongeurs work. Orwell concludes that such luxury is pointless, and that the brutal lives forced upon the plongeurs are thus completely unnecessary.

To add insult to injury, Orwell claims that at “high end” establishments, what passes for elegance is, upon closer inspection, actually shoddy and awful. When Orwell works at the Auberge, for example, he finds that the restaurant is poorly run, maintained on a system of bribes, and filthy. In the kitchen, the floor is an inch-deep in old food, the garbage can is overflowing, and the outdoor shed where the meat and vegetables are stored is overrun with rats. And yet, the Auberge is successful, in large part because of the “Norman” decorations: fake beams on the walls, “peasant” pottery, and erotic paintings over the bar. Customers are attracted to the this “elegance,” which is in fact a sham, while workers like Orwell, Boris, and the restaurant’s long-suffering cook, slave away in horrible and unsafe conditions.

Likewise, Orwell describes Hotel X as a perfect example of a restaurant that obtains its reputation for luxury through cutting corners and overcharging. The dining room might appear to be a bastion of elegance, but just behind a door is the kitchen where the cooks often spit in the food and vermin are not uncommon. There is, Orwell contends, “a secret vein of dirt, running through the great garish hotel like the intestines through a man’s body.” Orwell then, paints the “luxury” of such restaurants as a kind of con game in which the rich get only the illusion of luxury—and the status of being able to go to a “high-end” establishment—in exchange for the brutal exploitation of the poor.

Orwell is not blind, though, to the pernicious attraction of valuing status over substance—in fact, he describes how this value system has been adopted by the poor themselves. As a dishwasher, Orwell is keenly aware of his place in the Hotel X pecking order: he is just below an apprentice waiter and just above the chambermaid. This caste system gives (limited) power and superiority to those in valued positions (cooks, waiters, the maître d’hotel), which contents these workers and gives other workers a status to which they can aspire. In other words, the poor themselves buy into the system in order to achieve an illusion of power and status. While the rich get power through spending money on goods and services that appear luxurious, the poor get power by rigidly defining each other and fighting for the meager power or esteem they are allowed.

The streets of London share in common with the hotels of Paris a fixed pecking order. Acrobats and street photographers are at the top of the food chain, beggars at the bottom. Organ grinders and talented pavement artists are just below photographers, and those who sell cheap, unwanted merchandise (bootlaces, lavender in envelopes) are below them. This kind of hierarchy is also found among London tramps who are eager to distinguish themselves from those they consider the lowest of the low. At the Lower Binfield spike, for instance, Orwell meets a homeless woman who refuses to be associated with the trashy men around her. “When I want to get mixed up with a set of tramps,” she says, “I’ll let you know.”

At the end of the book, Orwell explains how the things he has learned while “down and out” will transform the way he behaves: “I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels,” he writes, “nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy … nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant. That is a beginning.” Orwell, then, ends his book at the “beginning.” It is a beginning that doesn’t offer a clear path forward, but that does offer the idealistic vision: should society decide to prioritize investment in the poor over pampering the rich, poverty might be eradicated. The down and out state is, according to Orwell, a creation of a capitalist system that rewards artificiality and fruitless toil. Orwell contends that if people—the wealthy and the poor—were to wake up to this fact, nobody would need to continue to waste their lives as slaves to the system.