DOWN AND OUT: SPATIAL AXES OF GEORGE ORWELL’S PARISIAN UNDERCLASS GEOGRAPHIES

Abstract

Abstract

George Orwell's account of Paris in the late 1920s offers an inverted perspective and a compelling testimony of the diverse and largely obscured world of the urban population living in precarious circumstances during a pivotal period between the wars. Through his own experiences working as a plongeur (dishwasher) in Parisian restaurants and living in squalor in overcrowded Latin Quarter lodgings, Orwell constructed a multi-layered portrayal of a social stratum of the underclass that transcends mere observation and may be read as a piece of the mosaic contributing to the contemporary political commentary on the imbalance of power between the Global North and the Global South. The paper focuses on Orwell’s strategies to make the narrative a sophisticated critique of class inequality by relying on the perceptions generated by and in the physical space. In Down and Out in Paris and London, Orwell maps the city’s underclass geographies using three interlocking spatial frameworks: proximity/distance, center/periphery, and verticality/horizontality. These axes reveal how physical environments both reflect and reproduce social hierarchies, offering a precursor to later 20th-century spatial theories while retaining Orwell’s distinctive blend of documentary realism and political urgency.