Down and Out in London and Paris

by Orwell, George

  newspaper proprietor, amiable compared with a hire-

  purchase tout-in short, a parasite, but a fairly harmless

  parasite. He seldom extracts more than a bare living from

  the community, and, what should justify him according to

  our ethical ideas, he pays for it over and over in suffering.

  I do not think there is anything about a beggar that sets

  him in a different class from other people, or gives most

  modern men the right to despise him.

  Then the question arises, Why are beggars despised? -

  for they are despised, universally. I believe it is for the

  simple reason that they fail to earn a decent living. In

  practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless,

  productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it

  shall be profitable. In all the modern talk about energy,

  efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning

  is there except "Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of

  it"? Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this

  test beggars fail, and for this they are despised. If one

  could earn even ten pounds a week at begging, it would

  become a respectable profession immediately. A beggar,

  looked at realistically, is simply a business man, getting

  his living, like other business men, in the way that comes

  to hand. He has not, more than most modern people, sold

  his honour; he has merely made the mistake of choosing

  a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich.

  XXXII

  I WANT to put in some notes, as short as possible, on

  London slang and swearing. These (omitting the ones

  that everyone knows) are some of the cant words now

  used in London:

  A gagger-beggar or street performer of any kind. A

  moocher-one who begs outright, without pretence of

  doing a trade. A nobbler-one who collects pennies for a

  beggar. A chanter-a street singer. A clodhopper -a street

  dancer. A mugfaker-a street photographer. A glimmer-

  one who watches vacant motor-cars. A gee (or jee-it is

  pronounced jee)-the accomplice of a cheapjack, who

  stimulates trade by pretending to buy

  something. A split-a detective. A flattie-a policeman. A

  dideki-a gypsy. A toby-a tramp.

  A drop-money given to a beggar. Funkumlavender or

  other perfume sold in envelopes. A boozer -a public-

  house. A slang-a hawker's licence. A kip -a place to

  sleep in, or a night's lodging. SmokeLondon. A judy-a

  woman. The spike-the casual ward. The lump-the casual

  ward. A tosheroon-a half-crown. A denner-a shilling. A

  hog-a shilling. A sprowsie-a sixpence. Clods-coppers. A

  drum-a billy can. Shackles-soup. A chat-a louse. Hard-

  up-tobacco made from cigarette ends. A stick or cane -a

  burglar's jemmy. A peter-a safe. A bly-a burglar's oxy-

  acetylene blow-lamp

  To bawl-to suck or swallow. To knock off-to steal. To

  skipper-to sleep in the open.

  About half of these words are in the larger diction-

  aries. It is interesting to guess at the derivation of some

  of them, though one or two-for instance, "funkum" and

  "tosheroon"-are beyond guessing. "Deaner" presumably

  comes from "denier." "Glimmer" (with the verb "to

  glim") may have something to do with the old word

  "glim," meaning a light, or another old word "glim,"

  meaning a glimpse; but it is an instance of the formation

  of new words, for in its present sense it can hardly be

  older than motor-cars. "Gee" is a curious word;

  conceivably it has arisen out of "gee," meaning horse, in

  the sense of stalking horse. The derivation of "screever"

  is mysterious. It must come ultimately from scribo, but

  there has been no similar word in English for the past

  hundred and fifty years; nor can it have come directly

  from the French, for pavement artists are unknown in

  France. "Judy" and "bawl" are East End words, not

  found west of Tower Bridge. "Smoke" is a word used

  only by tramps. "Kip" is Danish. Till quite recently

  the word "doss" was used in this sense, but it is now

  quite obsolete.

  London slang and dialect seem to change very

  rapidly. The old London accent described by Dickens

  and Surtees, with v for w and w for v and so forth, has

  now vanished utterly. The Cockney accent as we know

  it seems to have come up in the 'forties (it is first men-

  tioned in an American book, Herman Melville's White

  Jacket), and Cockney is already changing; there are few

  people now who say "fice" for "face," "nawce" for

  "nice" and so forth as consistently as they did twenty

  years ago. The slang changes together with the accent.

  Twenty-five or thirty years ago, for instance, the

  "rhyming slang" was all the rage in London. In the

  "rhyming slang" everything was named by something

  rhyming with it-a "hit or miss" for a kiss, "plates of

  meat" for feet, etc. It was so common that it was even

  reproduced in novels; now it is almost extinct.' Perhaps

  all the words I have mentioned above will have van-

  ished in another twenty years.

  The swear words also change-or, at any rate, they are

  subject to fashions. For example, twenty years ago the

  London working classes habitually used the word

  "bloody." Now they have abandoned it utterly, though

  novelists still represent them as using it. No born

  Londoner (it is different with people of Scotch or Irish

  origin) now says "bloody," unless he is a man of some

  education. The word has, in fact, moved up in the social

  scale and ceased to be a swear word for the purposes of

  the working classes. The current London adjective, now

  tacked on to every noun, is --------- . No

  doubt in time---, like "bloody," will find its way into

  1 It survives in certain abbreviations, such as "use your

  twopenny" or "use your head." "Twopenny" is arrived at like

  this: head-loaf of bread-twopenny loaf-twopenny.

  the drawing-room and be replaced by some other word.

  The whole business of swearing, especially English

  swearing, is mysterious. Of its very nature swearing is

  as irrational as magic-indeed, it is a species of magic.

  But there is also a paradox about it, namely this: Our

  intention in swearing is to shock and wound, which we

  do by mentioning something that should be kept secret -

  usually something to do with the sexual functions. But

  the strange thing is that when a word is well established

  as a swear word, it seems to lose its original meaning;

  that is, it loses the thing that made it into a swear word.

  A word becomes an oath because it means a certain

  thing, and, because it has become an oath, it ceases to

  mean that thing. For example, ----. The Londoners do

  not now use, or very seldom use, this word in its

  original meaning; it is on their lips from morning till

  night, but it is a mere expletive and means nothing.

  Similarly with -------, which is rapidly losing its original

  sense. One can think of similar instances in
French-for

  example,------,, which is now a quite meaningless

  expletive. The word--- , also, is still used

  occasionally in Paris, but the people who use it, or most

  of them, have no idea of what it once meant. The rule

  seems to be that words accepted as swear words have

  some magical character, which sets them apart and

  makes them useless for ordinary conversation.

  Words used as insults seem to be governed by the

  same paradox as swear words. A word becomes an

  insult, one would suppose, because it means something

  bad; but in practice its insult-value has little to do with

  its actual meaning. For example, the most bitter insult

  one can offer to a Londoner is "bastard"which, taken for

  what it means, is hardly an insult at all. And the worst

  insult to a women, either in London

  or Paris, is "cow"; a name which might even be a com-

  pliment, for cows are among the most likeable of animals.

  Evidently a word is an insult simply because it is meant as

  an insult, without reference to its dictionary meaning;

  words, especially swear words, being what public opinion

  chooses to make them. In this connection it is interesting

  to see how a swear word can change character by crossing

  a frontier. In England you can print « Je m'en fous »

  without protest from anybody. In France you have to print

  it " Je m'en f-----" Or, as another example,

  take the word "barnshoot"a corruption of the Hindustani

  word bahinchut. A vile and unforgivable insult in India, this

  word is a piece of gentle badinage in England. I have even

  seen it in a school text-book; it was in one of

  Aristophanes' plays, and the annotator suggested it as a

  rendering of some gibberish spoken by a Persian

  ambassador. Presumably the annotator knew what

  bahinchut meant. But, because it was a foreign word, it had

  lost its magical swear-word quality and could be printed.

  One other thing is noticeable about swearing in

  London, and that is that the men do not usually swear in

  front of the women. In Paris it is quite different. A

  Parisian workman may prefer to suppress an oath in front

  of a woman, but he is not at all scrupulous about it, and

  the women themselves swear freely. The Londoners are

  more polite, or more squeamish, in this matter.

  These are a few notes that I have set down more or less

  at random. It is a pity that someone capable of dealing

  with the subject does not keep a year-book of London

  slang and swearing, registering the changes accurately. It

  might throw useful light upon the formation, development

  and obsolescence of words.

  XXXIII

  THE two pounds that B. had given me lasted about ten

  days. That it lasted so long was due to Paddy, who had

  learned parsimony on the road and considered even one

  sound meal a day a wild extravagance. Food, to him, had

  come to mean simply bread and margarine -the eternal tea-

  and-two-slices, which will cheat hunger for an hour or

  two. He taught me how to live, food, bed, tobacco and all,

  at the rate of half a crown a day. And he managed to earn

  a few extra shillings by "glimming" in the evenings. It

  was a precarious job, because illegal, but it brought in a

  little and eked out our money.

  One morning we tried for a job as sandwich men. We

  went at five to an alley-way behind some offices, but there

  was already a queue of thirty or forty men waiting, and

  after two hours we were told that there was no work for

  us. We had not missed much, for sandwich men have an

  unenviable job. They are paid about three shillings a day

  for ten hours' work-it is hard work, especially in windy

  weather, and there is no skulking, for an inspector comes

  round frequently to see that the men are on their beat. To

  add to their troubles, they are only engaged by the day, or

  sometimes for three days, never weekly, so that they have

  to wait hours for their job every morning. The number of

  unemployed men who are ready to do the work makes

  them powerless to fight for better treatment. The job all

  sandwich men covet is distributing, handbills, which is

  paid for at the same rate. When you see a man distributing

  handbills you can do him a good turn by taking one, for he

  goes off duty when he has distributed all his bills.

  Meanwhile we went on with the lodging-house life-

  a squalid, eventless life of crushing boredom. For days

  together there was nothing to do but sit in the under-

  ground kitchen, reading yesterday's newspaper, or, when

  one could get hold of it, a back number of the Union Jack.

  It rained a great deal at this time, and everyone who came

  in steamed, so that the kitchen stank horribly. One's only

  excitement was the periodical tea-and-two-slices. I do not

  know how many men are living this life in London-it must

  be thousands at the least. As to Paddy, it was actually the

  best life he had known for two years past. His interludes

  from tramping, the times when he had somehow laid

  hands on a few shillings, had all been like this; the

  tramping itself had been slightly worse. Listening to his

  whimpering voice-he was always whimpering when he was

  not eating-one realised what torture unemployment must

  be to him. People are wrong when they think that an

  unemployed man only worries about losing his wages; on

  the contrary, 'an illiterate man, with the work habit in his

  bones, needs work even more than he needs money. An

  educated man can put up with enforced idleness, which is

  one of the worst evils of poverty. But a man like Paddy,

  with no means of filling up time, is as miserable out of

  work as a dog on the chain. That is why it is such

  nonsense to pretend that those who have "come down in

  the world" are to be pitied above all others. The man who

  really merits pity is the man who has been down from the

  start, and faces poverty with a blank, resourceless mind.

  It was a dull time, and little of it stays in my mind,

  except for talks with Bozo. Once the lodging-house was

  invaded by a slumming-party. Paddy and I had been out,

  and, coming back in the afternoon, we heard sounds of

  music downstairs. We went down to find

  three gentle-people, sleekly dressed, holding a religious

  service in our kitchen. They were a grave and reverend

  seignior in a frock coat, a lady sitting at a portable

  harmonium, and a chinless youth toying with a crucifix. It

  appeared that they had marched in and started to hold

  the service, without any kind of invitation whatever.

  It was a pleasure to see how the lodgers met this

  intrusion. They did not offer the smallest rudeness to the

  slummers; they just ignored them. By common consent

  everyone in the kitchen-a hundred men, perhaps behaved

  as though the slummers had not existed. There they stood

  patiently singing and exhorting, and no more notice was

  taken of them than if they had be
en earwigs. The

  gentleman in the frock coat preached a sermon, but not a

  word of it was audible; it was drowned in the usual din of

  songs, oaths and the clattering of pans. Men sat at their

  meals and card games three feet away from the

  harmonium, peaceably ignoring it. Presently the slummers

  gave it up and cleared out, not insulted in any way, but

  merely disregarded. No doubt they consoled themselves by

  thinking how brave they had been, "freely venturing into

  the lowest dens," etc. etc.

  Bozo said that these people came to the lodginghouse

  several times a month. They had influence with the police,

  and the "deputy" could not exclude them. It is curious

  how people take it for granted that they have a right to

  preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income

  falls below a certain level.

  After nine days B.'s two pounds was reduced to one and

  ninepence. Paddy and I set aside eighteenpence for our

  beds, and spent threepence on the usual tea-andtwo-

  slices, which we shared-an appetiser rather than a meal.

  By the afternoon we were damnably hungry and

  Paddy remembered a church near King's Cross Station

  where a free tea was given once a week to tramps. This

  was the day, and we decided to go there. Bozo, though it

  was rainy weather and he was almost penniless, would not

  come, saying that churches were not his style.

  Outside the church quite a hundred men were waiting,

  dirty types who had gathered from far and wide at the

  news of a free tea, like kites round a dead buffalo.

  Presently the doors opened and a clergyman and some

  girls shepherded us into a gallery at the top of the church.

  It was an evangelical church, gaunt and wilfully ugly, with

  texts about blood and fire blazoned on the walls, and a

  hymn-book containing twelve hundred and fifty-one

  hymns; reading some of the hymns, I concluded that the

  book would do as it stood for an anthology of bad verse.

  There was to be a service after the tea, and the regular

  congregation were sitting in the well of the church below.

  It was a week-day, and there were only a few dozen of

  them, mostly stringy old women who reminded one of

  boilingfowls. We ranged ourselves in the gallery pews and

  were given our tea; it was a one-pound jam jar of tea each,

  with six slices of bread and margarine. As soon as tea was