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by echtroipolemos
859 days ago
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The material for Down and Out in Paris and London was due to his disgust and self-loathing which arose from his time serving as a lapdog of the Colonial Raj. Following his time as a dishwasher (plongeur) in Paris and the ensuing poverty - which he characterised as an intensely boring endeavor - he moved to the UK and lived amongst the tramps - following them from spike to spike and writing travelogues. In Road to Wigan Pier - to the decry of mainstream Marxists - he noted that blind opposition to landlords is nuanced in working class coal mining communities. Generally the property would have been the only source of income for an old widow. I believe that's the project in which he remarked that, "The working classes smell." |
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"Ideally, the worst type of slum landlord is a fat wicked man, preferably a bishop, who is drawing an immense income from extortionate rents. Actually, it is a poor old woman who has invested her life's savings in three slum houses, inhabits one of them, and tries to live on the rent of the other two — never, in consequence, having any money for repairs."