Abstract
The 1930s saw an explosion of interest in class-passing and -crossing; they also saw the publication of the most canonical incognito social investigation text, Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. This chapter offers a close reading of the strategies used by the London sections of this text to convince the reader of its authority, and argues that it contributed to the decline of the Greenwoodian tradition that it partially exemplifies. Two late Greenwoodian texts, Jeremy Sandford’s Down and Out in Britain (1971) and Robin Page’s Down among the Dossers (1973), are also analysed.
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- 1.
‘Vicar’s Ordeal: As Unemployed Tramp’. Thanet Advertiser and Echo, 19 November 1921, p. 7.
- 2.
I owe knowledge of Railton’s talk to Seabrook, David. 2002. All the Devils Are Here. London: Granta, p. 10, and it was this reference that first awoke my interest in the topic.
- 3.
Unless otherwise noted, all information regarding Railton comes from Baigent, Elizabeth. 2004. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. ‘Railton, David (1884–1955)’.
- 4.
London, Documents and Sound Section, Imperial War Museum Collections, The Private Papers of Reverend D Railton, ref. Documents.4760. Extracts only from the letters are available, and there is little information regarding recipients.
- 5.
30 August 1916.
- 6.
London, Documents and Sound Section, Imperial War Museum Collections, The Private Papers of Reverend D Railton, ref. Documents.4760, 7 March 1917.
- 7.
London, Documents and Sound Section, Imperial War Museum Collections, The Private Papers of Reverend D Railton, ref. Documents.4760, 19 January 1917.
- 8.
London, Documents and Sound Section, Imperial War Museum Collections, The Private Papers of Reverend D Railton, ref. Documents.4760, 9 January 1917.
- 9.
For example: ‘having had a desire for a long time to obtain an insight into the vicissitudes of a vagrant’s life’ (Craven, C.W. 2008 [1887]. ‘A Night in the Workhouse’. In Freeman, Mark and Gillian Nelson (eds.). 2008. Vicarious Vagrants: Incognito Social Explorers and the Homeless in England, 1860–1910. Lambertville: The True Bill Press, pp. 181–8, p. 181).
- 10.
All information that follows regarding Railton’s tramping comes from personal correspondence with his grandson, David Railton QC, to whom I am extremely grateful.
- 11.
Cunningham, Valentine. 1988. British Writers of the Thirties. Oxford: Oxford University Press, passim, but especially pp. 241–55.
- 12.
Treglown, Jeremy. 2000. Romancing: The Life and Work of Henry Green. London: Faber and Faber, pp. 68–72.
- 13.
Isherwood, Christopher. 1996 [1938]. Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties. London: Minerva, p. 153.
- 14.
Driberg, Tom. 1977. Ruling Passions. London: Jonathan Cape, pp. 75–8.
- 15.
Davenport-Hines, Richard. 1995. Auden. London: Heinemann, p. 334.
- 16.
Seabrook, All the Devils Are Here, p. 10.
- 17.
See Eliot, T.S. 1971. The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound (ed. Valerie Eliot). London: Faber and Faber, p. 13, n. 5.
- 18.
Joyce, James. 1992 [1922]. Ulysses. London: Penguin, p. 564.
- 19.
Pound, Ezra. 1970 [1910]. The Spirit of Romance. London: Peter Owen, p. 176. It is also worth noting that Pound (p. 171) singles out for praise the line ‘Ne voient pan qu’aux fenestres’; the same line would inspire Orwell to muse on the ignorance of ‘real’ poverty amongst ‘educated people’ (Orwell, George. 1997 [1933]. Down and Out in Paris and London [The Complete Works of George Orwell, ed. Peter Davison, vol. 1]. London: Secker & Warburg, p. 121). On Orwell and Villon, see Davison, Peter. 1991. ‘George Orwell: Dates and Origins’. Library s6-13:2, pp. 137–50, pp. 137–9.
- 20.
Gray, Frank. 1931. The Tramp: His Meaning and Being. London and Toronto: J.M. Dent and Sons Ltd., p. 78.
- 21.
Orwell, George. 2000. Letter to Steven Runciman, August 1920. In A Kind of Compulsion: 1903–1936 [The Complete Works of George Orwell, ed. Peter Davison, vol. 10]. London: Secker & Warburg, pp. 76–7, p. 76.
- 22.
Ibid.
- 23.
Ibid., p. 77.
- 24.
Orwell, Down and Out, pp. 128–9.
- 25.
Ibid., pp. 215–16.
- 26.
Ibid., p. 137.
- 27.
Ibid., p. 183.
- 28.
Ibid., p. 140. The parenthesis translating ‘spike’ is Orwell’s.
- 29.
Ibid., p. 142.
- 30.
Ibid.
- 31.
Ibid., p. 176.
- 32.
Ibid., p. 142.
- 33.
Ibid., p. 143.
- 34.
See http://www.workhouses.org.uk/Romford/ and http://www.workhouses.org.uk/Edmonton/, accessed 16 October 2013.
- 35.
London, London Metropolitan Archives, PS.OLD/A/01/090.
- 36.
Seaber, Luke. 2014. ‘Edward Burton, Fish Porter, Drunk and Incapable: New Evidence on Orwell’s “Honesty” from the Records of his 1931 Conviction’. Notes and Queries 61:4, pp. 597–602.
- 37.
Orwell, George. 2000. Letter to Leonard Moore [19/11/1932]. In A Kind of Compulsion: 1903–1936 [The Complete Works of George Orwell, ed. Peter Davison, vol. 10]. London: Secker & Warburg, p. 274.
- 38.
Orwell, George. 2000. Letter to Eleanor Jaques 18 November 1932. In A Kind of Compulsion: 1903–1936 [The Complete Works of George Orwell, ed. Peter Davison, vol. 10]. London: Secker & Warburg, pp. 272–3, p. 273.
- 39.
Davison, Peter. 2000. ‘Publication of Down and Out in Paris and London in the United States’. In A Kind of Compulsion: 1903–1936 [The Complete Works of George Orwell, ed. Peter Davison, vol. 10]. London: Secker & Warburg, pp. 318–19, p. 318.
- 40.
Ibid., pp. 318–9.
- 41.
Williams, Raymond. 1979. Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review. London: NLB, p. 384. Christopher Hitchens has polemically but convincingly shown up Williams’s bad faith when dealing with Orwell (Hitchens, Christopher. 2002. Why Orwell Matters. New York: Basic Books, pp. 46–58); this does not disqualify his judgement, not of Orwell, but of Orwell’s reputation.
- 42.
See Moretti, Franco. 2000. ‘The Slaughterhouse of Literature’. Modern Language Quarterly 61:1, pp. 207–27, p. 209.
- 43.
See Rodden, John. 1989. The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of ‘St. George’ Orwell. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 177 and 228.
- 44.
http://www.workhouses.org.uk/lodging/, accessed 3 June 2014.
- 45.
Sandford, Jeremy. 1971. Down and Out in Britain. London: Peter Owen, p. 34.
- 46.
Ibid., note * to p. 9.
- 47.
Ibid., p. 9.
- 48.
Page, Robin. 1973. Down among the Dossers. London: Davis-Poynter, pp. 110–11.
- 49.
Ibid., p. 14.
- 50.
Ibid., p. 60.
- 51.
Sandford, Down and Out in Britain, p. 163.
- 52.
Page, Down among the Dossers, pp. 135–43.
- 53.
Ibid., p. 133.
- 54.
Sandford, Down and Out in Britain, note * to p. 163 and p. 174).
- 55.
Page, Down among the Dossers, p. 111.
- 56.
Ibid., p. 144.
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Seaber, L. (2017). Down and Out: George Orwell and the Death of a Genre. In: Incognito Social Investigation in British Literature. Palgrave Studies in Life Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50962-4_3
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