To find material for his writing and learn about the lives of the lower classes, Eric began “tramping” through London and Paris. Fascinated by the lives of the poor and by the fact that a nation as powerful as England could fail to address such shocking poverty, Eric lived among the lower classes, although he could have stayed in his parents’ comfortable home. Dressed in shoddy clothes, Eric would sit on street corners, converse with tramps, and spend time in the various “spikes” (men’s shelters provided by factories) around London. In Paris, he took a job as a plongeur (a dishwasher) and learned more about the suffering of the poor in another European capital. While in Paris, he contracted pneumonia and spent three weeks in the public ward of the Hopital Cochin — a depressing but enlightening experience that he later recorded in the essay, “How the Poor Die.” (Problems with his lungs plagued him his entire life.)
His experiences were shaped into his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, a work of non-fiction that Orwell asked a friend to destroy (convinced that it had no merit) but which the same friend took to an agent, who in turn took it to a publisher. Down and Out was published in 1933 to good reviews — reviews that spoke of the author not as “Eric Blair,” but as “George Orwell,” a pseudonym Eric chose in case the book was a total failure. For the remainder of his career, he remained Orwell to his readers but Eric to his family and friends.
