Read Down and Out in Paris and London Online
Authors: George Orwell
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free of charge. Of course, they have not really taken the first
photo; and so, if the victim refuses, they waste nothing.
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Down and Out in Paris and London
Organ-grinders, like acrobats, are considered artists
rather than beggars. An organ-grinder named Shorty,
a friend of Bozo’s, told me all about his trade. He and his
mate ‘worked’ the coffee-shops and public-houses round
Whitechapel and the Commercial Road. It is a mistake to
think that organ-grinders earn their living in the street;
nine-tenths of their money is taken in coffee-shops and
pubs—only the cheap pubs, for they are not allowed into
the good-class ones. Shorty’s procedure was to stop out-
side a pub and play one tune, after which his mate, who
had a wooden leg and could excite compassion, went in and
passed round the hat. It was a point of honour with Shorty
always to play another tune after receiving the ‘drop’—an
encore, as it were; the idea being that he was a genuine en-
tertainer and not merely paid to go away. He and his mate
took two or three pounds a week between them, but, as they
had to pay fifteen shillings a week for the hire of the organ,
they only averaged a pound a week each. They were on the
streets from eight in the morning till ten at night, and later
on Saturdays.
Screevers can sometimes be called artists, sometimes
not. Bozo introduced me to one who was a ‘real’ artist—that
is, he had studied art in Paris and submitted pictures to the
Salon in his day. His line was copies of Old Masters, which
he did marvellously, considering that he was drawing on
stone. He told me how he began as a screever:
‘My wife and kids Were starving. I was walking home late
at night, with a lot of drawings I’d been taking round the
dealers, and wondering how the devil to raise a bob or two.
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Then, in the Strand, I saw a fellow kneeling on the pavement
drawing, and people giving him pennies. As I came past he
got up and went into a pub. ‘Damn it,’ I thought, ‘if he can
make money at that, so can I.’ So on the impulse I knelt
down and began drawing with his chalks. Heaven knows
how I came to do it; I must have been lightheaded with hun-
ger. The curious thing was that I’d never used pastels before;
I had to leam the technique as I went along. Well, people be-
gan to stop and say that my drawing wasn’t bad, arid they
gave me ninepence between them. At this moment the oth-
er fellow came out of the pub. ‘What in —are you doing on
my pitch?’ he said. I explained that I was hungry and had to
earn something. ‘Oh,’ said he, ‘come and have a pint with
me.’ So I had a pint, and since that day I’ve been a screever. I
make a pound a week. You can’t keep six kids on a pound a
week, but luckily my wife earns a bit taking in sewing.
‘The worst thing in this life is the cold, and the next
worst is the interference you have to put up with. At first,
not knowing any better, I used sometimes to copy a nude
on the pavement. The first I did was outside St Martin’s-
in-the-Fields church. A fellow in black—I suppose he was
a churchwarden or something—came out in a tearing rage.
‘Do you think we can have that obscenity outside God’s
holy house?’ he cried. So I had to wash it out. It was a copy
of Botticelli’s Venus. Another time I copied the same pic-
ture on the Embankment. A policeman passing looked at it,
and then, without a word, walked on to it and rubbed it out
with his great flat feet.’
Bozo told the same tale of police interference. At the time
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Down and Out in Paris and London
when I was with him there had been a case of ‘immoral con-
duct’ in Hyde Park, in which the police had behaved rather
badly. Bozo produced a cartoon of Hyde Park with police-
men concealed in the trees, and the legend, ‘Puzzle, find the
policemen.’ I pointed out to him how much more telling
it would be to put, ‘Puzzle, find the immoral conduct,’ but
Bozo would not hear of it. He said that any policeman who
saw it would move him on, and he would lose his pitch for
good.
Below screevers come the people who sing hymns, or
sell matches, or bootlaces, or envelopes containing a few
grains of lavender—called, euphemistically, perfume. All
these people are frankly beggars, exploiting an appearance
of misery, and none of them takes on an average more than
half a crown a day. The reason why they have to pretend to
sell matches and so forth instead of begging outright is that
this is demanded by the absurd English laws about begging.
As the law now stands, if you approach a stranger and ask
him for twopence, he can call a policeman and get you seven
days for begging. But if you make the air hideous by dron-
ing ‘Nearer, my God, to Thee,’ or scrawl some chalk daubs
on the pavement, or stand about with a tray of matches—in
short, if you make a nuisance of yourself—you are held to be
following a legitimate trade and not begging. Match-selling
and street-singing are simply legalized crimes. Not profit-
able crimes, however; there is not a singer or match-seller in
London who can be sure of 50 pounds a year—a poor return
for standing eighty-four hours a week on the kerb, with the
cars grazing your backside.
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It is worth saying something about the social position of
beggars, for when one has consorted with them, and found
that they are ordinary human beings, one cannot help be-
ing struck by the curious attitude that society takes towards
them. People seem to feel that there is some essential dif-
ference between beggars and ordinary ‘working’ men. They
are a race apart—outcasts, like criminals and prostitutes.
Working men ‘work’, beggars do not ‘work’; they are para-
sites, worthless in their very nature. It is taken for granted
that a beggar does not ‘earn’ his living, as a bricklayer or a
literary critic ‘earns’ his. He is a mere social excrescence,
tolerated because we live in a humane age, but essentially
despicable.
Yet if one looks closely one sees that there is no ESSEN-
TIAL difference between a beggar’s livelihood and that of
numberless respectable people. Beggars do not work, it is
said; but, then, what is WORK? A navvy works by swinging
a pick. An accountant works by adding up figures. A beggar
works by standing out of doors in all weathers and getting
varicose veins, chronic bronchitis, etc. It is a trade like any
other; quite useless, of course—but, then, many reputable
trades are quite useless. And as a social type a beggar com-
pares well with scores of others. He is honest compared
with the sellers of most patent medicines, high-minded
compared with a Sunday 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
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Down and Out in Paris and London
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 no-
body cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or
parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profit-
able. In all the modem 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
businessman, getting his living, like other businessmen, in
the way that comes to hand. He has not, more than most
modem people, sold his honour; he has merely made the
mistake of choosing a trade at which it is impossible to grow
rich.
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XXXII
I want to put in some notes, as short as possible, on Lon-
don 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 nobbier—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 flat-
tie—a policeman. A dideki—a gypsy. A toby—a tramp.
A drop—money given to a beggar. Fuhkum—lavender
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. Smoke— London. A judy—a wom-
an. The spike—the casual ward. The lump—the casual ward.
A tosheroon—a half-crown. A deaner—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.
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Down and Out in Paris and London
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 dictionaries.
It is interesting to guess at the derivation of some of them,
though one or two —for instance, ‘funkum’ and ‘tosher-
oon’—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 pres-
ent sense it can hardly be older than motor-cars. ‘Gee’ is a
curious word; conceivably it has arisen out of ‘gee’, mean-
ing horse, in the sense of stalking horse. The derivation of
‘screever’ is mysterious. It must come ultimately from scr-
ibo, but there has been no similar word in English for the
past hundred and fifty years; nor can it have come direct-
ly 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 mentioned 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
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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 vanished in another twenty years.
[* 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 swear words also change—or, at any rate, they are
subject to fashions. For example, twenty years ago the Lon-
don working classes habitually used the word ‘bloody’. Now
they have abandoned it utterly, though novelists still repre-
sent 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 adjec-
tive, now tacked on to every noun, is ——. No doubt in time