"The grand test of virtue"

I finished Down and Out in Paris and London a week or two ago. Until I started reading it and saw the category "Fiction" on the back, I had assumed it was a memoir. From what I can gather, it's based on Orwell's experiences, but Orwell generally had money and family to fall back on, unlike his Down and Out protagonist. I may be the last person on earth to read it, but if you haven't: the first part is basically a depiction of the working poor (in Paris), while the second is a depiction of the homeless (in London). The book was first published in 1933, but some of his observations about poverty are no doubt still true, and the book in general felt modern - as Orwell seems to be able to do. I can't help comparing his language and ideas with those of Virginia Woolf, whose diary I'm picking back up (Volume 2). Woolf is an admitted snob and a total classist, even as she worries about money and writes some of the most beautiful and universal prose I've ever written. Orwell, on the other hand, knows the lives and humanity of all "classes" of people, and writes in a straightforward way that I also admire. It's interesting to read them so close together.

Anyway, here are some passages out of Down and Out that I found the most thought-provoking.

Orwell describes the life of a plongeur, a restaurant worker who washes dishes, among other tasks - a life with long hours and one lived day-to-day:

"...they have simply been trapped by a routine which makes thought impossible. If plongeurs thought at all, they would long ago have formed a union and gone on strike for better treatment. But they do not think, because they have no leisure for it; their life has made slaves of them." (p. 116)

If the working poor have no time to think, the homeless have been ground down to either an inability to think, or sheer boredom:

"He was probably capable of work too, if he had been well fed for a few months....He had lived on this filthy imitation of food till his own mind and body were compounded of inferior stuff. It was malnutrition and not any native vice that had destroyed his manhood." (p. 153)

These last two passages get at the heart of the class system and capitalism, and I think they apply equally to present-day America:

"Very few cultivated people have less than (say) four hundred pounds a year [middle class?], and naturally they side with the rich, because they imagine that any liberty conceded to the poor is a threat to their own liberty." (pp. 119-120)

"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.
...
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." (p. 174)


All quotations from Orwell, George. Down and Out in Paris and London. New York: Harcourt, Inc.: 1961.