Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell

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 blackI suppose

he was a churchwarden or somethingcame 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 picture 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 when I was with him there had been a case of

"immoral conduct" in Hyde Park, in which the police had

behaved rather badly. Bozo produced a cartoon of Hyde

Park with policemen 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 droning "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 legalised crimes. Not profitable crimes,

however; there is not a singer or match-seller in London

who can be sure of £5o a year-a poor return for standing

eighty-four hours a week on the kerb, with the cars

grazing your backside.

   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 being struck by the curious attitude that society

takes towards them. People seem to feel that there is

some essential difference 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 parasites, 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

essential

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 compares 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 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 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. 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 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.

                     XXXII

I WANT to put in some notes, as short as possible, on

London 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 nobbler-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 flattie-a policeman. A

dideki-a gypsy. A toby-a tramp.

   A drop-money given to a beggar. Funkumlavender 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. SmokeLondon. A judy-a

woman. The spike-the casual ward. The lump-the casual

ward. A tosheroon-a half-crown. A denner-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

   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 diction-

aries. It is interesting to guess at the derivation of some

of them, though one or two-for instance, "funkum" and

"tosheroon"-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 present sense it can hardly be

older than motor-cars. "Gee" is a curious word;

conceivably it has arisen out of "gee," meaning horse, in

the sense of stalking horse. The derivation of "screever"

is mysterious. It must come ultimately from scribo, but

there has been no similar word in English for the past

hundred and fifty years; nor can it have come directly

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 men-

tioned 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 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 van-

ished in another twenty years.

   The swear words also change-or, at any rate, they are

subject to fashions. For example, twenty years ago the

London working classes habitually used the word

"bloody." Now they have abandoned it utterly, though

novelists still represent 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 adjective, now

tacked on to every noun, is ---------

     . No

doubt in time---, like "bloody," will find its way into

1 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 drawing-room and be replaced by some other word.

   The whole business of swearing, especially English

swearing, is mysterious. Of its very nature swearing is

as irrational as magic-indeed, it is a species of magic.

But there is also a paradox about it, namely this: Our

intention in swearing is to shock and wound, which we

do by mentioning something that should be kept secret -

usually something to do with the sexual functions. But

the strange thing is that when a word is well established

as a swear word, it seems to lose its original meaning;

that is, it loses the thing that made it into a swear word.

A word becomes an oath because it means a certain

thing, and, because it has become an oath, it ceases to

mean that thing. For example, ----. The Londoners do

not now use, or very seldom use, this word in its

original meaning; it is on their lips from morning till

night, but it is a mere expletive and means nothing.

Similarly with -------, which is rapidly losing its original

sense. One can think of similar instances in French-for

example,------,, which is now a quite meaningless

expletive. The word---

  , also, is still used

occasionally in Paris, but the people who use it, or most

of them, have no idea of what it once meant. The rule

seems to be that words accepted as swear words have

some magical character, which sets them apart and

makes them useless for ordinary conversation.

   Words used as insults seem to be governed by the

same paradox as swear words. A word becomes an

insult, one would suppose, because it means something

bad; but in practice its insult-value has little to do with

its actual meaning. For example, the most bitter insult