48
PARTISAN REVIEW I
Down and Out in Paris and London,
published in 1933. One of the more
striking things about this work is not merely how good and original it is
and how well it stands up as prose after sixty years, but how deeply em–
bedded in a tradition of British writing it is as well.
It
is, among much
else, part documentary, part autobiography, and part fiction, a form that
someone has probably already called docufiction (or faction) and that
Orwell would compose in throughout his entire career. It is a distin–
guished work in the line of English writing about poverty, urban immis–
eration and homelessness, and is its most important modern representa–
tive. But it is also an extremely literary piece of work and belongs to a
tradition of English fiction and documentary writing that uses and mod–
ernizes the classical "inheritance plot" as a means of social exploration
and a device for social commentary and criticism. We find this plot in
such works of fiction as
Tom Jones
and
Oliver Twist,
in which the hero,
born into penurious, deprived, and lowly circumstances, discovers himself
in the end as actually a gentleman by right of birth as well as character.
It
is further updated, as it were, in such novels as Samuel Butler's
The
Way
if
All
Flesh,
which Orwell admired from an early age (it was pub–
lished in the year of his birth). In this and similar novels of the late
Victorian period, the protagonist's fall out of the middle classes and into
lower-class poverty is both represented as actual suffering and want and
at the same time mitigated by the convenience that there tend regularly
to be middle-class relatives and friends waiting in the wings to pull the
hero out of his desperate and abandoned condition of social existence.
We see it again among the conventions of popular fiction, such as some
of the Sherlock Holmes tales and the Raffles stories, in which the upper
middle-class detective or genteel burglar disguises himself as a member of
the outcast classes in order to achieve his purposes of discovery, explo–
ration, and adventure. And it is there as well, in its most significant vari–
ant form, in the nineteenth-century tradition of the investigation of ur–
ban slum life, a line that begins as early as 1815, and to which such di–
verse writers as Pierce Egan, Dickens, Engels,
L.
C.
Greenwood, Jack
London, and Beatrice Webb made contributions.
In this kind of writing, the middle-class explorer-investigator also , as
often as not, dresses and behaves as a member of the oppressed, outcast,
exploited, and penniless in order to find out how they lived and felt, and
to be able to testify sympathetically about them. I call this the
"inheritance plot" because there is never any doubt that these writers and
characters are continually aware of their "genuine" middle-class identities,
There is no mistaking the structural relation of their situation to the
classical, conventional plots in both tragedy and comedy out of which
these representations of such behavior partly developed; nor is it possible
