25 Jul 2025

Tipping George Orwell

by Diana Moskovitz

George Orwell was just 26 in 1929, when, the story goes, he had nearly all his money stolen from his digs in Paris. He was a middle-class, well-educated young man who could almost certainly have gotten help from his aunt Nellie, who lived in the French capital. But instead he wound up taking any job he could get, working as “a night watchman, cellarman, floor scrubber, dishwasher, porter, lavatory attendant,” and writing a memoiristic account of his experiences—today it might be called an “autofiction”—Down and Out in Paris and London (1933).

Despite the avalanche of Orwell scholarship published since his death, it’s still not quite clear how many liberties he took with the facts in Down and Out. Darcy Moore, an independent Orwell scholar, has written particularly detailed accounts of the book’s weird publishing history.¹ The portrait that emerges is one of a romantic, ambitious, louche young man, in love with the poet and criminal François Villon (“who wrote, whored, starved, rollicked and died in the Latin Quarter”), looking to experience everything that was forbidden, everything that was the opposite of Eton, and plunging himself into the Paris underworld. But however dramatized, reassembled and embroidered it appears to have been, Orwell’s biographers are agreed that most of the action in Down and Out really took place.

But it was a relatively small detail—Why are they talking so much about tipping?—that sent me down a real rabbit hole.

After finding himself flat broke in Paris, Orwell isn’t alone in his torturous search for work; his friend Boris, a Russian expat, joins him in the hunt for some sort of food service gig. Their conversations, both during the search and after they find work, invariably circle back to tipping. They talk about it during the day and into the night. They muse about it while they nearly starve.