The rue du Coq d’Or, Paris, seven in the morning. A succession of furious, choking yells from the street. Madame Monce, who kept the little hotel opposite mine, had come out on to the pavement to address a lodger on the third floor. Her bare feet were stuck into sabots and her grey hair was streaming down.
The opening paragraph of the text subtly sets the stage for the conditions in which the author was living. Madame Monce will turn out to be a landlord whose primary interest is lodging rather the lodgers. She becomes a symbol of sorts of the economics of living the low-life as she berates her lodgers for damaging walls that are infested with bugs as a result of her lack of care about providing clean living facilities for the lodgers she berates for destroying property. A vicious, ugly, bug-infested cycle.
Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like Negroes and white men.
Here, the author is pondering why so many people without real means, but not yet driven to the level of poverty or destitution support the status quo that ensures so many of them will live their entire lives trapped in unproductive jobs without opportunity for authentic improvement in their status. Why, he asks, do the lower classes align their interests with the rich from whom they are vast different rather than the poor with whom they share much more?
He might be ragged and cold, or even starving, but so long as he could read, think, and watch for meteors, he was, as he said, free in his own mind.
Bozo is a sidewalk artist, specializing in radical political cartoons drawn in chalk. An atheistic amateur astronomer who bops to a beat of his own drumming, Bozo is hardly the image of the middle class ideal, but for Orwell he represents nothing less than the ideal to which all should aspire: the man who has truly made himself from free in—and from—modern society.
I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant.
Orwell has described the economics, politics and sociology of being down and out. Even so, he himself admits that he has still come face to face with only the most outward edges of true poverty. In conclusion, he sums up what tugging on these fringes of desperation have taught him and what lessons he has drawn. The specificity of these lessons explain why the central thematic point he has been trying to get across is an appeal for greater understanding on the part of his readers. The text is, if nothing else, a cry for empathy toward the "mob."
