A man in possession of a little money-enough to eat on, perhaps, but not enough to pay the rent-does experience panic, but if he is down to his last coin, he shrugs. The impoverished are free from the working man’s worries of job security, mortgage, and other expenses because they care only to survive and to obtain as much comfort as is available to them. Why lose sleep over the possibility of advancement at work or in one’s social life when neither is within one’s grasp? There is no need to feel anxious about a future that will never come. They live day-to-day, sometimes hour-to-hour, and that can leave a person with little to no anxiety. Secondly, Orwell writes that having very little money means the poor do not have to agonize over how best to spend or invest their capital. The moneyed and educated classes, Orwell suggests, cannot boast of such colorful characters, since many eccentrics have been freed by financial ruin to be themselves without fear of recrimination. All Bozo needs to be content is a dry surface on which to paint and a clear sky overhead. Looking at the stars is free, he tells Orwell, and so is acquiring knowledge.

Unlike Paddy Jacques, Bozo never allows lack of money to get him down.

Bozo is perhaps Orwell’s most extreme example of a man set free by poverty. Orwell likewise encounters a host of odd people at the Hotel X and among the tramps in London. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behavior, just as money frees people from work.” The Hotel des Trois Moineaux, where Orwell lives when he first experiences Parisian poverty, is a den of odd characters, including an old, dwarfish couple that sells fake pornographic postcards, and a sewer worker who refuses to speak, having lost his fiancé to another man. “The Paris slums,” writes Orwell in the first chapter of the memoir, “are a gathering-place for eccentric people-people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. To Orwell, being poor gives a person license to be different, and he does indeed meet a number of poor eccentrics in both Paris and London. While Orwell shows how poverty shrinks the horizons of the poor, he does see it as having two redeeming qualities: it frees its victims from the sometimes-stifling demands of traditional respectability, and it renders moot any worry they might feel about the future.

George orwell down and out