“Poverty is what I am writing about, and I had my first contact with poverty in this slum.”

Source: Down and out in Paris and London (1933), Ch. 1
Context: I am trying to describe the people in our quarter, not for the mere curiosity, but because they are all part of the story. Poverty is what I am writing about, and I had my first contact with poverty in this slum. The slum, with its dirt and its queer lives, was first an object-lesson in poverty, and then the background of my own experiences. It is for that reason that I try to give some idea of what life was like there.

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George Orwell 473
English author and journalist 1903–1950

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