The Biological Consequences of Poverty
Orwell makes the effects of being impoverished tangible through concrete description, but brings things home through judicious use of metaphor. One of consequences of not having money, of course, is a nutritional poverty and Orwell makes it really clear how this can impact everything else:
“Hunger reduces one to an utterly spineless, brainless condition, more like the after effects of influenza than anything else. It is as though one had been turned into a jellyfish, or as though one’s blood had been pumped out and lukewarm substituted.”
Dirty
Orwell learns that it is not being dirty that that earns disrespect from others. Everybody gets a little filthy sometimes; one can’t escape it. The difference lies in where the dirt is seen; dirt from the very same patch of land is viewed differently on a man wearing a tailored suit than a man dressed in rags.
“Dirt is a great respecter of persons; it lets you alone when you are well dressed, but as soon as your collar is gone, it flies towards you from all directions.”
Tramps Like Us
Before “homeless” and even before “bum” the most common word to describe the man living a life of vagrancy was “tramp.” It is why Charlie Chaplin called his most character by that term. Orwell expends much literary energy examining the life of the vagrant and concludes that:
"the idea that tramps are impudent social parasites (’sturdy beggars’) is not absolutely unfounded, but it is only true in a few percent of the cases.”
Clothes Make the Millionaire
At the time of writing, the widely-held conventional wisdom was that there was a kind of genetic strain separating the rich from the poor. This was especially so in Europe where centuries of aristocratic propaganda had benefited from the lack of dissenting opinion offered by democratic rule. Orwell directly addresses this deep-seated misconception:
“The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.”
The Ideology of the Status Quo
In pondering why poverty exists even when it is clear beyond all doubt that there is enough money and enough resources to eliminate it at least in developed countries, Orwell climbs inside the mindset of the rich man who also happens to be “intellectually honest” to provide insight into how the conditions of the working class remains so unchanged for such long periods of time. This spokesman for the elite would present an argument that is especially vicious in its stated metaphorical implication of the true divide between the rich and everybody else, Orwell insists, that goes something like this:
“We are sorry for you lower classes, just as we are sorry for a cat with the mange, but we will fight like devils against improvement of your condition."
