In spite of the welfare the paupers received, the paupers, according to Longmate, were
“strangely ungrateful” (27). In 1765, a mob of paupers even destroyed one workhouse when the parishes stopped paying the reliefs (Longmate 27). In addition, the reliefs aroused the corruption among the “Overseers of the Poor” and the licensed traders, benefiting “those grocers, bakers and shoemakers who sat on the vestry” (Longmate 35). Confronting the problems, in 1818, the Rev. Robert Lowe “abolish[ed] out-relief and offer[ed] instead food and shelter in the workhouse, where conditions were made so strict that soon all its former occupants, apart from a dozen or so senile, sick or insane people with nowhere else to go, had voluntarily moved out” (Longmate 45).
This implementation succeeded in cutting “the poor-rates by three-quarters,” leading to the new form of workhouse which became the deterrent ones Orwell observed at the beginning of the twentieth century, but the austerity simultaneously aggravated the exploitation of the poor. Formerly the participants of charity were in suspicion of corruption by procuring the side-benefits of the reliefs. Nonetheless, after the financial austerity of the workhouses, the charities
were still a profitable trade in the early twentieth century. They were always able to squeeze out the profits from the poorest. What was changed after the reform was the even more desolate life of the homeless, constantly bullied and exploited by the privileged. In the Edbury spike, the tramps “[can] get extra tea in the morning, as the Tramp Major7 [is] selling it at a halfpenny a mug, illicitly no doubt” (Orwell 176). Another time in the Salvation Army, Orwell and Paddy, one of his tramping fellows, buy a cup of tea which “appear[s] to be made with tea dust” (178).
Orwell guesses that it is “given to the Salvation Army in charity, though they sold it at three-halfpence a cup” (178). The meal ticket is also a lucrative business. Before released from the Romton spike, the tramps get tickets, which are “worth sixpence each,” but Orwell finds that they can only get four penny-worth of food with a large tea and two slices for each ticket (172-73). Orwell surmises that “the shop habitually cheat[s] the tramps of twopence or so on each ticket” and comments that “having tickets instead of money, the tramps [can] not protest or go elsewhere” (173). Once again on the Embankment, literally for the rough sleepers, Orwell gets a ticket worth sixpence each from a clergyman (200). Likewise, the eating-house only gives him “four penny-worth of food for each ticket” (200). Orwell once more criticizes that the proprietor is swindling the tramps “to the tune of seven shillings or more a week” as “[t]he clergyman [have] distributed well over a pound in tickets” (200). Orwell imputes this sort of fraud to the malfunction of the welfare system: “This kind of victimization is a regular part of a tramp’s life, and it will go on as long as people continue to give meal tickets instead of money”
(200). Even though replacing tickets with cash is still questionable, by experiencing as a tramp himself, Orwell does detect the inadequacy of the system and the evil of human minds, which, in this case, tend to be egocentric. The tickets distributed, albeit in the name of charity, are always profitable for the people involved in the welfare deeds. To enact an effective policy,
7 Orwell explains that the Tramp Majors’ job “is to supervise casuals, and he is generally a workhouse pauper”
when Orwell came to the spike (the Romton spike) for the first time (169).
not only the interest from the perspective of the governments, but also the interest of the homeless should be taken into consideration. For instance, if the homeless can acquire the knowledge of how to use money properly when they get cash from the charity, then this invisible advantage will be more influential than the sheer extent of physical needs. When it comes to the lodging-houses, Orwell criticizes that it is because of the immense profitability that the owners refuse to ameliorate the living conditions: “Any improvement would mean less crowding, and hence less profit” (219-20). The examples shown in this literary work reveal the inconvenient fact of the “poor business,” squeezing profits from every sphere of society, including the miserable paupers. In spite of the amendments to the laws, the corruption among the privileged and authorities does not cease. What brings to tramps and paupers is only more suffering.
Apparently, the paupers, including Orwell, hardly pay respect to charity even at the most desperate moment in life. They strive to preserve their dignity and do not show their humility even after the welfare reformation makes the living condition unbearable and even destroys their willpower. In Down and Out, Orwell mentions the tramps’ ungrateful attitude when they receive the welfare from the churches. After staying overnight at a lodging-house in Bow, Orwell travels to Romton to seek another casual ward to stay. At Romton he meets an old Irish tramp8 (165). Since the spike will not open until six in the evening, to “[pass] the time away,”
the tramp leads Orwell to a place where they can get free tea from the church (166). In the “tin-roofed shed in a side-street,” the tramps get the tea and bun from the “lady in a blue silk dress, wearing gold spectacles and a crucifix” (presumably a nun) (166). In the meantime, the nun starts to “[talk] upon religious subjects” (166). Nevertheless, Orwell claims that “we [hate] it”
(166). When the nun asks a tramp how long he has not knelt down and spoken with his Father
8 Most of the tramps Orwell encounters are Irish. According to Higginbotham, the Irish people enormously immigrated to England during the Great Famine. http://www.workhouses.org.uk/vagrants/index.shtml Web. 12 Jan. 2019.
in Heaven, Orwell taunts that “his belly [answer] for him, with a disgraceful rumbling which it set[s] up at sight of the food” (167). Most of the tramps are eager to leave that place as soon as possible once they get their serving of tea, except for a “red-nosed fellow looking like a corporal who [has] lost his stripe for drunkenness” (167). Orwell surmises that the man has been in prison so he knows how to please the charity by saying “‘the dear Lord Jesus’ with less shame” (167). The speculation reveals Orwell’s distaste for the juridical system and the hypocrisy of the clergy. Putting the criminals, including the tramps and beggars at that time, in jail will probably reinforce a man’s will to survive by any means unscrupulously instead of getting liberal or vocational education which might help him socialize and start a new life. At the end of this event in Chapter XXVI, one tramp shows his contempt for the church by commenting that they have to “pay for” the tea and bun with the prayers which “[last] half an hour” (168). This comment represents the mercantilism and commercialism permeated in every stratum of English society, including the destitute. Partly since the discrepancy between the charity and its recipients might be caused by the institutional insufficiency, and partly to display the objectivity, at the last sentence of this chapter, Orwell speaks for the churches that the religious group is not intended to humiliate the tramps, but the tramps are simply not grateful to the clergy.9 Once more, in Chapter XXXIII, another religious scene again shows the unfriendly and unapproachable religious congregation and the ungrateful vagabonds. A group of “slummers,” including “a grave and reverend seignior in a frock coat, a lady sitting at a portable harmonium, and a chinless youth toying with a crucifix,” appears in the kitchen of a lodging-house “without any kind of invitation” (196). They hold a religious service, and the lodgers pay no attention to them, on which Orwell makes a bitter comment that “it was a pleasure to see how the lodgers met with the slummers”: “They did not offer the smallest
9 This comment shows Orwell’s complexity of double identity—simultaneously a real tramp with the subject
“we” and an incognito social investigator (Seaber 70-71).
rudeness to the slummers; they just ignored them” (196). Orwell mentions that the religious congregation is so powerful that the officials cannot exclude it from the workhouse. He then asserts, wryly, that “they [the clergy] have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level” (197). On the same day, Orwell comes to a church near King’s Cross Station with Paddy. Bozo, their tramp fellow, rejects, for he claims that
“churches were not his style” (197). The tramps come there also for the free tea. They also ought to listen to the sermon after the tea. As always, the tramps do not attend the sermon.
Instead, they “lolled in their pews, laughed, chattered, leaned over and flicked pellets of bread among the congregation” (197-98). Witnessing this, Orwell remarks, “we were frankly bullying them,” but “[i]t was our revenge upon them for having humiliated us by feeding us”
(198). In the eyes of the helped, the church’s charity resembles more the trade between the belief and the reliefs than the pure act of kindness. Seeing the ironic and unreasonable scenes, Orwell’s emotion of anti-hegemony might be triggered by the “peaceful” violence derived from the overbearing clergy towards the unwilling tramps.
Regarding Orwell’s attitudes towards religion, especially the Anglican Church, Peter Davison provides explicit explanation and analysis in the article “Orwell—Religion and Ethical Values.” From Orwell’s description of the school St. Cyprian in Such, Such Were the Joys, written in 1947-48, Davison speculates that Orwell might have lost his faith in his teens.
In St. Cyprian, Orwell as little boy who kept wetting the bed inflicted corporal punishment from the headmaster Sambo. Another time, a priest took his daughter to the garden party and introduced that she wetted the bed, “and to underline her wickedness he had previously painted her face black” (qtd. in “Orwell—Religion and Ethical Values,” hereafter “Religion”). Orwell also describes the school to be expensive and snobbish. From his memoir about the school, it is hard to say that the school left a joyous impression in Orwell’s life, especially concerning the religion. In addition, Davison finds in Orwell’s letter to Eleanor Jacques, his lover, in 1932,
that Orwell criticized the Church of England for being hypocritical, deceitful, and dishonest.
However, the Rev. Ernest Parker’s10 widow, Madge Parker, refused the idea that Orwell “was not a genuine believer”, for they together “prepare[d] the sick to receive the sacraments” and took care of the unemployed (“Religion”). Orwell even “developed an antipathy to religious practice” (“Religion”). He opposed Christianity and “‘political Catholicism’ which he likened to Communism as a form of nationalism” (“Religion”). Despite Orwell’s antipathy to religious formality, Davison contends that Orwell “strongly believed that ‘the good of mankind is worth fighting for’” (“Religion”). Davison also cites that “our job is to make life worth living on this earth, which is the only earth we have” from Orwell’s declaration in “Reflections on Gandhi,”11 1949. In Davison’s view, no matter Orwell believed in God or not, he was deeply influenced by the humanitarian aspect in the moral lessons taught by the religion.
In Down and Out, Orwell also exhibits his attitude through other tramps’ deeds regarding the religion (for he as an author claims to be selecting the contents). Evidently, below a certain level of society, the religion’s practical function is more prominent than its spiritual support.
The tramps take advantage of the religious items in exchange for what they need so as to survive. For instance, the tramps smuggle money in the “papers,” or the Bible, to avoid searching and confiscation before entering the spikes (Orwell 169). The “papers” are considered sacred so they will not be searched. In other situations, the tramps might sell off their bibles for more practical reasons. For example, Orwell’s friend, Paddy, cares more about his appearance and has sold his papers. Orwell surmises that the caring of the appearance is to gain respectability, even though “one [will] have known him for a tramp a hundred yards away”
(173). When it comes to nourishment, Paddy will go to the Church of England for reliefs, despite the fact that he is a Catholic. His exclamation goes:
10 Orwell befriended with the curate when he taught in a high school in Middlesex (Brenman 33).
11 Orwell does not agree with some of the doctrines Gandhi holds and he dislikes the air of sainthood that Gandhi gives off, though, for he thinks at some point, the ascetism is inhuman.
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/reflections-on-gandhi/
Ah, what’d a man do widout religion, eh? I’ve took cups o’ tay from de convents, an’ de Baptists, an’ de Church of England, an’ all sorts. I’m a Catholic meself. Dat’s to say, I ain’t been to confession for above seventeen year, but still I got me religious feelin’s, y’understand. An’ dem convents is always good for a cup o’ tay….
This passage exposes not the spiritual but the material console that the religion can provide for a tramp (174). In comparison, the religious rites and sermons seem quite useless and suspicious of putting the cart before the horse. The churches ask the tramps to keep their faith, but ignore the even more complicated and influential issues about physical health and the knowledge to work, to save money, and to lead a decent life, etc.
Other scenes show the variety among the tramps. Not all the tramps are nonchalant about the faith. In the Salvation Army shelter, Orwell witnesses a “young clerk […] praying” and he finds that the face of the clerk looks “agonised,” from which Orwell guesses that “he [is]
starving” (178). In the context, the clerks in the Salvation Army shelter are all “out of work, pallid and moody” (178). This foreshadows that the clerks may be on the edge of taking to the roads. Perhaps that young clerk implies the last grasp of faith before he reaches the point of no return. Perhaps it means that faith can still be the last hope and spiritual support for those who are unemployed and starving. On the contrary, Bozo refuses not only spiritual support but material aid from the churches even though “it [is] rainy weather and he [is] almost penniless”
(197). He refuses the religious charities, saying “it stuck in his throat to sing hymns for buns”
(186). Orwell describes him as “an embittered atheist” and put in the parentheses that “the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally [Orwell himself] dislike Him”
(186). Bozo’s background is similar to Orwell’s, educated, back from India, having been in Paris, and suspicious about religion. Possibly Bozo is a real character in history, but he seems more to be the double of Orwell. Orwell might express his opinion through the character, and the dialogue between them might be Orwell’s self-catechism about the role of religion in the
lowest social stratum. Their suspicion of faith is different from other tramps. The former’s loss of faith is ontological; the latter might seldom reflect upon the issue of religion, and the faith goes hand-in-hand with money. The description at the beginning of the London part might foreshadow the dark side of religion: “In Whitechapel somebody called The Singing Evangel undertook to save you from hell for the charge of sixpence” (163). Judged from the tone of the narrator, the belief in God might belong to those who have yet become social outcasts.
The development of Orwell’s attitude towards religion can be tracked down along with his writing history. Down and Out was composed as early as 1930-31, when Orwell was back from Burma, where he saw the brutal colonial government of England. It was composed before A Clergyman’s Daughter in 1934, in which the “meanness and spite” of the “orthodox Christianity” is displayed (“Religion”). Later on, in “The Prevention of Literature” in 1946, Orwell draws an analogy between the formality of the religion and that of the communist party (qtd. in “Religion”). In view of the later works, Orwell’s hatred to the formalism of religion might be reinforced by his experience as a tramp in the workhouse, receiving the reliefs from the churches. Furthermore, his disbelief in religion was mixed with the disbelief in and disillusion to communism after he attended the Spanish Civil War during 1936-37, for both of which imply certain hypocrisy and autocratic tendency.
The disbelief in the hypocritical religious and political groups, nevertheless, did not destroy Orwell’s central idea to be a humanist. Although Orwell’s belief in Soviet Communist Party was disillusioned in the Spanish Civil War, he did not give up the value of humanity and equality in communism. He still held the value of “the good of mankind.” With this value in mind, Makovi’s argument makes Orwell’s profile more complete that Orwell is actually a public choice economist, who cares “moral, behavioral, and psychological equivalence between public and private actors” (184). From Orwell’s critiques, Makovi finds that Orwell objected to the centralized control of Soviet Union and Nazism (192-93). The former is
communism in totalitarian form, while the latter is totalitarian capitalism. Therefore, with the ideal of egalitarianism and anti-totalitarianism, Makovi finds that Orwell is more democratic socialist than anti-communist or anti-capitalistic. Orwell’s such attitude can explain why he always stands with the poor and the underprivileged against the exploitative authority. It is no surprise that he chooses the first-person plural “we” in sentences: He is one of the tramps, such as “We hated it [the sermon]” and “We ranged ourselves in the gallery pews and were given our tea” (166, 197). Ostensibly, Orwell may “pretend” to be an incognito social investigator, but with the discourse above, he does wholeheartedly care about the homeless, and rationally analyze the laws, the police and the religious system that oppress them.