Abstract
In the late 1920s, a young and well-educated Englishman was confronted with the hardships that a penniless existence in two European capital cities, namely Paris and London, involved. Through the account of the Englishman's life, the reader can get a quite faithful image of what it was like to be poor in a big city at that time. From popular quarrels to anecdotic talks in the bistro, from hunger and unemployment to the restlessness of the vagabond's life, from the ?tea-and-two-slices' to the ?spike' and the tramps, everything in Down and Out in Paris and London participates in a broad depiction of poverty.
