Chapters I - XXIII (Paris)

Two verbless sentences introduce the scene-setting opening chapters which describe the atmosphere in the Paris quarter and introduce various characters who appear later in the book. From chapters III to chapter X where Orwell obtains a job at 'Hotel X' he describes his descent into poverty, often in tragi-comic terms. An Italian compositor forges room keys and steals his savings and his scant income vanishes when the English lessons he was giving stop. He begins to pawn his possessions and search for restaurant work with a Russian waiter named Boris. He recounts his two-day experience without any food and tells of meeting Russian 'Communists' who, he later concludes, must be confidence tricksters who exact membership dues for a 'secret' revolutionary group and then disappear.

After the various ordeals of unemployment and hunger Orwell obtains a job as a plongeur (dishwasher) in the 'Hotel X' and begins working long hours. In chapter XIV he describes the frantic and seemingly chaotic workings of the hotel as he understands it. He goes on to talk of his routine life as one of the working poor in Paris: slaving and sleeping, then drinking on Saturday night until the early hours of Sunday morning - the 'one thing that made life worth living' for some of the unmarried men of the quarter. In chapter XVI Orwell characterises the semi-autonomous existence by referencing a murder that was committed outside the hotel where he stays 'just beneath my window'. '[T]he thing that strikes me in looking back', he says, 'is that I was in bed and asleep within three minutes of the murder... We were working people and where was the sense of wasting sleep over murder?'

Misled by Boris's optimism, Orwell is briefly penniless again after he and Boris quit their hotel jobs in the expectation of work at a new restaurant, the 'Auberge de Jehan Cottard', where Boris feels sure he will be a waiter again. (At the hotel he had been doing lower grade work.) Boris explains that the "patron", 'an ex-colonel of the Russian Army,' seems to have financial difficulties - Orwell is not paid for ten days and spends a night on a bench rather than face his landlady over rent. 'It was very uncomfortable - the arm of the seat cuts into your back - and much colder than I had expected.'

At the restaurant Orwell finds himself working 'seventeen and a half hours' a day 'almost without a break' and looking back wistfully at his relatively leisured and orderly life at the Hotel X. Boris works even longer: 'eighteen hours a day, seven days a week'. 'Such hours', he explains, 'though not usual, are nothing extraordinary in Paris.' He falls into a routine again and talks of literally fighting for a place on the Paris Métro to reach the 'cold, filthy kitchen' of the restaurant by seven. In spite of the filth and incompetence, the restaurant turns out to be a success.

The narrative is interspersed with recounted anecdotes told by some of the minor characters such as Valenti, an Italian waiter at Hotel 'X', and Charlie, 'one of the local curiosities' who is 'a youth of family and education who had run away from home'.

In chapter XXII, Orwell considers the life of a "plongeur":

Chapters XXIV - XXXVIII (London)

Orwell arrives in London expecting to have a job waiting for him: he was told by a friend, to whom he refers as 'B.', that he would get paid to mind an 'imbecile'. Unfortunately the would-be employer has gone abroad.

Until his employer returns, Orwell lives as a tramp, sleeping in an assortment of venues. Under law, vagrants could not stay at the same place more than once a month and were required to keep on the move, with the result that long hours were spent tramping or waiting for hostels to open. Chapters XXV to XXXV describe the journeys, the different forms of accommodation, a selection of the people he met, and the tramps' reaction to Christian charity. Characters in this section of the book include the Irish tramp Paddy "a good fellow", but whose "ignorance was limitless and appalling", and the pavement artist Bozo who had a good literary background, was an amateur astronomer, but had suffered a succession of misfortunes that brought him down.

The final chapters provide a catalogue of different types of accommodation, and offer Orwell's general remarks, concluding

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