On that same balmy night in June of 1930, while Waugh was amusing the duchess, a young man of the same age but very different appearance, Eric Blair, was working alone in a small, shabby room in the working-class section of Leeds, a manufacturing city in the north. He was the unwelcome guest of his brother-in-law, who regarded this lodger as a penniless failure with no job and no future.
This opinion was shared by almost everyone acquainted with Blair. It was a relatively small group but one that included several experts on failure; they had learned about it firsthand. Blair looked, and often smelled, like a tramp, because he was one. He, however, made the distinction that he wasn’t really a tramp, but only chose to be among tramps to free himself from class prejudices about poverty and dirt. He put it this way: “When you have shared a bed with a tramp and drunk tea out of the same snuff-tin, you feel that you have seen the worst and the worst has no terrors for you.
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