Orwell on the Laboring Poor
In the spirit of yesterday’s post—and really, in the spirit of my whole academic focus at this point in time—here’s a passage from George Orwell’s excellent Down and Out in Paris and London.
The moral is, never be sorry for a waiter. Sometimes when you sit in a restaurant, still stuffing yourself half an hour after closing time, you feel that the tired waiter at your side must surely be despising you. But he is not. He is not thinking as he looks at you, ‘What an overfed lout’; he is thinking, ‘One day, when I have saved enough money, I shall be able to imitate that man.’ He is ministering to a kind of pleasure he thoroughly understands and admires. And that is why waiters are seldom Socialists, have no effective trade union, and will work twelve hours a day—they work fifteen hours, seven days a week, in many cafes. They are snobs, and they find the servile nature of their work rather congenial.
Actually, I came upon the Orwell reference in a spring 2008 article in the New York Times by Saki Knafo. I was in India conducting fieldwork into the life and work of Bangalore’s golf caddies when I read the article online. I picked up the book from a friend and read it cover-to-cover in short order.
Even now, as I’m writing the dissertation, I think about that quote, as it perfectly captures what I was “discovering” in the field. Most of what I was reading in the early days of this project sidelined everyday life—and the dreams and dreaming that go with it—in favor of statistics and/or abstract theory. The caddies I came to know, though many were poor and also lower caste, nevertheless aspired to something greater, something beyond their existing condition. Like Orwell’s waiters. Like all of us, I’d say, no matter where we sit in the social hierarchy.
