“Bad luck seemed to have turned him half-witted in a single day.”

When George Orwell was a young man and still a comparatively unknown writer, he spent several years in destitution in Paris and then outright homelessness in London, tramping about from flophouse to flophouse. The first book he published was about this experience, Down & Out in Paris and London, which came out in 1933. It is one of my benchmark books and I have read it many times and pressed it on many friends. Here is some of what Orwell had to say about what he saw and what he experienced:

“It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have thought so much about poverty--it is the thing you have feared all your 
life, the thing you knew would happen to you sooner or later; and it is all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would be quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be terrible; it is merely

squalid and boring. It is the peculiar LOWNESS of 
poverty that you discover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the complicated meanness, the crust-wiping.”

“…For, when you are 
approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the
others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of 
hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the 
fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually 
true that the less money you have, the less you worry. When you have a hundred francs in the world you are liable to the most craven panics. When 
you have only three francs you are quite indifferent; for three francs will 
feed you till tomorrow, and you cannot think further than that.”

“…There were eccentric characters in the hotel. The Paris slums are a 
gathering-place for eccentric people--people who have fallen into 
solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or 
decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as 
money frees people from work. Some of the lodgers in our hotel lived lives 
that were curious beyond words.

“…Hunger reduces one to an utterly spineless, brainless condition, more 
like the after-effects of influenza than anything else. It is as though one 
had been turned into a jellyfish, or as though all one's blood had been pumped out and luke-warm water substituted.”

“Nevertheless, he was a good fellow, generous by nature and capable of 
sharing his last crust with a friend; indeed he did literally share his 
last crust with me more than once. He was probably capable of work too, if 
he had been well fed for a few months. But two years of bread and margarine 
had lowered his standards hopelessly. He had lived on this filthy imitation 
of food till his own mind and body were compounded of inferior stuff. It 
was malnutrition and not any native vice that had destroyed his manhood.”

“It is worth saying something about the social position of beggars, for
when one has consorted with them, and found that they are ordinary human 
beings, one cannot help being struck by the curious attitude that society 
takes towards them. People seem to feel that there is some essential 
difference between beggars and ordinary 'working' men.

…I am not saying, of 
course, that most tramps are ideal characters; I am only saying that they 
are ordinary human beings, and that if they are worse than other people it 
is the result and not the cause of their way of life. 

It follows that the 'Serve them damned well right' attitude that is 
normally taken towards tramps is no fairer than it would be towards 
cripples or invalids.

“At present I do not feel that I have seen more than the fringe of poverty. Still I can point to one or two things I have definitely learned by being hard up. I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant. That is a beginning.”