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Is it possible to forget George Orwell? In every age defined by totalitarianism and institutional lies, Orwell’s work has been invoked and apparently continues to be invoked invariably. His writings continue to lend to publications comparisons for political situations around the world every other day. Very few works have left an impress on the minds of readers in any age equivalent to that of Animal Farm and 1984. The peculiarity of his writing that made him a hero among common readers was his simplistic style of writing and his clarity of thought. He made writing look like a piece of cake. And what made his writing so robust were his rich experiences and his keen observations. But how many of us have really known Orwell as an essayist? Without a shred of doubt, Orwell was one of the finest essayists of all time. From criticism of personalities to advice on writing and from reflections on human despair to making tea, his essays portray a vivid picture of his observant and analytical mind.

In the early years of his life, Orwell spent several years bumming and slumming in the squalid localities of London and Paris. Most of his early work is inspired by his personal experiences and observation of the life around him. In How the Poor Die, Orwell paints a grim picture of his first ever experience of being admitted in a public ward of a hospital in Paris where he was being treated for pneumonia. He recounts the horrors of being an unpaid patient in a gloomy, smelly, sordid hospital where patients are cramped together in dingy rooms. Where the inconsiderate and lazy staff treats human beings as inanimate objects and the doctors and the medical students see patients as subjects of curiosity and pedagogy. He recalls the revulsions of the dreadful conditions his inmates suffered from and the misery of dying in a hospital alone with no one to be by the bedside in the last moments. Reminded of strange familiarity of something similar to the conditions in the hospital, he alludes to the memories of all the atrocious nineteenth-century literary descriptions of hospitals and surgeries before the discovery and regularization of the use of anesthesia. But in the essence, through his compelling prose, he makes us aware of the reality of how the poor die.