In the decade following his demoralised return in 1927 from service with the colonial police in Burma, George Orwell quite determinedly widened his circle of experience. Afflicted with a condition of 'bad conscience' in Burma, he explains, he was driven by the need to escape 'not merely from imperialism but from every form of man's dominion over man. I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against their tyrants' (148). This feeling dictated the kinds of experience he would pursue: living on the rough with tramps and beggars in England; menial work in the cellars of fancy Parisian restaurants; wandering the streets of poverty in England's depressed North; fighting with the Catalonian workers' militia during the Spanish Civil War. Although Orwell recalls embarking on this programme out of a commitment to 'failure' - 'Every suspicion of self-advancement . . . seemed to me spiritually ugly, a species of bullying' - these ventures paradoxically inaugurated his success as a nonfiction writer: the authority of direct experience strengthened the impression of truth in his reportage about circles of social and political life remote from most of his readers.