But it is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty.You have thought so much about poverty - it is the thing you have feared all you life, the thing you knew would happen to you sooner or later; and it is all so utterly and prosaic different.

You thought it would be quite simple; it is extraordinary 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..

George Orwell Down and Out in London and Paris