Jack London's journey into the abyss



At a time when Great Britain ran the biggest empire since the Romans, the people of the east end of London were still living and working in conditions abject degradation. So abject, that when American author Jack London visited in 1902 to research a non-fiction book published in 1903 as The People of the Abyss, the shock of the experience was never to leave him. His friend Upton Sinclair reported that "for years afterwards, the memories of this stunted and depraved population haunted him beyond all peace". And London himself declared: "No other book of mine took so much of my young heart and tears as that study of the economic degradation of the poor."

I grew up in an area of east London in which my extended, mixed heritage family had lived for generations, and it was during research into my own convoluted family background, (Irish, Huguenot, Jewish, English) that I chanced upon London's nowadays largely forgotten literary and sociological masterpiece which was to change my view of the past forever.

Written decades before George Orwell's famous Down and Out in Paris and London, Jack London, posing as an American sailor stranded in the east end, wandered the streets talking to the people he met for seven weeks. He slept in doss houses, lived with the destitute and starving, and went on to produce one his most important works.

From the very first page I was completely transfixed. Although written nearly a century before, I immediately recognised the place names, the characters, the wretched individuals who walked the self same streets as I, not so long ago. While other famous authors were fervently celebrating the glories of Empire at its peak, it took an American to reveal the true horror of what life was actually like for my predecessors. Descriptions like the passage below were enough to bring tears to my eyes:

"'From the slimy sidewalk, they were picking up bits of orange peel, apple skin, and grape stems, and they were eating them! In such conditions the outlook for the children is hopeless. They die like flies, (infant mortality rates, 40 per 1,000, compared to a national average 26.6 per 1,000) and those that survive, survive because they possess excessive vitality and a capacity of adaptation to the degradation with which they are surrounded."

And although by turns indignant, angry, and amazed, like the author, I found myself asking the very same questions. Why was such misery and poverty to be found in the heart of one of the world's wealthiest cities? Why were families with seven children living in one flea-infested room? Why were the homeless not allowed to sleep at night and constantly kept on the move? Although London is often left speechless by the squalor he encounters at every turn, we must remember that he was no stranger to poverty himself, having worked in jute mills and been jailed for vagrancy whilst still in his teens. Thus, his indignation is all the more amazing.

So while the powers that be were busy carving up Africa and painting the globe pink, the majority of their own citizens were living in conditions not fit for animals. For it wasn't in just the east end of London that this degradation occurred: conditions were similar in all the major cities of our green and pleasant land. So if you are unfortunate to have to listen to someone talk about the glory of the British empire, give them a copy of Jack London's The People of the Abyss, and let them learn see another side of its glory years.