The People of the Abyss

By Jack London

Life in the East End of London in 1902.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Start Classics
• Release date: May 16, 2014
• ISBN: 9781633551473

Jack London

John Griffith Chaney, conocido como Jack London (1876-1916), creció en Oakland. A los catorce años dejó el colegio y pasó su juventud trabajando como pescador, patrullero de costas o marinero a la caza de focas. También sufrió el desempleo y fue arrestado por vagabundear, hasta que se trasladó a Alaska empujado por la «fiebre del oro». Allí vivió sus experiencias más duras, pero también las que plantarían la semilla de la escritura. De ese entorno surgen sus primeros relatos y los que le granjearon fama inmediata: La llamada de la selva (1903) y Colmillo Blanco (1906), para muchos sus mejores obras. La desnutrición y sus escasas ganancias lo llevaron de vuelta a California, pero no tardó en hacerse de nuevo a la mar. Primero (1904) como corresponsal de guerra y más adelante (1907) con su propio navío, en una expedición que recorrió el mundo durante varios años y que inspiró Cuentos de los mares del Sur (1911), otro de sus títulos más conocidos. A su vuelta compró una gran propiedad, pero un incendio fortuito destruyó la nueva casa y aquello afectó profundamente a la salud del autor, ya de por sí precaria en aquel momento. Falleció en su rancho de California a los cuarenta años.

Reviews for The People of the Abyss

[bruce_deming_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is a non fiction book where Jack London Lives with the homeless people of London. And some life to the old saying about "walking a mile in another man's shoes."

[keylawk · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Jack London remains one of the most prescient observers of human society. This work of journalism is the product of his own immersion into the slums of London after witnessing the coronation of Edward VII in the capital of the British Empire in 1902. Hindsight reveals that the British Empire was at its height. The eponymous London was also at the height of his powers, and published his most famous work, "The Call of the Wild" in the following year back in California, which remained his home.This work is the first manacle of reportage by London which indicts the hands of the wealthy criminal class where "The Iron Heel" published in 1907 caught their feet. London had the insight and courage to expose as ineluctable fact that criminals in the name of capitalism would use every device of fraud and violence to seize the wealth and labor of the poor. These twin volumes prophecied the utterly pointless destruction of WWI and the rise of fascism which culminated in WWII.This edition is brilliantly prefaced by Jack Lindsay who provides historical background on London without indulging in any clap-trap ideological bias. The background touches upon London's reactionary streaks--his own racism, and views on women, affected by readings on Hegel and Nietzsche [4]--and whatever internal inconsistencies lie in the heart of a man who built up a fortune while advocating socialism. The Preface notes that it "was nothing new for a writer to make a journey into slumland and return to recount its horrors." Lindsay compares London to the Victorians who preceded him: William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, whose kitchens and beds for the poor were visited by London, wrote "In Darkest England" in 1890. He documented the horrific conditions "within a stone's throw of our cathedrals and palaces".George R. Sims, another colorful and highly productive journalist, repeatedly documented the perils of lives in the London slums. For example in his "How the Poor Live" and "Horrible London" in 1889.Charles Booth, the Unitarian philanthropist famous for providing a map of povertry in London, in "Life and Labour of the People in London" (1889). William T. Stead, the English journalist and editor who pioneered "new journalism" and investigative reporting, published numerous articles on urban poverty, especially in England, but including one series after living six months sub rosa in Chicago. In placing London in this historical setting, Lindsay notes that both Booths, and Sims, Mayhew and James Greenwood, among others, gave striking accounts of the terrible conditions for the poor in England. He notes that the life of the poor had been academically studied by W. Wyckoff, luridly depicted by William Stead, and scientifically analyzed by Charles Booth. But Lindsay offers the argument made by a reviewer at the time (in The Independent) that London offered a unique addition: London brought these conditions to life--making it "real and present to us". [7] London depicts the inhabitants as our brothers and sisters, unblurred by sentimentality.The authenticity of London's documentation is vouch-safed by the American's use of street cant. He also recites numerous "stories" told by the denizens of the crowded streets, "gardens" (patches of grass), doss-houses, and workhouses -- the Mile End Waste, the Spike, Whitechapel, Hoxton, Spitalfields, and Wapping. He found the women in Leman Street, Waterloo Road, Piccadilly, the Strand [100]. He could compare the places serving "skilly", a fluid concoction of oatmeal and hot water provided as breakfast and supper. [38] Includes his observations of the Coronation. He documents the rise of a "new race of street people". [94] London spells out how these brutalized degraded and dull "Ghetto folk" have been incapacitated and cannot, cannot, perform service to England, either as workers or as soldiers, because of their weakness and desperation. [94] He compares jails in America with the fare of an English workingman, and finds the latter severely lacking. The work also recites the latest statistical and economic data on pauperism in London. [101] Of particular import was his grasp of how many English were killed and maimed by their participation in the forms of "work" available to them--West End factories, carding and chemical concerns, slayed even the most splendid men and women. [104] London lines up the suicide cases. He presents the gestures--ghastly simulacrae--toward a "family life" made impossible for the desparate wailing for lasting employment to enable workers to earn food and shelter. Where the labor is so productive that a single workman can produce cloth for 250 people, and five men can produce bread for a thousand, yet millions starve. It comes down to "criminal management". [120]In a chapter on "drink, temperance and thrift", London addresses the fecklessness of most of the do-gooders and charities. He holds up the remedial exception in the work of Dr Barnardo Homes, the "child snatcher". The doctor took waifs not yet hardened to a vicious society, and sent them to Canada, where they had a chance to thrive. [124]In the final Chapter, London examines the "management". He compares the English "Civilization" with the Inuit living along the banks of the Yukan, in Alaska. [124]The Inuit have good and bad times, in which they all share, but chronic debt and starvation is unknown. London is one of the first to fix the label of "criminal mismanagement" to the political powers of the Kingdom, by documenting the numbers, the conditions, the markets, and the deliberate misappropriations of the wealthy who live off the poor.

[carlislemlh · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Jack London's The People of the Abyss is a great book. Somehow London always manages to make compelling topics I would not generally find interesting. His writing is always powerful. I can see the scenes he depicts in front of me; in fact, I feel I am in them. I find myself sympathetic to the characters. The world is a better place for having revealed itself to London and to have reflected back his interpretation of it.

[jfetting_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In 1902, Jack London went to the city of London and spent a few months posing as an unemployed American sailor in the East End slums. He lived with them, on the streets and in workhouses, and in The People of the Abyss he reports back on the living conditions he found there. They are horrific. Starvation, filth, disease... people standing hours in line trying to get a spot to sleep for the night, unable to find or keep jobs. Many of the people London met were merely unlucky - an illness, a death in the family, an injury that cost them a job, the "thing that happened" - and the next thing they knew they were homeless, no longer able to make ends meet (sounds familiar, no? The more things change, the more they stay the same). It is difficult reading, and London only hints at some of the worst of the problems. As other reviewers have said, this is by no means an unbiased, just-the-facts-ma'am book. London was outraged by what he saw. In the book, he lays blame at the feet of the government, society, the lack of jobs, and even do-gooders, stopping just short of calling for class revolution. For what it is worth, an outraged Jack London is a compulsively readable Jack London, for this reviewer. So, so difficult to put down.

[robertgriffen · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The People of the Abyss - Jack London - published by Hesperus Press Limited."Where home is a hovel, and dull we grovel,Forgetting the World is fair." William Morris, The Voice of Toil.A quotation to the start of the Chapter on Children in this striking work by Jack London, written in 1903.If this reflection by William Morris was true in Jack London's eyes in 1903, sadly and with great shame it has to be said that nothing has changed for the many, today.Accepting that Jack London was looking for the worst situations he could find and his personal background and experiences, the comments and opinions he offers are nevertheless sound. Reading this book I found all too often quite painful. All the more so because my own father was an infant of seven when this was written, living in the suburbs of London, born into a family of fourteen living in a three bedroomed terraced house. Of the fourteen children born ten survived to adult hood. By the evidence recounted by Jack London, that so many survived was exceptional.It is impossible reading the many examples he gives, not to feel that there has been little if any improvement in the lives of those today who are existing in conditions not better than he describes. The gap between those who have plenty and those who have nothing then was great and today I fear it remains so, to an even greater extent.Any serious student of social history will easily find that his research has a bias that tends to over dramatise some situations but accepting that, the stories he tells make compelling reading and do provide a very real picture of the conditions existing at that time. It would be wrong to ignore the humanity that comes from his views. He was, as would any civilised person, deeply disturbed by his experiences.This is a well produced book and Hesperus Press have provided a clear and easily read edition that reflects well the nature of the original story. I have not seen the original edition although I have seen later editions produced in 1913. This new one is faithful in all ways to the original and makes a good addition to any library.

[dekesolomon · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

When somebody says “muckraker,” I recall names such as Lincoln Steffens, Ray Stannard Baker, Upton Sinclair, Ida Tarbell, Izzy Stone and a few others. I never thought of Jack London in that context because books I associated with his name (White Fang, et al.) were works of adventure fiction. I was aware of London’s socialist-labor sympathies having read a few of his short stories: tales such as South of the Slot come to mind. But I never knew Jack London for a muckraker.Now I’ve read The People of the Abyss (London: Hesperus Press Limited; 2009), I’m willing to allow that Jack London was a muckraker. Still, I note that London’s approach to muckraking was different than some. Where Ida Tarbell (for example) did years of research, gathered mountains of documented evidence and used something like 800 pages to expose the foetid monstrosity of John D. Rockefeller, Jack London did only a few weeks of leg work, composed just one airtight analogy and used only 232 pages to expose the foetid monstrosity of the British Empire and of civilization as we know it.The People of the Abyss is Jack London’s eyewitness account of what he saw when, in the summer of 1902, he went to England disguised as a merchant seaman on the skids. Arriving in England, the author dived headlong into the reeking labor ghetto at the notorious East End of London.Walking the same mean streets that Jack the Ripper had stalked just 12 years earlier, the American novelist spent several months living the life of London’s poor. He wore the clothes. He ate the swill. He slept out in the weather. He visited housing in which families of six, eight, or more dwelt in single, 7-by-8-foot rooms with no heat or water. He stayed in Dickensian workhouses. He visited hospitals that made people sick and asylums that drove people crazy. He worked for pennies a day while he watched multitudes of people slog through filth, disease and starvation to achieve misery, despair and death.In this writer’s ken, Jack London never wrote a book that didn’t contain a purple passage or two. No surprise, then: The People of the Abyss contains a few. But if London was a passionate writer, he was also a damned good one. He understood that rhetoric won’t stand without facts to support it. He also understood that a long recitation of bald facts will alienate most readers. Accordingly, London’s Abyss uses few statistics and those few statistics are shrewdly chosen. The following paragraph (p. 178) is about as thick as the narrative gets:"The figures are appalling: 1.8 million people in London live on the poverty line and below it, and one million live with one week’s wages between them and pauperism. In all England and Wales, eighteen percent of the whole population are driven to the parish for relief, and in London, according to the statistics of the London County Council, twenty-one percent of the whole population are driven to the parish for relief. Between being driven to the parish for relief and being an out-and-out pauper there is a great difference, yet London supports 123,000 paupers, quite a city of folk in themselves. One in every four in London dies on public charity, while 939 out of every 1,000 in the united Kingdom die in poverty; 8 million simply struggle on the ragged edge of starvation, and 20 million more are not comfortable in the simple and clean sense of the word."The bulk of London’s narration describes with horrid clarity what it meant to be “driven to the parish for relief” and to be “not comfortable in the simple and clean sense of the word.” Here it should be sufficient to say that in America today, cattle and hogs are often more “comfortable” than poor Britons of 1902.For all it tells a depressing story, The People of the Abyss is an almighty good book that offers today’s American reader plenty to think about. Tales of parents who killed themselves after murdering children for whom they could not provide ring all too familiar. Even more chilling is the idea that we today are afflicted with militantly moronic leaders who want to do away with “entitlements” such as Social Security and Medicare and Food Stamps so we can enjoy the good old days that supposedly prevailed before such programs existed.Jack London was a great writer who was never better than he appears in this muckraking reprint from Hesperus Press. The People of the Abyss will curl your hair, stiffen your spine, and stand you right up on your hind legs. Read it. Get mad. Raise Hell!

[booksloth_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"It is rather hard to tell a tithe of what I saw. Much of it is untellable. But in a general way I may say that I saw a nightmare, a fearful slime that quickened the pavement with life, a mess of unmentionable obscenity that put into eclipse the 'nightly horror' of Picadilly and the Strand. It was a menagerie of garmented bipeds that looked something like humans and more like beasts, and to complete the picture, brass-buttoned keepers kept order among them when they snarled too fiercely."That was what Jack London saw on his first visit to the London docks and, despite his claim that it is 'rather hard to tell', this marvellous book does a better job of telling it than many another work, either of fiction or of history, that attempts to bring to life the squalor of 19th century London.It was in 1902 that London (the author) visited London (the city) and lived as an out-of-work man on its streets while investigating the lives of the thousands of men and women for whom that was an everyday reality. The stories that feature here are some of the most heartbreaking you will find anywhere. The vicious circle of near-endless searching for a place to sleep or a crust to eat - a search that left little time for the most important job of all, looking for work, demonstrates the unfairness of a system in which a person, once caught up in it, can only spiral further and further down to the depths (the 'abyss') that can only end in death - from starvation, disease or suicide.It is not so much the appalling conditions in which life had to be lived as the sheer inability for anyone, once caught up in this spiral, ever to emerge from it that so raises the hackles of both reader and writer and it is to London's credit that the majority of the book is written in a white hot fury. He apportions blame wherever it is due - with the government, the rich, even the charities and social workers who do their best to relieve the conditions but from a position of very little understanding.Just how much social change was brought about by this book at the time of publication I do not know. Sadly, no book can ever do quite enough and the number of people still (over 100 years later) sleeping on the streets in the capital are evidence of that but perhaps this reissue will do something, if not to change that situation, then at least to help the rest of us understand a plight we can only be grateful we do not have to experience ourselves.A superb book - not just angry, righteous and worthy but a damn good read too.

[clfisha · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The premise is simple in 1902 Jack London, posing as an out of work American sailor, went undercover in the poverty stricken east of London.There are much more interesting, richer and more detailed accounts of poverty out there (Henry Meyhew springs to mind) although this still an interesting read, even whilst being a dated and extremely flawed book. It's interesting because in spite of his many flaws Jack London is an engaging writer, his passion and horror at the poverty keeps the account painfully alive whilst his socialist views and lack Victorian prudishness is, for the period, deeply refreshing.However it contains far far too much of Jack London and his giant ego. The tome veers wildly from boys own adventure (look how brave he is!) to heart wrenching accounts, to repetitive lengthy facts and figures. It can be funny but for all the wrong reasons, he seems to carefully select his interviewees and he has a bizarre superiority going on; our poor are better than your poor kind of thing.To be honest the whole thing makes me wonder what he would thought he would achieve. He may be right but alienating people who can change things never helps. I mean he even criticises the King! Yes yes I know, how cruel ;)A different and interesting account of poverty but one I would only recommend to Jack London fans.

[oldroses · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What Jacob Riis did for New York City with his photos of tenements, Jack London did for London with his book, The People of the Abyss. The abyss that he referred to was the squalid East End of London, where the poorest of the poor lived and died.All of the horrors are there, described not by a dispassionate historian keeping a professional distance in his reporting, but in eyewitness accounts of and interviews with people living in appalling conditions. What I found most horrifying about this book is that so many things haven’t changed since it was written at the turn of the last century. His descriptions of homeless people forced by the police to literally walk all night due to a law which forbade sleeping in public places brought to mind the sweeps done in our own cities, forcing the homeless off the streets and out of our sight. Healthcare was an issue then just as it is now. Families were forced into poverty and sometimes starvation when the husband, the main breadwinner, was injured, became ill or died. The majority of bankruptcies in our own time are caused by overwhelming medical bills. More than a century ago when this book was written, when a man was out of work due to illness or injury, his wife was unable to adequately support the family because the only jobs open to her paid too little. Sadly, in our own time, women are still not able to adequately provide for their families on their own because they are paid, on average, 70 cents for every dollar a man earns doing the same job. A statistic that should outrage everyone (but strangely doesn’t) is that post-divorce, children slide down the economic scale, sometimes into poverty thanks to their mothers’ inability to earn a living comparable to their fathers who actually ascend the economic ladder post-divorce due their higher earning power.The cost of housing, rents equal to half their income, brings to mind the mortgage crisis we are suffering today. As the cost of housing during the last real estate bubble, reached stratospheric levels, families were forced to pay more and more of their income for housing, leaving little to actually live on. All it takes is a job loss or catastrophic illness for them to find themselves on the street as the banks foreclose on their homes. Their counterparts a century ago faced a similar fate for the same reasons. Job loss or illness resulted in the loss of the tiny rooms that they rented.Yet for all the similarities, there are important differences. We have laws governing the workplace and a social safety net that prevents the worst of the gruesome results of illness and unemployment described in this book. Laws about workplace safety and working hours prevent employers from exploiting their workers. Unemployment insurance replaces a portion of lost wages. Food stamps and free or reduced cost meals in schools stave off starvation. We have come a long way since 1902. After reading this book, I realized that we still have a long way to go.

[bengan_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a very interesting book set in London in the first decade of the twentieth century. You can read it as a social history as long as you remember what Alexander Masters writes in the foreword to the book; 'as an objective, trustworthy analysis, Abyss won’t do at all'.In 1902 Jack London moves temporarily into East End, disguised as a poor inhabitant. He observes and tells us about how the poor in East End live and how they go about their daily chores.Even if not everything in the book is considered trustworthy the stories tell us a lot of the persistence of social inequality in Britain. The atmosphere is vividly described and all that happens in the book seems genuine.Besides the stories of different people there are statistics, all showing the misery the working class lived in during the first years of the twentieth century.All together the book is absolutely worth reading, especially if you are interested in the history of England.

[fluffyblue_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The old adage, "You can't judge a book by it's cover" certainly applies in the case of this particular book. Hesperus have put together a really lovely thick cover and good quality pages. I wanted to like it, I really did, and it initially started off well, being about poverty in London in the early 1900's. I wanted to be interested because my grandparents were born around 1910, and so not so far into the future of London's study of the people of London, which was 1902. I felt that he barely touched the surface of the people of the East End's lives, he wrote about the dire circumstances in which those people lived, and although you could sense his anger, I felt that all the time he was comparing our lives to those of those living in poverty in America, who he considered to be much better off. The book ended up being a chore to read and I forced myself to finish the last quarter of it, although I'm sure I didn't take much of it in.

[auntiecatherine · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

First off let me say how much I like Hesperus Press editions. They are sturdy, well-made paperbacks, whose covers have been lengthened an inch or so and then turned in, like a book jacket. The paper is good and the print excellent. I have a set of their Dickens Christmas anthologies, which include the contributions by other people, and they are excellent. I have to say I didn't enjoy this one as much as those.If you've read Orwell - Road to Wigan Pier and Down and Out in Paris and London - or Henry Meyhew - London labour and the London Poor, you'll have found the same information better presented. Jack London was a poverty tourist, he dipped his toe into the tide of human misery but made sure he could scuttle back to better living pretty sharpish. That's not to say there aren't some good things, the stories of the individuals he met, his compassion for the underworld (by which he meant the underclass rather than criminals) and his perception that, once a person began the fall from even relative prosperity, it was next to impossible to get out of the Abyss. Less successful - his quoting of more systematic researchers and a rather brash Yankee triumphalism - he is forever claiming that the American poor did much better, though it is plain by this he meant white Americans, I doubt African-, Native- and Chinese-Americans of the period would have been quite so sanguine.

[karweenie · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In 1899 Jack London travelled to London and immersed himself in the worker neighborhoods of the East End. What follows is a horrifying account of daily life in the Industrial Age. The homeless paid to sleep in wooden coffins at night. Starving men ate used cigarette butts and rotten orange peels from off the dirty streets. Suicide and infanticide were rampant; some parents even maimed their children at birth so that they'd have better luck begging on the streets. Recommended for anyone who's merely curious, and invaluable to the social historian.