The People Of The Abyss: (Jack London Classics Collection)

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 lo

In this relatively short book, Jack London succeeds in exposing the utter misery of lower class life in London's East Side circa 1900. I often found myself revolted to the point of having to walk away and think happy thoughts. The fact that he donned the threadbare garment of the labourer and set out to live and work amoungst the poor allowed him the opportunity to expirience and record their strife and degredation first hand. It feels like a travel guide through Hell- all while during the supposed 'Guilded Age'. A must-read for anyone with a social conscience.

Jack London's social document written in 1902 about the slum of London's East End paints no less than hell, `a huge killing machine': an illiterate scrambling mass of human beings living in the most squalid conditions, inhaling air saturated with sulfuric acid. The fact, that there were `more people than houses', was fully exploited by house-sweaters. The fact that there were `more men than work' was ruthlessly used by employers to pay starvation wages. Moreover the working conditions were abominable; every year 1 out of 1400 workers were killed, 1 out of 2500 were totally and 1 out of 9 temporary disabled. 55 % of the children died before the age of 5. The average lifetime was 30 years. The renowned economist Pigou estimated that 71 % of the population of London lived on the brink of starvation. In the innermost centre of Christian civilization, in the heart of the wealthiest and most powerful empire in the world, cynical moral indecency was the standard. The church goers remained callous before the permanent hunger wail and the slaughter of the innocents: `It's their own fault'. More, the `soul snatchers' promised paradise after life. The situation in London reflected the global situation in England, which was perhaps worse, because people continued to migrate in the city. If Jack London's book is a dramatic plea for more humanity on behalf of the powerful, his solution (`better management') is more than naive. What the starving poor (the vast majority of the population) needed was democracy (one man, one vote) in order to grab power themselves. This book is unfortunately still topical, because, in a certain sense, the social contrasts inside London at the beginning of the 20th century reflect our North/South division. Not to be missed.

This was written at the beginning of this century, and yet, it speaks just as vividly to the conditions at end of the century. We are seeing the erosion and deterioration of all that was won through hard-fought labor battles: the end of the 8 hour work day; people working two jobs and still not being able to make ends meet; children left to their own devices as parents are stretched to the breaking point; the rise of infectious diseases, especially tuberculosis, as people are forced to live in more crowded, unsanitary conditions; the lack of healthcare; increasing numbers of people living on the street; and hunger. These were the conditions Jack London saw and described in East London at the turn of the century; but they could as easily have been New York City or any large American city; and they could be any large American city today.Jack London was far more than just a writer of dog stories for boys, as he is so often thought to be. All his writings should be more widely read, and I commend the publishers for republishing this brilliant piece of "investigative journalism" by a great American writer.

This is Jack London's first hand account of the living conditions of London's poor in 1901. He actually went to live among them. England was at the height of her empire and unable to alleviate the misery right on her own door step. The descriptions of privation physically affect the pit of the stomach, and the point of such horror being possible square in the middle of the pomp and perfumery of opulence is pressed home by London until the reader can feel nothing other but indignation. It is a sad tract about human greed and human suffering, and as long as homelessness and want are rampant, this little book will find readers.