The People of the Abyss
1903
The visceral, unflinching account of one of America's greatest adventure writers descending into the darkest corners of Edwardian London. In the summer of 1902, Jack London, author of The Call of the Wild, disguised himself as an out-of-work American laborer and entered the Whitechapel district, the notorious East End where Jack the Ripper once walked. He spent weeks embedded in the slums, sleeping in workhouses, crashing in lodging houses, and rooming with families eking out existence in crushing poverty. What emerges is a devastating indictment of late Victorian society's treatment of its most vulnerable, documenting the grinding misery, the hunger, the disease, and the crushed spirits of thousands deliberately hidden from respectable society. This is investigative journalism at its most raw and personal, written with a novelist's eye for devastating detail and an explorer's hunger to witness truth firsthand. It remains a landmark work that forces readers to confront uncomfortable questions about class, poverty, and who society chooses to ignore.
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“Class supremacy can rest only on class degradation””
— Jack London
“Man always gets less than he demands from life; and so little do they demand, that the less than little they get cannot save them.””
— Jack London
“the human soul is a lonely thing””
— Jack London
“The myriads that raise the cry of hunger wail in the greatest empire in the world””
— Jack London
“A soldier, as Bernard Shaw has said, “ostensibly a heroic and patriotic defender of his country, is really an unfortunate man driven by destitution to offer himself as food for powder for the sake of regular rations, shelter, and clothing.””
— Jack London
“But at the best, it is a dull, animal happiness, the content of the full belly. The dominant note of their lives is materialistic. They are stupid and heavy, without imagination. The Abyss seems to exude a stupefying atmosphere of torpor, which wraps about them and deadens them. Religion passes them by. The Unseen holds for them neither terror nor delight. They are unaware of the Unseen; and the full belly and the evening pipe, with their regular “arf an’ arf,” is all they demand, or dream of demanding, from existence.””
— Jack London
“Then arises the third and inexorable question: If Civilisation has increased the producing power of the average man, why has it not bettered the lot of the average man? There can be one answer only”
— Jack London
“In a civilisation frankly materialistic and based upon property, not soul, it is inevitable that property shall be exalted over soul, that crimes against property shall be considered far more serious than crimes against the person.””
— Jack London
“Man cannot be worked worse than a horse is worked, and be housed and fed as a pig is housed and fed, and at the same time have clean and wholesome ideals and aspirations.””
— Jack London
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London, Jack. The People of the Abyss. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-people-of-the-abyss-a8272228-9d7b-4bd0-9ebf-bdc3f26f1c60.London, J. (1903). The People of the Abyss. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-people-of-the-abyss-a8272228-9d7b-4bd0-9ebf-bdc3f26f1c60London, Jack. The People of the Abyss. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-people-of-the-abyss-a8272228-9d7b-4bd0-9ebf-bdc3f26f1c60.
