Non-fiction: The People of the Abyss

Overview

Jack London's The People of the Abyss (1903) is a first-person descent into the slums of London's East End at the turn of the century. Written after several weeks living as a destitute laborer in 1902, the book blends reportage, memoir, and social analysis to expose an industrial capital's hidden underclass, the "submerged tenth" described by contemporary social investigators. London portrays a metropolis of imperial wealth resting on a foundation of chronic unemployment, overcrowded lodging houses, hunger, disease, and premature death, arguing that such misery is not accidental but produced by economic and legal structures.

Method and Setting

London discards his identity as a well-known American writer, dons threadbare clothes, and moves into Whitechapel and Spitalfields to live on the cheapest food and lodging he can afford. He queues for entry to workhouse casual wards, sleeps in common doss-houses and on the streets, and tries his luck at the dock gates with casual laborers hoping for a day’s work. He secures a room with a suspicious but ultimately helpful East End couple and uses their home as a base from which to wander courts and alleys, observing both the rhythms of daily life and the crises that punctuate it. The narrative alternates between scenes he witnesses and statistics drawn from government Blue Books and social surveys, notably those of Charles Booth.

Scenes from the Abyss

The book’s memorable set pieces turn abstractions into lived experience: men paying a penny to sit upright all night in a reeking shed, or two pence for the infamous rope "hangover" that lets them sleep slumped forward; coffin-like shelters where a few hours’ oblivion is purchased with the last coins of the day; workhouse wards where the price of shelter is degrading labor and the surrender of personal freedom. London follows seamstresses, matchbox makers, and shirt-finishers forced into impossible hours for pennies, and he chronicles veterans of imperial wars, maimed and discarded into beggary. He attends inquests in which starvation and exposure are recorded with bureaucratic calm, and he watches children with rickets and consumptive coughs play in sunless courts. Throughout, individuals, wry, proud, broken, or defiant, emerge against a backdrop of systemic want.

Causes and Systems

Behind the vignettes lies a critique of Victorian and Edwardian political economy. Casualized labor keeps wages low and workers interchangeable; rents devour incomes as families cram into single rooms; the Poor Law and its workhouses stigmatize relief and deter the desperate from seeking help; charity, though well-intentioned, often polices rather than aids. London insists that poverty on this scale is not the result of personal failure or temporary cycles but a permanent feature of an unregulated industrial order. Drawing on Booth’s findings, he argues that roughly a third of Londoners live in poverty, an indictment of a society that celebrates empire while tolerating a domestic underworld of deprivation.

Style, Argument, and Legacy

London’s prose is vivid, sometimes incendiary, pushing readers to feel the cold, smell the lodging-house air, and taste the weak tea and bread that pass for meals. The book’s power comes from the pairing of immersion, sleeping where the homeless sleep, eating what they eat, with documentation that widens each episode into a social pattern. It is a call for collective solutions, aligning with London’s socialist politics, but its enduring value lies in the close-up portraits that refuse to let statistics do all the work. As an early landmark of undercover social journalism, The People of the Abyss helped shape public understanding of urban poverty and influenced later investigative narratives, reminding readers that modern cities often conceal, within a short walk of their grand avenues, a depth where the cost of prosperity is paid.