The People of the Abyss

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As their poor vitals warmed to the food, they began to expand and wax boastful, and to talk politics. I can only say that they talked politics as well as the average middle-class man, and a great deal better than some of the middle-class men I have heard. What surprised me was the hold they had on the world, its geography and peoples, and on recent and contemporaneous history. As I say, they were not fools, these two men. They were merely old, and their children had undutifully failed to grow up and give them a place by the fire. Dorset Street in London's notorious Whitechapel district, photographed in 1902 for The People of the Abyss But when the dawn came, the nightmare over, you would hale you home to refresh yourself, and until you died you would tell the story of your adventure to groups of admiring friends. It would grow into a mighty story. Your little eight-hour night would become an Odyssey and you a Homer. Unlike the other works with which the name of the “American Kipling” is associated, it suggests the moderately imaginative reformer rather than the vividly imaginative novelist, but it is bitterly true. NOT A NICE BOOK – NOT NICE PEOPLE It is terrible, and it is also well-known; and though there are phases of the tragedy which Mr. London’s remarkable powers of description and keen insight into human nature enable him to put before us, more poignantly and vividly perhaps than has been done before, he tells no new story.

By the brand upon my shoulder, by the gall of clinging steel; By the welt the whips have left me, by the scars that never heal; By eyes grown old with staring through the sun-wash on the brine, I am paid in full for service . . . ” No fear you’ll refuse the second time; they’ll run you in,” answered the Carpenter. “Wouldn’t advise you to try it on, my lad.” This dining-room, on the same floor as the kitchen, was about four feet below the level of the ground, and so dark (it was midday) that I had to wait a space for my eyes to adjust themselves to the gloom. Dirty light filtered in through a window, the top of which was on a level with a sidewalk, and in this light I found that I was able to read newspaper print.In his 1903 “The People of the Abyss”, the American gives this description of the poor Londoners: “the air he breathes, and from which he never escapes, is sufficient to weaken him mentally and physically, so that he becomes unable to compete with the fresh virile life from the country hastening on to London Town… My first discovery was that empty houses were few and far between– so far between, in fact, that though I walked miles in irregular circles over a large area, I still remained between. Not one empty house could I find–a conclusive proof that the district was “saturated.” These people are devoid of any chance for a job. Thus, more often than not, the only thing left for them is life in the streets and starvation. In the adjoining room lived a woman and six children. In another vile hole lived a widow, with an only son of sixteen who was dying of consumption. The woman hawked sweetmeats on the street, I was told, and more often failed than not to supply her son with the three quarts of milk he daily required. Further, this son, weak and dying, did not taste meat oftener than once a week; and the kind and quality of this meat cannot possibly be imagined by people who have never watched human swine eat. A lull; apparently one combatant temporarily disabled and being resuscitated; child’s voice audible again, but now sunk to a lower note of terror and growing exhaustion.

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. Drunken women fighting! It is not nice to think of; it is far worse to listen to. Something like this it runs – And, what of the coughing and the sweetmeats, I found another menace added to the hostile environment of the children of the slum. He took thousands of pictures over the years from the slums of London’s East End to the islands of the South Pacific.Consult the police,” he concluded authoritatively, when I had persisted. “We are not accustomed to taking travellers to the East End; we receive no call to take them there, and we know nothing whatsoever about the place at all.” It is incontrovertible that the children grow up into rotten adults, without virility or stamina, a weak-kneed, narrow-chested, listless breed, that crumples up and goes down in the brute struggle for life with the invading hordes from the country.” He spluttered unintelligibly, shook his head, and looked very miserable. “I’m a strynger ‘ere,” he managed to articulate. “An’ if yer don’t want Stepney Station, I’m blessed if I know wotcher do want.” In good times, when there was a rush of work, this man told me that he could earn as high as “thirty bob a week.”–Thirty shillings! Seven dollars and a half! A journey further East than St. Paul’s Church yard is not calculated to display the latest toque to those able to appreciate it or envy its possessor. Even though it be but a clever and elaborate, if quite unconscious, repetition of much that has been said and thought and deplored times without number, it is well that The People of the Abyss should have been written. SORDID HORROR