Jack London

The People of the Abyss Jack London

People of the Abyss shows how far we have come, but also the dangers of a new abyss yawning as global capitalism dumps unions and enforces zero-hour contracts, and the global arms industry's bombs drive millions from their homes".

In the summer of 1902, the great American writer, journalist, and social activist Jack London undertook an immersive research project in the coalface of poverty in the East End of London, the belly of the first industrialised nation. Fresh from his adventures in the Yukon goldrush that would inspire his classic adventure novels The Call of the Wild and White Fang, London's immersion coincided with the coronation of a new king Edward VII. The splendor and decadence of this state occasion only accentuated what he witnessed and experienced as a yawning and terrifying social gulf between the privileged and dispossessed. London's undertaking - thirty years before Orwell conducted a similar exercise in Down and Out in Paris and London - produced a searing, powerful and, at times, haunting account of raw capital colliding with the vulnerable poor to devastating effect. Working from court and press reports and official state data, he finds that one in four adults is destined to die on public charity 'either in the workhouse, the infirmary or the asylum' (120). Life expectancy in the East End is thirty years with 55 percent of children dying before the age of five.