Jack London’s in-depth exploration of the (shocking) living conditions in London’s East End: "The People of the Abyss" (1903)

In 1902 the 25-year-old Jack London, who was already a veteran of a year of vagrant "hobo" wanderings around the American continent when he was 17, of a year of sailing on a fishing boat in the Far Pacific when he was 18, and of a year in the Klondike gold-rush in Canada’s Far North when he was 21, found himself in London, where he had been sent by a Californian newspaper to cover the Boer war - which however had been concluded by the time he arrived there [1].

So instead of exploring the wilds of South Africa, he set out to explore the East End of London, site of the recent exploits of Jack the Ripper and reputedly unsafe to the extreme, where he proceeded to dress and behave and live and eat and sleep like the rest of the teeming millions cramped into that run-down, decaying, dirty and polluted home of the city’s poorest.

He brought back with him this moving, this shocking, this powerful denunciation of the quite inhuman living conditions tolerated in its centre by the biggest Empire the world had ever seen, at the height of its wealth and power.

Most of the photographs shown here were taken by Jack London himself, a keen and very talented photographer, with one of the first portable Kodak cameras.

(62,300 words)

An e-book is available for down-loading below.

The People of the Abyss (e-book)