People of the Abyss
Jack London
1903 Penguin 2002

Recommendation Topic
If John Reed and Charles Flambeau were respectively the early 20th century war correspondent and travel writer, then Jack London, as well as being an author, was the prototype undercover investigative journalist. In the late summer of 1902 he spent 2 months living amongst the people of the East End of London, the poorest of the poor who earned only a few pence a day working 12-14 hours. The precariousness of these lives was emphasised, in a world where an accident of fate or industrialisation could incapacitate the main breadwinner and send the rest of the family to the workhouse. The homeless were moved on during the night so were unable to rest and were therefore unfit to get work in the morning – a truly vicious circle. Even the trip (slogging along on foot) to Kent for hop picking was not as idyllic as it might appear from a distance, as it meant sleeping under the hedgerows and having extremely nimble fingers to pick enough bushels (Link) to earn enough to eat.
Jack London uses the examples of people he met to illustrate the inequalities of capitalism in Britain when everyone from the well-to-do to the lower middle classes was celebrating the coronation of Edward V11 and the British Empire was at its peak. Indeed, he even takes a chapter to argue that the Inuit in their primitive state were better off as a society than industrialised Britain. Looking back from a 21st century perspective one wonders that the system didn't really collapse until the First World War. But in a different way, unrestrained capitalism has created a first world underclass in the USA and it is still possible to fall outside the benefit system in Britain. (See also The World of Upstairs, Downstairs ( Link) for more on this period )
November 2009