It took a young American writer, better known for his fiction about the Yukon Gold Rush, to expose the abomination that was life in the East End of London in 1902. His chronicle of three weeks spent there is a plumb of the depths to which the world’s largest empire consigned its poorest subjects, only a few miles from the seat of its power.
Only an American
It is one of the ironies inside this book that only an able-bodied, relatively solvent man from over the ocean is seemingly able to tell it as it is. To fully reveal the misery and the extent of the degradation hidden in London’s most decrepit and filthy streets.
Perhaps this tale would not have been permitted to be told by a Britain. It is certainly undoubted that no member of the indigenous working class, to whom this story is most pertinent, would have been published had they attempted the telling.
Jack London is one of the few authors to have been a success with adult and children readers alike. Many, like me, have been schooled on books such as White Fang, and The Call of the Wild, melodramas that lack real power. One of his ‘adult’ novels The Iron Heel, left me cold again. I sympathised with the sentiment but not the style or narrative.
This piece of work is entirely different. Its impact is unmediated by any type of discourse. Of course, it is written in a style but it is the content that grabs you. The thing in itself. And that thing is the awful reality of life and death in the districts of Spitalfields, Whitechapel, Limehouse, Stepney and the other constituent parts of the East End.
Forget Charles Dickens
Reading this, one forgets about Charles Dickens and his often ridiculous and romanticised version of London, although these novels were set a few decades earlier. And this is surprising, because, if anything, the dirt and the poverty often only implied in Dickens’ work seem to have gotten worse by 1902 and the dawn of the Edwardian age.
Another of the ironies mentioned earlier is encountered when London tries to enlist the help of Thomas Cook travel agents in The City at the beginning of his journey. They can organise trips to the ends of the earth but are nonplussed by his request to travel a couple of miles to the east.
Eventually Jack manages to establish a ‘safe’ base where he can recover from the temporary privations he is to experience. Gradually he is exposed to the grim occurrences of the rotten streets, alleys and hovels and soon realises there is no escape from this vast “killing machine” of chronic starvation, vermin infestation and overcrowding. No escape, that is, for those without the luck of Jack himself to have a gold sovereign sewn into their clothes, and decent digs waiting when they have had enough.
The Realities of East End Life
In the East End entered by Jack, the life expectancy is 30 years of age, and 55% of infants die before they are 5 years old. The causes are lack of sanitation, food and warmth, allowing disease and decay to flourish. There are too many people and too few jobs and this competition for employment drives the wages even lower.
Jack discovers that in Inner London, some 1.3m folk received 21 shillings or less a week per family. He calculates from this that around 30% goes on rent (rents were relatively very high again because of demand and the exploitative practises of exploitative landlords), the rest on a paltry amount of food and fuel. There is no room for any luxuries. If the man has one pint of ale it would mean hunger for another in his family.
And this was families with the father in regular employment. The rest, the unemployed, the casual workers, the sick, maimed and disabled have to make do with the streets. Scrounging and stooping to pick up scraps, apple cores and crusts for any sustenance. “Carrying the banner” they call it. Tramping the streets at night unable even to sleep because vigilant ‘Bobbies’ would move then on from doorways, under arches or any place of refuge.
No such sleeping is allowed at night. During daylight hours it is permitted, giving the grotesque spectacle of scores of men and women sprawled around parks, on the ground or propped against each other on benches. This happens even in the West End where the rest of the city’s population ridicule the rough-sleeping unfortunates or worse. To them, these people are ‘others’ who deserve their lot. Such lack of compassion is especially evident during the day-long celebrations of Edward VII’s coronation.
The Workhouse and Middle-class Charity
And charity is no saviour either. Workhouses or “Doing the Spike” means long queues from midday with often arbitrary decisions as to who is admitted. Those lucky enough to make it inside get skilly (a mixture of corn flour and hot water) a hard bread loaf, rough hammocks and hard labour. The Salvation Army also make it difficult for those needing their help. Men are forced to stand, tightly packed, all morning before they get food. And they have to stay on to listen to pompous sermons from self-important officers, even if that means missing out on the chance of picking up work somewhere.
Jack focuses much of his anger at these do-gooders, whose upper middle class wealth is made off the labours of the poor, and who, he observes: “do everything for the poor except get off their backs.” These same people and their friends think nothing of sending some of their dirty money off to “educate the black boys of Sudan,” while their exploitation is causing misery, sordidness and early death on an industrial and previously unimaginable scale on their own doorstep.
The Decline of the British Empire
Jack met many who had had one unfortunate accident, one slip, one blacklisting, one injury that made employment impossible and destitution inevitable. The East End was their end, the very bottom of the pit.
But he reveals also, to the horrified reader, that although the East End is the lowest place, Britain, the greatest power the western world has known for at least 1500 years is a country where 939 out of 1000 die in poverty and 8million are on the edge of starvation. Mismanagement, by the ruling class, is the key, according to Jack.
Mismanagement that creates a way of life worse than the Arctic Inuit, despite unparalleled industrial productive power. London sees the decline of the British Empire in this and other facts, such as the relatively poor pay the average British worker receives in comparison to his US counterpart.
Jack London’s Flaws and His Legacy
Jack has a strong ego and this jars with the reader as he sometimes compares his own life and choices favourably to those around him. He is scathing in his attitude to the unfortunates who drown their sorrows in booze, this coming over as hypocrisy when one remembers that he died through alcohol at around 40 years of age. And the fact that he can escape the carnage every few days also diminishes the impact of his account.
Other critics have stated that Jack isn’t dispassionate enough; he lacks objectivity they say. But for any human to remain unmoved by the sight and reality of families of 6, 8 and more sharing one room and storing their dead infants’ bodies on shelves until they can afford to bury them, would show unconscionable callousness and would border on an attitude close to that of an apologist for the status quo.
Much of the power of this book derives from London’s skill as a novelist, the ability to paint a picture, evoke a feeling, and place us in the shoes of his ‘characters’ through his words. The chapter entitled A Vision of the Night in which he walks from Spitalfields at night down nightmarish streets and alleyways to reach the docks reminds one of the Eternal City chapter of Heller’s Catch 22 in its depiction of hell on Earth, a manmade Hell.
The rest of the impact is caused by Jack’s fury, his clear sightedness, and how the book resonates with the inequalities of today’s world that seem set to increase inexorably. Perhaps one day in the future a similar unflinching vision of deprivation, hunger and sheer human unhappiness in the early 21st century may be published. It will take an account of some ability and empathy to match Jack London’s defining work.
Jack London, The People of the Abyss, Hesperus Press, London, 2009 (first published 1903)
Scott Graham - I've graduated twice from the University of Glasgow, both disciplines majoring in fiction, an MA in Politics and an MLitt in Creative ...
