The People of the Abyss

In 1902 Jack London entered the East End in borrowed clothes and attempted to live among the people he intended to describe. He slept in common lodging houses and on the streets, queued for food and entered the casual ward system while recording the conditions faced by workers, unemployed men, women and children.

The resulting nonfiction study combines first-person reporting with an argument against the economic system that allowed extreme poverty to persist in the capital of the British Empire. London examines housing, hunger, ageing, wages and the Poor Law, using individual encounters to challenge explanations that blamed destitution solely on personal failure.