The People of the Abyss

by Jack London

Overview

The People of the Abyss is a book by Jack London (Call of the Wild, White Fang) about life in the East End of London in 1902. He wrote this first-hand account after living in the East End (including the Whitechapel District) for several weeks, sometimes staying in workhouses or sleeping on the streets. In his attempt to understand the working-class of this deprived area of London the author stayed as a lodger with a poor family. The conditions he experienced and wrote about were the same as those endured by an estimated 500,000 of the contemporary London poor.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780999428320
Publisher:	Antipodes Press
Publication date:	09/12/2018
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.55(d)

About the Author

John Griffith London (born John Griffith Chaney) was an American novelist, journalist, and social activist. A pioneer in the world of commercial magazine fiction, he was one of the first writers to become a worldwide celebrity and earn a large fortune from writing. He was also an innovator in the genre that would later become known as science fiction.

His most famous works include The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in the Klondike Gold Rush, as well as the short stories "To Build a Fire", "An Odyssey of the North", and "Love of Life". He also wrote about the South Pacific in stories such as "The Pearls of Parlay" and "The Heathen", and of the San Francisco Bay area in The Sea Wolf.

London was part of the radical literary group "The Crowd" in San Francisco and a passionate advocate of unionization, socialism, and the rights of workers. He wrote several powerful works dealing with these topics, such as his dystopian novel The Iron Heel, his non-fiction exposé The People of the Abyss, and The War of the Classes.

Table of Contents

• Preface

1. The Descent
2. Johnny Upright
3. My Lodging and Some Others
4. A Man and the Abyss
5. Those on the Edge
6. Frying-Pan Alley and a Glimpse of Inferno
7. A Winner of the Victoria Cross
8. The Carter and the Carpenter
9. The Spike
10. Carrying the Banner
11. The Peg
12. Coronation Day
13. Dan Cullen, Docker
14. Hops and Hoppers
15. The Sea Wife
16. Property Versus Person
17. Inefficiency
18. Wages
19. The Ghetto
20. Coffee-houses and Doss-houses
21. The Precariousness of Life
22. Suicide
23. The Children
24. A Vision of the Night
25. The Hunger Wail
26. Drink, Temperance, and Thrift
27. The Management

Editorial Reviews

It is written with the smoldering anger of turn-of-the-century revolutionary socialism. There are no gray shadings in London's economic world. There is only the evil of capitalism and the saintly suffering of the poor. The rich had had their stories told in mass periodicals, and London felt it was time to let the ignored speak. He thus wrote the biographies of the people who have been exploited by imperialism and capitalism. This is the book that counters the Horatio Alger story. For every Alger, for every Rockefeller, there is a mass of sufferers whose plight enabled the speedy rise to wealth of a few. In its sociological and journalistic documentation of poverty is a call for direct action. Wealth blinds, and London makes us see. With this reprinting of London's incredibly important and readable book, Pluto Press and London remind us of how economic exploitation must always be fought, that we must always be educated in the lives of the unfortunate.

James Williams

No other book of mine took so much of my young heart and tears as that study of the economic degradation of the poor.

Jack London