An American novelist goes undercover in the world's richest empire and finds people starving in the streets.

The People of the Abyss

Jack London · 1903

In the summer of 1902, Jack London — already a rising novelist — disguised himself as a stranded American sailor and spent weeks living in London's East End: sleeping in casual wards, queuing for doss-house beds, picking hops alongside London's seasonal poor, and tallying what he saw against the official statistics of the day. The result is muckraking journalism before the word existed in Britain, written by a man who could have simply described the misery from a distance and instead chose to sleep in it. Read alongside The Jungle (also in this library), The People of the Abyss is a reminder that the world's wealthiest empire at its peak coexisted with, and depended on, a permanent underclass it had no plan to lift — and that the tools London reaches for to explain why (mismanagement, not scarcity) are still the terms of the argument today.

28 chapters · 61,883 words · ~4.7 hr read