The People of the Abyss
Glossary
A
- A Vision of the Night
- London's chapter describing a nighttime scene of homeless men and women massing in a park or public space, using vivid, almost hallucinatory imagery to convey the sheer scale of unsheltered suffering he witnessed after dark in the Abyss.
- Related: The Abyss, Carrying the Banner
C
- Carrying the Banner
- East End slang, which London adopts as a chapter title, for walking the streets all night because one has nowhere to sleep — a condition he experiences and documents directly as part of his immersive investigation of homelessness.
- Related: The Peg, Doss-House
- Coffee-Houses and Doss-Houses
- The chapter surveying the East End's cheap eating and sleeping establishments as an interlocking economic system, where the poorest residents cycle between paying for a night's bed and a meal, often unable to afford both on the same day.
- Related: Doss-House
- Coronation Day
- London's account of the elaborate 1902 coronation pageant for King Edward VII, witnessed against the backdrop of the East End's misery — a juxtaposition he uses to indict the nation's willingness to spend lavishly on royal spectacle while its poorest subjects starve within walking distance of the procession.
- Related: The Abyss, Property versus Person
D
- Dan Cullen, Docker
- A real dockworker and union organizer London profiles, living crammed with his family into a seven-by-eight-foot room in the Municipal Dwellings — used as a detailed case study of a working, unionized laborer who nonetheless cannot escape the Abyss's crushing housing conditions.
- Related: Wages, The Ghetto
- Doss-House
- A cheap lodging house renting a bed, or at the bottom of the market just a chair or a rope to lean on, by the night. London catalogues their economic hierarchy in detail, from filthy fourpenny 'kips' to marginally better establishments, as central infrastructure of East End survival.
- Related: Coffee-Houses and Doss-Houses, The Abyss
- Drink, Temperance, and Thrift
- London's chapter directly rebutting the popular middle-class explanation that poverty resulted from drunkenness and poor money management, arguing instead that alcohol offered one of the only affordable pleasures available in a life otherwise stripped of comfort, and that 'thrift' was structurally impossible on East End wages.
- Related: Wages, Inefficiency
F
- Frying-Pan Alley
- One of the most squalid East End courts London documents firsthand, its name evoking the cramped, airless housing he calls 'a glimpse of Inferno' — used as a concentrated example of the overcrowding and physical degradation found throughout the district.
- Related: The Abyss, Those on the Edge
H
- Hops and Hoppers
- London's account of the East End's seasonal migration to the Kent hop fields, where whole families traveled to pick hops for meager pay under harsh conditions — presented as a brief, illusory escape from the city that offered little real relief from poverty.
- Related: Wages, The Abyss
I
- Inefficiency
- London's chapter arguing that the English economic and social system is not merely unjust but wasteful — squandering human labor, health, and life on a massive scale through mismanagement, in contrast to what a rationally organized society could achieve with the same resources.
- Related: Property versus Person, The Management
J
- Jack London (Narrator)
- The author, who in the summer of 1902 deliberately went down into London's East End 'with an attitude of mind which I may best liken to that of the explorer,' disguising himself as a stranded American sailor to live among the district's poorest residents and document their conditions firsthand rather than relying on secondhand reports or charity statistics.
- Related: The Abyss, The Descent, Muckraking journalism
- Johnny Upright
- London's pseudonym for a respectable East End resident who lives on one of the district's few relatively clean, quiet streets — a small oasis of order and decency London uses to illustrate how thin and precarious the line is between respectability and the surrounding squalor.
- Related: The Abyss
M
- Muckraking Journalism
- The broader turn-of-the-century American and British tradition of undercover, evidence-driven exposé reporting on social conditions that The People of the Abyss belongs to, distinguished by London's insistence on direct, lived immersion — disguise, residence, and firsthand suffering — rather than interviews or statistics alone.
- Related: Jack London (Narrator), The Abyss
O
- Oakum-Picking
- The tedious, hand-lacerating labor of unraveling old tarred rope fiber into loose material used for caulking ships, assigned to paupers in workhouses and casual wards as the price of a bed and meal — one of the era's standard tests of destitution and willingness to labor.
- Related: The Spike, Casual Ward
P
- Property versus Person
- The chapter in which London directly indicts the English legal and economic system for valuing property rights above human welfare, arguing that a society which lets its citizens starve while safeguarding wealth has inverted its priorities in a way that dooms the poor by design rather than accident.
- Related: The Management, Inefficiency
S
- Suicide
- London's chapter documenting the East End's routine, almost unremarkable rate of suicide and attempted suicide, treated with the same procedural indifference by police courts as drunkenness — offered as grim proof of how cheaply life was held to be worth in the Abyss.
- Related: The Precariousness of Life
- Sweating / The Sweater's Den
- The subcontracted piecework system — garment-making, matchbox assembly, and similar trades done at home or in small unregulated shops for starvation wages — that London documents as the dominant form of labor exploitation in the Ghetto and throughout the East End's poorest households.
- Related: The Ghetto, Wages, Inefficiency
T
- The Abyss
- London's term for the East End slum districts of London — Whitechapel, Spitalfields, the Ghetto — imagined as a pit that swallows the unfit and unlucky and grinds them down into misery, disease, and early death. The title's controlling metaphor for the entire investigation.
- Related: Jack London (Narrator), The Descent, The Management
- The Casual Ward
- The formal name for the workhouse facility London calls 'the spike' — an institution meant to provide emergency shelter to the destitute, but which London documents as bureaucratically hostile, requiring rigorous searches, strict timing, and demeaning labor in exchange for its bare minimum of relief.
- Related: The Spike, Oakum-Picking, A Winner of the Victoria Cross
- The Children
- London's chapter on East End childhood, opening with the single 'beautiful sight' of children dancing to an organ-grinder before cataloguing the malnutrition, stunted growth, and foreclosed futures awaiting them — a deliberate juxtaposition of fleeting joy against systemic damage.
- Related: The Abyss, The Hunger Wail
- The Descent
- The chapter recounting London's initial, almost farcical difficulty persuading anyone — friends, a travel agency clerk, even the police — to help him find his way into the East End, since respectable Londoners considered the district as unknown and dangerous as darkest Africa despite lying at the heart of the city.
- Related: The Abyss, Jack London (Narrator)
- The Ghetto
- London's chapter title and period term for the densely packed Jewish immigrant quarter of Whitechapel, used by London as a case study in sweated labor and overcrowding — he explicitly compares the district's confinement of the poor by economic force to the historical confinement of Jews by legal decree.
- Related: Sweating / the sweater's den, The Abyss
- The Hunger Wail
- London's chapter documenting mass unemployment demonstrations and public expressions of desperation among the East End's jobless poor, capturing the collective, audible voice of hunger as a social and political phenomenon rather than an individual private shame.
- Related: Wages, The Precariousness of Life
- The Management
- London's closing chapter, widening the lens to indict 'Civilisation' itself by comparing the material security of the Yukon's Innuit people to the engineered destitution of the world's wealthiest empire, concluding that a society is not managed well if, for all its wealth, it fails to better the lot of the average person.
- Related: Property versus Person, Inefficiency, The Abyss
- The Peg
- London's term for the cheapest possible night's rest available to the truly destitute — leaning against a rope stretched across a room, rather than lying in a bed — an institution he documents as evidence of just how minimal 'shelter' could be stretched to mean in the doss-house economy.
- Related: Doss-House, Carrying the Banner
- The Precariousness of Life
- London's chapter documenting how thin the margin was between subsistence and catastrophe for East End families — a single illness, lost job, or missed rent payment could plunge a household from marginal stability into total destitution, with almost no institutional safety net to catch them.
- Related: Suicide, The Hunger Wail
- The Spike
- Slang for the casual ward of a workhouse, where homeless men and women could get a bed and food in exchange for a set task, usually stone-breaking or oakum-picking. London recounts his own repeated, grueling attempts to gain admission, finding the ward degrading, filthy, and punitive rather than genuinely charitable.
- Related: Casual Ward, Oakum-Picking
- The Winner of the Victoria Cross
- An old soldier London encounters in the workhouse system, decorated for valor in Britain's colonial wars, now reduced to seeking a pauper's bed in the casual ward — London's sharpest single illustration of the gap between imperial glory and the fate the nation actually reserves for the men who won it.
- Related: The Casual Ward, The Spike
W
- Wages
- London's detailed statistical chapter comparing East End wage levels against the actual cost of food, rent, and clothing, demonstrating mathematically that full-time, honest labor at prevailing wages could not sustain a family above the poverty line — the book's most data-driven argument against the myth that poverty stemmed from laziness.
- Related: Sweating / The Sweater's Den, Inefficiency