The People of the Abyss

By: Jack London

Narrated by: John Stanbridge

"The People of the Abyss" (1903) is a work by Jack London 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 months, sometimes staying in workhouses or sleeping on the streets.

The conditions he experienced and wrote about, were the same as those endured by an estimated 500,000 of the contemporary London poor.©2017 Audioliterature (P)2017 Audioliterature

England's Version of "How the Other Half Lives"

this was the first non-fiction Jack London work I read (listened to) and I loved it. It fits right in with the Victorian Slum documentaries and the works of Jacob Riis. Jack London immerses himself in the community of London's East End and shares his experiences, revealing his sharp mind and kind heart. a fine bit of historical journalism! The only flaw was the recording quality and soft tone of the narration. Not terrible, just lackluster and still worth the purchase.

Stunning, gritty

Hauntingly gritty account of what people on the comfortable side of life ignore. Stunning, humbling

As Fresh Today as a Century Ago

Jack London’s personal investigation of London’s East End in 1902, achieved by living there for several months, has surprising relevance today, probably because so little has changed. It is a repudiation of the “trickle-down” theory and denounces governments that fail to take responsibility for the needs of a nation’s poorest people.

London was a social activist as well as a novelist, and it follows that he would deliver a brutal rendering of the stark divisions he found between the haves and have-nots, and the system designed to keep it that way.

He describes one-story hovels—cow sheds, really—where people lived. “The roofs of these hovels were covered with deposits of filth, in some places a couple of feet deep, the contributions from the back windows of the second and third stories. I could make out fish and meat bones, garbage, pestilential rags, old boots, broken earthenware, and all the general refuse of a human sty.”

In another instance, he recounts the example of a woman supporting four children by making matchboxes. She was paid 2.25 pence for every twelve dozen matchboxes, working 14 hours a day, seven days a week, all of her life. Her 98-hour week brought her roughly a dollar.

When a coroner investigated the death of a 77-year-old woman, he concluded that “’Death was due to blood poisoning from bed sores, due to self-neglect and filthy surroundings…’ It was the old dead woman’s fault that she died, and having located the responsibility, society goes contentedly on about its own affairs.”

The poor of 1902 even blame their poverty on immigrants (sound familiar?), in this case Polish and Russian Jews, who do the same work for less money.

London was an angry young man, and his anger builds as the book progresses. He was also a journalist, and the accusations become more and more detailed with each chapter. The experience never left him. His friend Upton Sinclair said that "for years afterwards, the memories of this stunted and depraved population haunted him beyond all peace."

Since Jack London was an American, born in San Francisco, the choice of a very proper British narrator is an odd one. Nonetheless, John Stanbridge does a fine job of communicating the author’s passion, outrage, and horror over the conditions he found and the societal cruelty he sought to expose.

Wow

This classic bit of journalism is very graphic, very real. Quite difficult to listen to.

Even as an American I resented the repeated caterings to London’s American audience and his hint that all the plenty and fairness is in the US and all the strong people went there whilst the weak stayed in England. It’s pretty apparent to the most superficial students of history that terrible poverty and injustice was happening in the US while London was slumming it in his namesake city. I guess he was just too timid or too self interested at the time he was writing Abyss to tackle the problems in our country directly. He also didn’t provide a useful solution to the problem of poverty in Great Britain— a common criticism of this book.

Even so, his writing is excellent and the pictures he paints with his words are the stuff of nightmares. I have to give the book 5 stars.

The narrator could have been better. A little too high pitched and chirpy for my taste. I had to slow down the delivery by two degrees to get a slightly better sound.

Amazing

A very interesting and 1st hand account of life in 1903's London. A great lesson in why it's not "liberal policies" that create the homeless. It's something much worse - unchecked weather and power