A lot of people are not aware that Jack London, the well-known American author wasn’t just an author but a photojournalist and a skilled documentary photographer.
He captured thousands of pictures over the years from the slums of London’s East End to the islands of the South Pacific.
In the book, “The People of the Abyss”, London describes the first-hand account of his visit to his namesake city in 1902 and capturing its people and their daily lives.
He lived in the East End (including the Whitechapel District) for several months, sometimes staying in workhouses or sleeping on the streets during his stay.
He experienced the living conditions of about 500,000 of the respectable London poor and so wrote about it. Jack London, an evolutionary socialist had talked about the idea of a book highlighting the living conditions of those in London slums with one of his publishers, George Brett.
The aim was to find and show “the Black Hole of capitalism” and the degradation of workers. He went on to disguise himself as an American sailor who had lost his ship to penetrate the East End.
He pretended to be one of the working-class poor and this enabled him to get to know the conditions of their daily life.
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He shared how the conditions were an abomination and the meal was beyond terrible. He also highlighted people living with disabilities, suffering from diseases, old people and the poor. These ones had no chance of getting a job or bettering their lives and had to make do with the streets and their humiliating conditions.
In his book, he wrote; “the air he breathes, and from which he never escapes, is sufficient to weaken him mentally and physically so that he becomes unable to compete with the fresh virile life from the country hastening on to London Town…It is incontrovertible that the children grow up into rotten adults, without virility or stamina, a weak-kneed, narrow-chested, listless breed, that crumples up and goes down in the brute struggle for life with the invading hordes from the country.”
