The People of the Abyss E-Book

Jack London

• Herausgeber: Enrico Conti
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

The People of the Abyss (1903) is a book 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  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.

Leseprobe

The People of the Abyss

by

Jack London

To the best of our knowledge, the text of this

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Preface

The Descent

Johnny Upright

My Lodging and Some Others

A Man and the Abyss

Those on the Edge

Frying-Pan Alley and a Glimpse of Inferno

A Winner of the Victoria Cross

The Carter and the Carpenter

The Spike

Carrying the Banner

The Peg

Coronation Day

Dan Cullen, Docker

Hops and Hoppers

The Sea Wife

Property Versus Person

Inefficiency

Wages

The Ghetto

Coffee-Houses and Doss-Houses

The Precariousness of Life

Suicide

The Children

A Vision of the Night

The Hunger Wail

Drink, Temperance, and Thrift

The Management

The People of the Abyss

The chief priests and rulers cry:—

“O Lord and Master, not ours the guilt,

We build but as our fathers built;

Behold thine images how they stand

Sovereign and sole through all our land.

“Our task is hard — with sword and flame,

To hold thine earth forever the same,

And with sharp crooks of steel to keep,

Still as thou leftest them, thy sheep.”

Then Christ sought out an artisan,

A low-browed, stunted, haggard man,

And a motherless girl whose fingers thin

Crushed from her faintly want and sin.

These set he in the midst of them,

And as they drew back their garment hem

For fear of defilement, “Lo, here,” said he,

“The images ye have made of me.”

James Russell Lowell.

Preface

The experiences related in this volume fell to me in the summer of 1902. I went down into the under-world of London with an attitude of mind which I may best liken to that of the explorer. I was open to be convinced by the evidence of my eyes, rather than by the teachings of those who had not seen, or by the words of those who had seen and gone before. Further, I took with me certain simple criteria with which to measure the life of the under-world. That which made for more life, for physical and spiritual health, was good; that which made for less life, which hurt, and dwarfed, and distorted life, was bad.

It will be readily apparent to the reader that I saw much that was bad. Yet it must not be forgotten that the time of which I write was considered “good times” in England. The starvation and lack of shelter I encountered constituted a chronic condition of misery which is never wiped out, even in the periods of greatest prosperity.

Following the summer in question came a hard winter. Great numbers of the unemployed formed into processions, as many as a dozen at a time, and daily marched through the streets of London crying for bread. Mr. Justin McCarthy, writing in the month of January 1903, to the New York