Before You Begin

Before you begin.

"But you can't do it, you know," his friends told him. In the summer of 1902, a young American writer set out to disappear into the East End of London — to put on the worn clothes of a stranded sailor, to sleep in the casual wards, to stand in the bread lines, and to see, with the eyes of an explorer, how the poorest of a great empire actually lived. Jack London did exactly that, and The People of the Abyss is what he carried back out.

London was already a working man who had ridden the rails and known hunger before he ever found fame with The Call of the Wild. That hard-won credibility is the spine of this book. He does not report from a carriage window. He waits in the rain outside Whitechapel Workhouse, walks Mile End Road between a sixty-five-year-old carpenter and a fifty-eight-year-old carter, and lies down in the "spike" — and he names the cost in plain figures: 1,800,000 Londoners on or below the poverty line, fifty-five per cent of East End children dead before the age of five.

More than a century on, the book endures because its outrage never curdles into mere statistics, and its statistics never let the outrage become sentiment. London gives the submerged their proper names — Dan Cullen the docker, Thomas Mugridge and his Sea Wife, the unflinching young socialist — and insists they be seen as people, not a problem.

The gallery that follows is an illustrated companion to that descent: the real men and women he documented, the geography of the Abyss, the cold arithmetic of poverty he set down, and the night scenes he could not forget. Step in, and go down with him.