The People of the Abyss by Jack London

Jack London was a socialist, of course. Casual readers can forget that - and his books often phrase things in ways that will tend to make modern readers miss his expected ends - but several of his major works only make sense in that context.

This is one of them: The People of the Abyss, a 1903 non-fiction book based on a few months of living in London, mostly the worst sections of the East End, and investigating the lives of the urban poor. London's conclusion basically says that the rich should have their fortunes seized and those peers put to work doing something productive, to raise the living conditions of these poor people. But he phrases it in a 1903 way, somewhat roundabout as well, presumably so as not to overly shock the audiences of his day, and so the sharpness of the solution can be easy to miss.

But that's the whole point of the book. London spent months living like the poorest of the poor, waiting in line for workhouses, talking to the aged and destitute, living in a single room in the worst neighborhood of Whitechapel and wearing the clothes of the locals.  All of that so he can describe it, mostly to an American audience, for a country where he assumes poverty is not this horrible or grinding because of greater opportunities and more empty land. Whether that was actually true at the time, or just London's idyllic dream, is a question for a historian. I suspect parts of some American cities were at least as bad as this - and some Black people in the US had it even worse.

(Minor consumer note: I read this in the Library of America Novels and Social Writings volume, which seems to be currently out of print. Since London is well out of copyright, there are a lot of editions, and their texts might not be equally authoritative. It's worth seeking out a good edition from a real publisher for OOP material. I recommend LoA strongly for any writer they've published.)

Abyss is a short book with a lot of detail - twenty-seven chapters, each with a separate focus and aim, all reported directly by London, who came as close to actually living this life as any outsider with an escape hatch possibly could.

It's a horrible, grinding, thankless life. I suspect that even the lives of the relatively stable working class, those two or three steps up from London's poorest of the poor, would come across as unbearably arduous and unpleasant to us today, but these people are truly in hell: cast out, forgotten, left to die as quickly and easily as possible. This is not a pleasant read, but London is mostly a crisp, quickly readable, essentially modern writer. He does descend a bit into pseudo-Victorian circumlocutions when he's giving his policy prescriptions, as I noted up top - but he's mostly in muscular, straightforward mode here, as he was for most of his career.

If I were King of the World, every libertarian and techbro would be forced to read People of the Abyss - no, forced to live like those 1902 Londoners for six months or so, long enough to give them a real fear of death and, I hope, finally convince them that other people are real and that even they can be brought low.

I'm not, of course. But I do like to dream.