In 1933, as the US and Europe struggled to haul itself out of the Great Depression, George Orwell went ‘Down and out in Paris and London’ to see from the inside how the other half really lived. Although the book became a classic, it was, Orwell freely admitted, not entirely his idea. As a young man he had become enthralled and inspired by an earlier writer, who had taken the same trip into ‘darkest London’ 30 years previously.
But while nobody minded Orwell drawing on an earlier work for inspiration, Jack London’s People of the Abyss was more controversial – charges of plagiarism were to dog the American writer throughout his brief career. London was to die in 1916, at the age of just 40, having produced an astonishing 50 books, countless short stories and a mountain of journalism in a career spanning just 18 years. Combining this heroic output with a life of adventure, seafaring, prospecting and ranching, as well devoting himself to consuming enormous amounts of alcohol, London was (particularly toward the end) sometimes let the quality control slip a little. Critics have opined that he lacked patience for the sheer grind and length of novel writing (his true skill was in the short story). To keep the production line going, he would turn out fictionalised accounts of stories he read in the newspapers. Around the turn of the 20th century he would even purchase plot outlines and story plans from apiring young novelist Sinclair Lewis. Lewis would become a major literary figure in the 1920s, winning (and turning down) the Pulitzer Prize, and writing Elmer Gantry and It Couldn’t Happen Here. But London was nothing if not frank about it. ‘Expression, you see, with me, is far easier than invention,’ he candidly admitted to a friend. In the case of ‘Abyss’, London seems to have been inspired himself by Jacob Riis’s 1890 account of low life in New York, How the Other Half Lives. But whatever his source, nobody could deny that London lived the tramp’s life in London for himself – there was no faking it.
London was 27 years old when he hopped in a London taxi and told the startled driver to take him ‘to the East End’. In the opening pages of ‘People of the Abyss’ London rather plays on the impossibility of anyone from the West End ever visiting the East, even attempting to book a visit east of Aldgate from a branch of Thomas Cook in the City. The picture given is of a hidden world that most Londoners are unaware of – though as toffs had been coming east to slum it since time immemorial, half the clerks in the City travelled in every day from homes in the East End, and that the area had Tube stations by this point, you can’t help feeling that London was cooking up the horror somewhat.
London was pretty hardened by this time. His own life was ‘Boy’s Own’ stuff. He had been born in January 1876, probably as John Griffith Chaney. His father disappeared early (famed astrologer William Chaney denied in letters to Jack ever having been married to the boy’s mother, Flora Wellman). To add to this extraordinary confusion, the bulk of San Francisco’s civil and legal documents were destroyed in the earthquake of 1906, among them any wedding certificate and birth certificate. If Jack knew who he was, the truth died with him. He set about making his own life. Hardly at school, though an enthusiastic self-educator from the public libraries, by 16 he’d become a deckhand on seal-hunting ships. Back on dry land he had a succession of grim jobs – in a jute mill, in a power plant, in a cannery. During the depressed years of the late 1890s he even ended up as a tramp, hopping box cars, begging and sleeping rough. Periodically he would sign up for another voyage. If life in ‘the Abyss’ was tough, London had seen it tough himself.
It was to form a singular political sensibility. He was by no means a liberal (some of London’s views on race were, even by the standards of the time, pretty distasteful) and was strong on self-help and survival of the fittest, no matter how brutal the process. Yet his experiences fomented a powerful sympathy with the rights of the working classes and how badly they could be done down by business and commerce. Orwell described London as “a socialist with the instincts of a buccaneer and the education of a 19th-century materialist.” All London’s conflicting views were to be displayed when he accepted a commission from a US publisher to go undercover as a tramp in London and see how that other half lived … in London in 1903.
‘”You don’t want to live down there!” everybody said, with disapprobation writ large upon their faces. “Why, it is said there places where a man’s life isn’t worth tu’pence.”‘ Jack London had told his hosts in London that he wanted to visit the East End, to see how “the other half” really lived in England in 1902. “The very places I wish to see,” counters London.
Jack is unimpressed by the East End. “Surrounded on every side by close-packed squalor and streets jammed by a young and vile and dirty generation.” His cab driver drops him off at Stepney railway station, and the writer picks up a set of suitably ragged clothes at a secondhand shop. With emergency funds sewn into his coast, he sets off to find rooms, which he rents for six shillings a week (30p). “A most comfortable affair. From the American standpoint, on the other hand, it was rudely furnished, uncomfortable, and small. By the time I had added an ordinary typewriter table to its scanty furnishing, I was hard put to turn around.”
It wasn’t London’s first descent into poverty. During the 1890s he had been a vagrant for real in California, ending up in the Penitentiary for 30 days for vagrancy in 1894, when 18 (he had been a working man since age 13, putting in 18 hour days at a cannery). So the fears his more privileged friends felt of the East End didn’t touch him. The streetwise London, who had lived life on ship and had to learn how to fend off the unwelcome attentions of older prisoners in the Erie County Gaol, could look after himself. He even found a certain liberation in his old clothes. Up to now, as a moneyed American he could constantly had to contend with beggars in London. Now they didn’t bother him, and he even earned a penny for holding a toff’s horse for a few minutes.
But London’s questionable political opinions (he was to write a 1904 piece called “The Yellow Peril” and would assert the supremacy of “the Teuton” above other races) quickly surfaced. “Day by day I became convinced that not only is it unwise, but it is criminal for the people of the Abyss to marry. They are the stones by the builder rejected. Moreover, the work of the world does not need them. There are plenty, far fitter than they, clinging to the steep slope above, and struggling frantically to slide no more.” In his defence, they were the views of many others of his day, but to modern eyes they are nothing more than fascist.
London attempts to enter the workhouse, finding out just how hard it was. His first error is to have a few pence in his pocket; as such he is not technically “destitute” and is knocked back by the warden. Second, he starts queuing too late: “Seven o’clock in the evening is too late in the day for a pauper to get a pauper’s bed.” And, like many vagrants, he spends vast hours walking, killing time. At least on the road in America, he muses, he could sleep under a hedge for the night. He suggests to a youth he meets that they hop the fence into Hyde Park and grab a kip there. “‘No fear,’ he answered. `There’s the park guardians, and they’d run you in for six months.’”
On 9 August 1902, London witnesses the coronation of Edward VII: “great rejoicing and elaborate tomfoolery … I never saw anything to compare with the pageant, except Yankee circuses and Alhambra ballets; nor did I ever see anything so hopeless and so tragic”. Rather than coming “straight from the Hotel Cecil to a five-guinea seat among the washed”, London comes straight from the East End, and remarks how few joined him. “The East End, as a whole, remained in the East End and got drunk.”
Anyone looking for an aesthetic appreciation of the Edwardian East End will look in vain. What London saw most of all was dreariness. “Whitechapel, Hoxton, Spitalfields, Bethnal Green, and Wapping to the East India Docks. The color of life is gray and drab. Everything is helpless, hopeless, unrelieved, and dirty. Bath-tubs are a thing totally unknown, as mythical as the ambrosia of the gods.” London finishes his book with some vague political musings about the people being done down by “the national debt” and capital, but it’s hard to buy when the overwhelming sense is of misanthropy – London doesn’t see people in the East End, just rather grubby objects. Biographer Kevin Starr maintains London’s socialism “always had a streak of elitism in it, and a good deal of pose.” He liked to wear a workman’s flannel shirt, but “London’s badge of solidarity with the working class looked as if it had been specially laundered for the occasion”.
London was to return to America and file his copy. It was a success, as ‘The Road’ would be a few years later, this time charting his time as a vagrant in the 1890s. London, often accused of plagiarism in his attempt to keep up a punishing pace of work, was not one to use an idea once where twice would do.