The People of the Abyss was published by Macmillan in 1903 (the same year as The Call of the Wild). London traveled to England in the summer of 1902, bought secondhand clothing, and spent weeks living as a homeless man in the East End of London — sleeping in doss-houses, standing in bread lines, working casual labor, and observing the conditions of the urban poor at the heart of the British Empire.
London’s method anticipates the immersive journalism of the twentieth century: he does not observe from a distance but participates, sleeping rough, eating workhouse food, and experiencing the physical degradation that poverty inflicts. His outrage is palpable and specific: he documents the caloric inadequacy of workhouse diets, the overcrowding of lodging houses, the casual brutality of the police, the destruction of human dignity that the system requires. He supports his observations with statistics drawn from official reports, creating a synthesis of personal testimony and documentary evidence.
The book is both a piece of investigative journalism and a political argument. London’s thesis: the richest empire in the history of the world has produced, in its capital city, conditions of degradation worse than those experienced by the “savages” whom the empire claims to civilize. The comparison between the treatment of London’s poor and London’s treatment of colonized peoples is explicit and devastating.
Collecting The People of the Abyss
First edition (Macmillan, New York, 1903): Dark blue cloth, with photographs by London.
Market values:
- First edition, fine: $300–$800
- Very good: $100–$300
Projected values (2026–2036): Moderate appreciation.
London’s East End
The People of the Abyss (1903) is London’s exposé of poverty in the East End of London — written after he spent six weeks living as a pauper in Whitechapel and Stepney in the summer of 1902. London dressed in old clothes, ate in workhouse kitchens, slept in doss-houses, and experienced firsthand the conditions he described. The book is passionate, angry, and still shocking — a companion piece to Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), which it clearly influenced. The Macmillan first edition includes London’s own photographs of the East End.
Frequently Asked Questions
Did this influence Orwell? Almost certainly. Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London follows London’s method of immersive poverty journalism, and Orwell’s pen name may itself be a nod to Jack London (his real name was Eric Blair).