The People of the Abyss

Product Information

He took thousands of pictures over the years from the slums of London’s East End to the islands of the South Pacific. But ‘ere, give me your ‘and,” he said, ripping open his ragged shirt. “I’m fit for the anatomist, that’s all. I’m wastin’ away, sir, actually wastin’ away for want of food. Feel my ribs an’ you’ll see.” Nor does he suggest a remedy; for to rail at civilisation, one of the failures of which the East-end undoubtedly is, does not aid to a solution of the problem. STRONGER FORCES ARE AT WORK This is a remarkable classic, deserving of a place on the shelf right next to Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. In fact, The People of the Abyss likely inspired Orwell to write his book, according to a biography I read.

They looked me over with frank curiosity, as though I were some sort of a strange animal, and then ignored me utterly for the rest of my wait. Then Johnny Upright himself arrived, and I was summoned upstairs to confer with him. We are unsurprised when London ventures that ‘The cases of out of works killing their wives and babies is not an uncommon happening’ (123) because this ‘chronic condition of misery’ is never wiped out, even in periods of greatest prosperity. I’ve ‘ad three ‘a’penny rolls in two days,” the Carpenter announced, after a long pause in the conversation. “Two of them I ate yesterday, an’ the third to-day,” he concluded, after another long pause. And then she explained the process of saturation, by which the rental value of a neighbourhood went up, while its tone went down. In a couple of years,” he says, “my lease expires. My landlord is one of our kind. He has not put up the rent on any of his houses here, and this has enabled us to stay. But any day he may sell, or any day he may die, which is the same thing so far as we are concerned. The house is bought by a money breeder, who builds a sweat shop on the patch of ground at the rear where my grapevine is, adds to the house, and rents it a room to a family. There you are, and Johnny Upright’s gone!”

There had been several previous accounts of slum conditions in England, notably The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) by Friedrich Engels. Most had been based on secondhand sources, unlike London's personal account. A contemporary advertisement for the book compared it to Jacob Riis's sensational How the Other Half Lives (1890), which had documented life in the slums of New York City in the 1880s. [3] As far as the man and woman were concerned, the game was played. They had lost handhold and foothold, and were falling into the pit. But what of the daughters? Living like swine, enfeebled by chronic innutrition, being sapped mentally, morally, and physically, what chance have they to crawl up and out of the Abyss into which they were born falling? Did Destiny today bind me down to the life of an East-end slave for the rest of my years, and did Destiny grant me but one wish, I should ask that I might forget all about the Beautiful and True sad Good; that I might forget all that I had learned from the open books, and forget the people I had known, the things I had heard, and the lands I had seen. And if Destiny didn’t grant it, I am pretty confident that I should get drunk and forget it as often as possible.” I’ll tell you what I want,” I said. “You drive along and keep your eye out for a shop where old clothes are sold. Now, when you see such a shop, drive right on till you turn the corner, then stop and let me out.” Tangerine Press has done us all a great service in re-publishing The People of the Abyss with a series of original photographs taken by the author that complement his impassioned prose. It is a vital social polemic imbued with humanity and written with a compassionate eye that reminds us of the responsibility we all have to ensure that national wealth is invested in social need and protecting the most vulnerable around us. As Rosita Sweetman (2016) said of the book:

The cost of housing, rents equal to half their income, brings to mind the mortgage crisis we are suffering today. As the cost of housing during the last real estate bubble, reached stratospheric levels, families were forced to pay more and more of their income for housing, leaving little to actually live on. All it takes is a job loss or catastrophic illness for them to find themselves on the street as the banks foreclose on their homes. Their counterparts a century ago faced a similar fate for the same reasons. Job loss or illness resulted in the loss of the tiny rooms that they rented.

I put my hand under his shirt and felt. The skin was stretched like parchment over the bones, and the sensation produced was for all the world like running one’s hand over a washboard. Victorian Slum House, a BBC series about a modern recreation of a slum tenement and its inhabitants in the East End of London A coroner’s inquest into the death of a 75 year old woman heard from a witness to her wretched condition: No, no,” I answered; “merely to identify me in case I get into a scrape with the ‘bobbies.'” This last I said with a thrill; truly, I was gripping hold of the vernacular.