He went to England armed, his egalitarianism girded with a copy of George Haw’s 1900 The Plaint of Overcrowded London, an exegesis of the conditions endured by the city’s poor. After landing at Liverpool and reaching London, he first checked in with the Social Democratic Federation, a contact that Anna had arranged for him, and the group loaded him down with papers and pamphlets full of facts and figures to work into his book. He rented a room at 89 Dempsey Street, Stepney, in the East End—the poverty-ridden Whitechapel area of Jack the Ripper infamy. This room became his refuge, a place where he could get dry and warm, and write up what he observed.
For ten shillings—about $2.50—he purchased a suite of used clothes in which he could blend in with his lower-class subjects, for whom he affected to be a stranded American sailor down on his luck. This was a role that he adopted easily; not only was he himself a sailor, knowing the vocabulary and able to tell tales of Japan and the Bering Sea, but beached American seamen were hardly an uncommon sight in London. British shipowners would hire British crews for the “duration of the voyage,” which meant that as the vessel tramped cargo from Dakar to Buenos Aires and so on around the world, they did not get paid until they returned to their home port, which might not be for two years or more. Shortly before returning, officers would make a point of treating them so badly that some of them would jump ship in America, saving the owners a bundle while needing only to pay a spot wage to American sailors to round out the crew and bring the vessel home—thus stranding the American sailors in England. It was a perfectly believable pose for London, to say nothing of a vivid indictment of the way unregulated capitalism was practiced.
“Am settled down and hard at work,” he wrote Anna on August 16. He had thought he was steeled against whatever he might find, but what he discovered were scenes straight out of darkest Dickens. “The whole thing,” he wrote, “all the conditions of life, the intensity of it, everything is overwhelming. I never conceived such a mass of misery in the world before.”8 He saw poor women by the score fingering through butchers’ scraps for fat and gristle; he saw appalling tenement rooms whose only heat in winter was a single gas jet governed by a heavily locked coin meter. In such rooms he was demoralized by the sight of tightly wrapped corpses of children and toddlers, stored on a shelf until there was money saved for a service. He met the streetwise who, when they could manage a penny for breakfast, bought a cup of tea in some tatty coffee-house, which they drank so slowly that when no one was looking they could devour what others left on their plates. (“It’s surprising, what some people leave,” one assured him.) He saw urchins reaching up to their armpits into mounds of rotten fruit discarded by markets. As he worked he annotated his copy of George Haw, blocked off paragraphs whose assertions he could verify, and penciled its margins with supporting examples of the horrors he witnessed that passed for everyday life, and data on the mortality rate of the poor.9
In the sharpest conceivable contrast to the life into which he had immersed himself, the city—indeed the whole empire—was gearing up for the coronation of King Edward VII. After the long, dour widowhood of his mother, Queen Victoria, it would be the first crowning of a monarch in six decades. The capital burgeoned with royal relations of the sixty-year-old “Uncle of Europe,” commemorative memorabilia were on sale everywhere, the main thoroughfares and even by-lanes were elaborately decorated, the atmosphere electric.
The anticipated celebration also had an ugly underbelly, however, and it was one upon which Jack London intended to cast a harsh spotlight: the suppressed muttering of discontent. While part of the new king’s inheritance was the imperial throne of India, a twelve-year-old boy named Keshava, long before he became celebrated as the Indian nationalist Dr. Rashtra Rishi Hedgewar, wrote, “It is an utter shame to partake in the . . . coronation of a king who has enslaved our Bharatmata.”10 Similarly, James Connolly, the socialist and Irish nationalist, wrote a vituperative column referring to the coronation as “this saturnalia of tyranny,” an event to which socialists in their minds’ eyes also “hasten thither in order to offer to King Edward, in the name of ourselves and our class, the only homage we owe him—OUR HATRED.” Connolly perceived that the ceremony was not only about tradition and values, it was about subterfuge. The coronation was “not merely . . . a huge parade of pomp and magnificence, cloaking the festering sores of that slave society on which it is built—but [it has] also become an elaborately contrived and astutely worked piece of propaganda, designed to captivate the imagination of the unthinking multitude,” who would thus be led to discredit socialists who were working to alleviate the conditions of the lowest class.
The Social Democratic Federation would undoubtedly have given London a copy of the Connolly piece, for it was written to spoil the original date of the coronation, June 26. (The ceremony had had to be postponed because of the king’s sudden appendicitis on June 24, and was re-set for August 9.) Standing with the throng in a steady rain in Trafalgar Square while awaiting the procession, London and his pauper fellows caught no more than a glimpse of the golden coach as it creaked and rumbled by, a glimpse of the king within, his fat gray brow weighted with several pounds of jewels in the form of the Imperial State Crown. Beside him was Queen Alexandra, by all accounts one of the most beautiful women in the world, her swan’s neck barely accommodating the high choker of massed diamonds almost as brilliant as the crown matrimonial designed especially for her.
London looked around at the toothless and the bedless, those who had every reason to despise this royal symbol of their oppression, and to his horror they threw their grimy caps into the air and lustily cheered their new monarch. This was not what he had come to England to see, and it did not fit the conclusions he had already drawn for The People of the Abyss. London acidly quoted the song of the day, once in standard English and again a few pages later, for literary effect, in the Cockney dialect of his companions:Oh, on Coronation Day, on Coronation Day,
We’ll have a spree, a jubilee, and shout, Hip, hip, hooray,
For we’ll all be very merry, drinking whisky, wine and sherry.
We’ll all be merry on Coronation Day.11
There was, however, one very practical reason to be merry, which London chose not to write about, and that was that some 450,000 people were being fed in street banquets. (Ironically, this was the same number estimated to be homeless in the East End.) While the royal party was fêted on trout with caviar and hollandaise sauce, and Jambon d’Espagne à la Basque, the humble masses were fed such stout yeomen’s fare as beef and onions stewed in beer.12 Still, it was food, and better food than they were used to, but to describe feasting in the streets would not have served the purpose of The People of the Abyss.
That London omitted such an extenuating circumstance did not alter the essential truths of his book, but neither can it be claimed that he went to Britain as an objective journalist. As a literary leader at the cutting edge of the “muckraking” age, he went to expose and decry those inhuman conditions he already knew existed, not to determine whether they existed. To that end, London was keenly aware of the metaphorical power of the coronation, so much so that although he spent ten chapters of The People of the Abyss leading up to it, the actual event took place only three days after he arrived in England.13
Later in the week, just like the seasonal migrant workers in America, he traveled down to Kent to pick hops, only to discover that this annual ritual was thrown out of kilter by bad weather and a late harvest. “At Dover,” lamented one newspaper, “the number of vagrants in the workhouse is treble the number there last year at this time.” No sooner did the hops ripen than the crop was devastated by hailstorms, stripping the flowers from the poles and pounding them into the dirt, leaving the pickers with double or more the amount of labor to earn their shilling for seven bushels.
As little as London had seen of England to cheer him, the weather was equally depressing. “Been in England 11 days,” London wrote sardonically to Cloudesley Johns, “& it has rained
every day. Small wonder the Anglo-Saxon is such a colonizer.” 14 Another few days of sampling London homeless life and he sat to write George and Carrie Sterling: “How often I think of you, over there on the other side of the world! I have heard of God’s Country, but this country is the country God has forgotten that he forgot. . . . Actually, I have seen things, & looked the second time in order to convince myself that it was really so.” The poor stooped to pick rotten apple cores out of the gutter and bite into them; the old and the sick who used to work still wanted to work, but as no one would hire them they walked and wasted until they died quietly. Many sought to hasten the day, and threw themselves into the Thames or closed themselves in a room with a gas jet; those who failed were hauled into court and remanded to jail, for attempting suicide was a crime. London attended court sessions and heard a magistrate upbraid one poor wretch for being rescued.
On August 21 he wrote Anna, “Dear, dear You:—Have not received a letter from you since I arrived in England—all of two weeks now, plus voyage of eight days. On receiving this, again address mail in care of American Press Association. . . . Have book 1/5 written & typewritten. . . . Am rushing, for I am made sick by this human hell-hole called London Town. I find it almost impossible to believe that some of the horrible things I have seen are really so.”
He then plunged back into what he now called the Abyss—a term originally applied to the East End by the British socialist and Fabian, H. G. Wells. Saturday he stayed out all night with the homeless ones in the rain, walking the streets. One of the few good things that might happen while walking all night was to encounter a do-gooder from the Salvation Army, some of whose volunteers walked abroad at night to distribute breakfast tickets, redeemable Sunday morning at the Salvation Army barracks near the Surrey Theater—which for many meant a walk that took up most of the rest of the night. They started gathering outside the door before dawn; those who could find stoops to sit on were soon fast asleep, until a policeman came by and rousted them out. A city ordinance prohibited them from sleeping in the parks or in public at night, although the police looked the other way during the day as long as they stayed out of sight. “But the policeman passed on,” London wrote, “and back we clustered, like flies around a honey jar.”
The door to the barracks opened at seven-thirty and the men were admitted in stages, those with tickets first and those without at nine, and they were herded into a courtyard, where they were kept standing a further two hours, wedged in so tightly that some fell asleep standing up. London estimated there were seven hundred, their massed body odor so foul that he nearly retched, and when they were finally allowed to sit they were presented not with food, but with hymns and a sermon. This he found a waste of effort, not just because the famished men cared more at that moment about grub than salvation, but because they were already “too inured to hell on earth to be frightened by hell to come.” The freshest of them had been there four hours, and most much longer, when each man was given a paper packet with his breakfast: two slices of bread, a wedge of cheese, a mug of “water bewitched” (thin, weak beer or punch), and a small plug of what might have been raisin bread or fruitcake. The portions were sufficient only to exacerbate their existing hunger. After eating, London caused a minor disturbance by asking to leave, unaware that entering the compound had committed him to hear the entire service. “The idea! The idea!” huffed an orderly. It was then nearly noon, and London explained that he needed the breakfast to strengthen him to look for work, which surely was the most important thing.
He was referred up the scandalized chain of command. “Oh, you ’ave business, eh?” grandly mocked a Salvation Army adjutant. “It’s a man of business you are, eh? Then wot did you come ’ere for?” He was finally taken to see the major, who rather than letting word get around and give other mendicants any ideas, let him leave quietly. On this stint he was out thirty-six hours either working or looking for work or for food before returning to his room at 89 Dempsey Street. He bathed, shaved, and slept fifteen hours straight before rising to write down the images still in his mind.
By the end of the day he had written, typed, and revised 4,000 words of the new book. At one o’clock in the morning he did open a letter from Anna, who had almost become the muse for whom he wrote—to read a withering broadside rejecting his proposal of marriage and telling him to leave off further expectation of intimacy between them. In all of Jack London’s meticulously preserved correspondence, this letter is missing, surely destroyed in his distress and anger. Anna later recalled of it that she had tried to communicate her cool disinterest, but then “in the middle of a page came her words like a torrent of tears.”15
Judging from the fractured pain of London’s reply, Anna had learned that Bessie was pregnant again, after he had given her to believe that relations between them were over. “Please remember that I am worn out & exhausted,” he replied to her, “and that my nerves are blunted with what I have seen and the suffering it has cost me.” Therefore, he warned her, his reply might seem colder than it would if he were in a calmer state of mind. But after this little prevarication, he lit into her: “You are ever quick to harshness. You are one of the cruelest women I have ever know[n].” He recounted the arithmetic of Bessie’s conceiving a child as having taken place before the time when he told Anna the marriage was over: London had declared his love for Anna and asked her to marry him in early May. Becky London had been conceived in late January and was born October 20. “Shall I tell you what I have been guilty of? Not of lying, but of keeping my word.” The rest of the long letter makes little sense without hers to compare, but his shock and pain are still palpable.16
Back in California Anna read his reply, and years later related to her daughter that the force with which his pen had bit into the paper made her fear that he might harm himself.17 Her remorse was swift, but his knowledge of this would have to await several arrivals of the mail boats. Thinking his flame extinguished, London determined to try to save his marriage, and wrote an endearing if insincere letter to Bessie, enclosing a photograph of him in his stranded-sailor guise to share with baby Joan. And though his muse had rejected him, the work still had to be completed and he waded back into the Abyss.
Jack London’s complaint with the British system of aid to the poor was not just that it was appallingly bad. His greater complaint was that it was the capitalist labor market itself that had sidelined workers into idleness and then made no provision to keep them alive with anything like dignity. London did acknowledge that some of the city’s well-to-do harbored a soft spot for the needy, but as often as not their acts of charity were worse than useless. He cited the case of a woman whose job was the manufacture of artificial violets, for which she was paid three farthings per gross—about one and a half cents for every 144 flowers. For her daily wage of nine pence, less than twenty cents, she had to fold and twist 1,726 of them.
For the elevation and recreation of her and those like her, one group of concerned citizens mounted an exhibition of Japanese art prints, hoping, according to their mission statement, to inspire them with yearnings for the beautiful, the true, and the good. “When the people who try to help,” wrote London, “cease their playing and dabbling with day nurseries and Japanese art exhibits, and go back & learn . . . the sociology of Christ, they will be in better shape to buckle down to the work they ought to be doing in the world. . . . They won’t cram yearnings for the Beautiful & True & Good down the throat of a woman making violets for three farthings a gross, but they will make somebody get off her back.”
That was a telling choice of words: the sociology of Christ—not the gospel or the passion. With his religion as with his socialism, London believed in the principles but would not ally himself with the dogmas of any particular sect. What he looked to was the effect of the doctrines, and in the Bible it was unmistakable to him that the life of Christ was about sociology, about comforting the downtrodden and stinging the complacent, about the practice of justice and mercy in everyday liv
es. To him, Jesus’s pronouncements on the treatment of the poor were the most unambiguous in the book.
He made his way to Whitechapel Workhouse, whose grim brick edifice had loomed over Charles Street (now Vallance Road), Spitalfields, for sixty years. Because London was applying for aid as a transient pauper and not for residency, he was shown on around the corner to the Casual Ward on Thomas Street (now Lomas Street).18 The workhouses whose horrors Dickens made famous had been around since late in the reign of Elizabeth I but had been systematized and regulated only since an amendment to the Poor Law was passed in 1832. Like most aid to the poor that is conceived by deeply conservative and unsympathetic governments, actually aiding the poor was second in importance after ensuring that that aid was so odious and dehumanizing that almost no one would actually resort to it. The conditions London found in 1902 would have been even worse, had it not been for earlier crusades led by the nation’s leading medical journal, the Lancet, and a famously meddlesome nurse named Florence Nightingale.
Wolf: The Lives of Jack London Page 18