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Mar 4, 2024 · In 1902 Jack London visited his namesake city London where he took pictures of its people and their everyday life. In the book “The People of the Abyss”, London describes this first-hand account by living in the East End (including the Whitechapel District) for several months, sometimes staying in workhouses or sleeping on the streets.
Whitechapel, in the East End of London, experienced high amounts of crime and difficulties in policing at the end of the 19th century. The murders of several women took place in, or around, the ...
Whitechapel is a district in East London, just outside the City of London. At the end of the 19th century, it was known for poverty, discontent, alcoholism, sex work and crime. Between c.1870 and ...
- Introduction
- Urban Poverty
- Preconceptions
- Abyss, Or The Black Hole of The Empire
- Slum Congestion
- Slum Children
- Mismanagement
- A Foundering Empire
- References and Further Reading
Jack London (1876-1916) made a significant contribution to Victorian slum literature. In the summer of 1902 he arrived in England to report the coronation of King Edward VII from the perspective of the London poorest inhabitants. Initially, he wanted to spend a few days in the slums but eventually he stayed six weeks in London’s district of Whitech...
The late Victorian debate about urban poverty was boosted by a number of studies beginning with Andrew Mearns’s pamphlet The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (1883), Charles Booth’s monumental Life and Labour of the People in London (1891-1902) and B. S. Rowntree’s Poverty: A Study of Town Life(1901). As Patricia Ingham has written, First, and simply, ...
London travelled to England with a copy of George Haw’s book, No Room To Live: The Plaint of Overcrowded London(1900), which introduced him to the slum conditions he was to explore. In a letter to his close friend and socialist confidante, Anna Strunsky, London wrote about his negative preconceptions of the East End slums: I sailed yesterday from N...
The metaphor “abyss” with reference to the East End slums was not invented by London. It had earlier already circulated in public discourse and literature. Benjamin Disraeli’s view of the “two-nation” divide, which alluded to the unbridgeable gap between the poor and the rich, evolved into the image of a chasm or an abyss in the final decades of th...
London believed that the main cause of slum overcrowding was enforced poverty. Slum dwellers, who on average received low wages, had to pay disproportionately high rents to landlords. In the following passages London develops Haw’s observations about the shortage of affordable and adequate accommodation for the working class. There are more people ...
Although generally child morbidity and mortality steadily declined in late Victorian England, it remained high in slum areas. London, like Arthur Morrison in his novel, A Child of the Jago, gives a poor outlook for deprived slum children. In such conditions, the outlook for children is hopeless. They die like flies, and those that survive, survive ...
As an ardent socialist, London puts the blame for the subhuman conditions of the Victorian underclass on unfettered industrial capitalism, which is for him an inherently exploitative system with an unfair distribution of wealth and power. He accuses the British political class of gross mismanagement and predicts the inevitable fall of the Empire. I...
On the occasion of the impressive ceremony of the coronation of Edward VII as the head of the largest empire the world had ever known, Jack London reveals that it is in fact in disarray due to government mismanagement and ineptitude. A vast empire is foundering on the hands of this incapable management. And by empire is meant the political machiner...
Booth, William. In Darkest England and the Way Out. London: International Headquarters of the Salvation Army, 1890. Born, Daniel. The Birth of Liberal Guilt in the English Novel: Charles Dickens to H.G. Wells. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Haley, James L. Wolf: The Lives of Jack London. New York: Basic Books, 201...
Jack the Ripper. In the autumn of 1888, a serial killer murdered five women in Whitechapel in the East End of London. The murderer was never identified, but became known as Jack the Ripper. Key location: Whitechapel. Key date: 1888. High Street, Whitechapel. Cox, T., Shepherd, Thomas Hosmer. ©London Museum.
By 1914, 90 per cent of all Jews in England would live in the crowded streets and alleys of Whitechapel, Spitalfields and St George's in the East. A ghetto was in formation. Why did the refugees choose this area to settle in? One reason was the presence of earlier poor Ashkenazi immigrants in the area; another was the existence of the soup kitchen.
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Jack the Ripper was an unidentified serial killer active in and around the impoverished Whitechapel district of London, England, in 1888. In both criminal case files and the contemporaneous journalistic accounts, the killer was also called the Whitechapel Murderer and Leather Apron .
