The People of the Abyss

Written when London arrived in England at the age of twenty-five, This book gives a firsthand account of the poor, the menial workers, the homeless, and the perpetually unemployed among whom he lived in the slums of London's East End at the turn of the century. It is a sensitive portrayal of daily life on the margins of society that culminates in a searing indictment of modern industrialism's mistreatment of workers and the poverty-stricken and its propensity for transferring wealth to the rich. In her foreword to this facsimile of the 1903 edition, which includes London's original lithographs, Micaela di Leonardo concludes that the terrible conditions and human and human cost that London witnessed almost a century age are 'powerfully close, absent a few details, to the present'.