In 1902 Jack London, an American journalist and social activist, sought to
discover the underworld of East End London. Having read the account
of Victorian philanthropists that had gone before, his eyes had already been opened
to the plight of the poor in the inner city slums. Yet, words were not enough
he needed to experience the ‘abyss’ – the depths of poverty which people were
suffering in the metropolis as the city transitioned from the 19th to the 20th
Century. Dismayed by political mismanagement that watched over masses
of unemployed and starving people, he was determined to document the struggles of
the working classes and their fight for food and shelter.
This first-hand account was published as ‘The People of the Abyss’.
In this video we join London as he makes his way into Spitalfields in the heart of the
East End, accompanied by two young men befriended on his travels.
One, an East Ender, agreed to show him the living and working conditions
of the ‘sweating den’ where he scratched a living.
Once an area characterised by merchant dwellings, by the time of London’s visit
Spitalfields had, for several decades, become known for its multi-occupied
dwellings and slum conditions. In fact it was one of the worst ‘rookeries’ of
East London: the home of poverty, vice and crime on its notoriously dangerous streets.
In particular, Dorset Street witnessed the slaying of Mary Jane Kelly
by the infamous Jack the Ripper in 1888.
The sweating system, as it had become known, was a dreadful combination of long
hours and low pay often carried out in a ‘den’ – a workshop, which was often
a dwelling as well. Here, in unhealthy conditions, men and women would toil
sixteen to eighteen hours a day for a poor wage - barely sufficient to survive.
The ‘sweating’ trade mostly comprised of tailoring and was mainly found in the
East End of London where a steady flow of poor immigrants
and a profound failure of regulatory control fuelled a life of living hell.
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Passing Leman Street, we cut off to the left into Spitalfields, and dived into Frying-pan
Alley. A spawn of children cluttered the slimy pavement, for all the world like
tadpoles just turned frogs on the bottom of a dry pond. In a narrow doorway,
so narrow that perforce we stepped over her, sat a woman with a young babe,
nursing it grossly naked and libelling all the sacredness of motherhood.
In the black and narrow hall behind her we waded through a mess of young life,
and essayed an even narrower and fouler stairway. Up we went, three flights,
each landing two feet by three in area, and heaped with filth and refuse.
There were seven rooms in this abomination called a house. In six of the
rooms, twenty-odd people, of both sexes and all ages, cooked, ate, slept, and worked.
In size the rooms averaged eight feet by eight, or possibly nine.
The seventh room we entered. It was the den in which five men “sweated.”
It was seven feet wide by eight long, and the table at which the work
was performed took up the major portion of the space. On this table were five lasts,
and there was barely room for the men to stand to their work,
for the rest of the space was heaped with cardboard, leather, bundles of shoe uppers,
and a miscellaneous assortment of materials used in attaching the uppers of
shoes to their soles. In the adjoining room lived a woman and six children.
In another vile hole lived a widow, with an only son of sixteen who was dying of
consumption. The woman hawked sweetmeats on the street,
I was told, and more often failed than not to supply her son with the three quarts of milk
he daily required. Further, this son, weak and dying, did not taste meat oftener than
once a week; and the kind and quality of this meat cannot possibly be imagined
by people who have never watched it eaten. “The way ’e coughs is somethin’ terrible,”
volunteered my sweated friend, referring to the dying boy.
“We ’ear ’im ’ere, w’ile we’re workin’, an’ it’s terrible, I say, terrible!”
And, what of the coughing and the sweetmeats, I found another menace
added to the hostile environment of the children of the slum.
My sweated friend, when work was to be had, toiled with four other men in his
eight-by-seven room. In the winter a lamp burned nearly all the day and added its
fumes to the over-loaded air, which was breathed, and breathed, and breathed again.
In good times, when there was a rush of work, this man told me that he could earn
as high as “thirty bob a week.”—Thirty shillings! Seven dollars and a half!
“But it’s only the best of us can do it,” he qualified. “An’ then we work twelve, thirteen
and fourteen hours a day, just as fast as we can. An’ you should see us sweat!
Just running from us! If you could see us, it’d dazzle your eyes. Just running from us!
—tacks flyin’ out of mouth like from a machine. Look at my mouth.”
I looked. The teeth were worn down by the constant friction of the metallic brads,
while they were coal-black and rotten. “I clean my teeth,” he added, “else they’d be
worse.” After he had told me that the workers had to furnish their own tools,
brads, “grindery,” cardboard, rent, light, and what not,
it was plain that his thirty bob was a diminishing quantity.
“But how long does the rush season last, in which you receive this high wage of thirty
bob?” I asked. “Four months,” was the answer; and for the rest of the year,
he informed me, they average from “half a quid” to a “quid” a week,
which is equivalent to from two dollars and a half to five dollars.
The present week was half gone, and he had earned four bob, or one dollar.
And yet I was given to understand that this was one of the better grades of sweating.
I looked out of the window, which should have commanded the back yards of the
neighbouring buildings. But there were no back yards, or, rather, they were covered
with one-storey hovels, cowsheds, in which people lived. The roofs of these hovels
were covered with deposits of filth, in some places a couple of feet deep
—the contributions from the back windows of the second and third storeys.
I could make out fish and meat bones, garbage, pestilential rags, old boots,
broken earthenware, and all the general refuse of a human sty.
“This is the last year of this trade; they’re getting machines to do away with us,”
said the sweated one mournfully, as we stepped over the indecent woman
and waded anew through the cheap young life.
We next visited the municipal dwellings erected by the London County Council on
the site of the slums where lived Arthur Morrison’s “Child of the Jago .”
While the buildings housed more people than before, it was much healthier.
But the dwellings were inhabited by the better-class workmen and artisans.
The slum people had simply drifted on to crowd other slums or to form new slums.
“An’ now,” said the sweated one, the ’earty man who worked so fast as to dazzle one’s
eyes, “I’ll show you one of London’s lungs. This is Spitalfields Garden.”
And he mouthed the word “garden” with scorn.
The church of Christ’s Church falls across Spitalfields Garden, and in the shadow of
Christ’s Church, at three o’clock in the afternoon, I saw a sight I never wish to see
again. There are no flowers in this garden, which is smaller than my own rose garden
at home. Grass only grows here, and it is surrounded by a sharp-spiked iron fencing,
as are all the parks of London Town, so that homeless men and women may not come
in at night and sleep upon it. As we entered the garden, an old woman, between fifty and
sixty, passed us, striding with sturdy intention if somewhat rickety action,
with two bulky bundles, covered with sacking, slung fore and aft upon her.
She was a woman tramp, a houseless soul, too independent to drag her failing carcass
through the workhouse door. Like the snail, she carried her home with her.
In the two sacking-covered bundles were her household goods, her wardrobe,
linen, and dear feminine possessions. We went up the narrow gravelled walk.
On the benches on either side arrayed a mass of miserable and distorted humanity,
the sight of which would have impelled Doré to more diabolical flights of fancy
than he ever succeeded in achieving. It was a welter of rags and filth,
of all manner of loathsome skin diseases, open sores, bruises, grossness, indecency,
leering monstrosities, and bestial faces. A chill, raw wind was blowing,
and these creatures huddled there in their rags, sleeping for the most part, or trying
to sleep. Here were a dozen women, ranging in age from twenty years to seventy.
Next a babe, possibly of nine months, lying asleep, flat on the hard bench,
with neither pillow nor covering, nor with anyone looking after it. Next half-a-dozen
men, sleeping bolt upright or leaning against one another in their sleep.
In one place a family group, a child asleep in its sleeping mother’s arms,
and the husband (or male mate) clumsily mending a dilapidated shoe.
On another bench a woman trimming the frayed strips of her rags with a knife,
and another woman, with thread and needle, sewing up rents.
Adjoining, a man holding a sleeping woman in his arms. Farther on, a man,
his clothing caked with gutter mud, asleep, with head in the lap of a woman,
not more than twenty-five years old, and also asleep.
It was this sleeping that puzzled me. Why were nine out of ten of them asleep or trying
to sleep? But it was not till afterwards that I learned. It is a law of the powers that be
that the homeless shall not sleep by night. On the pavement, by the portico of Christ’s
Church, where the stone pillars rise toward the sky in a stately row, were whole rows of
men lying asleep or drowsing, and all too deep sunk in torpor to rouse or be made
curious by our intrusion. “A lung of London,” I said; “nay, an abscess, a great putrescent
sore.” “Oh, why did you bring me here?” demanded my young friend, his delicate
face white with sickness of soul and stomach sickness.
“Those women there,” said our guide, “will sell themselves for thru’pence,
or tu’pence, or a loaf of stale bread.” He said it with a cheerful sneer. But what more he
might have said I do not know, for the sick man cried,
“For heaven’s sake let us get out of this.”