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, London was determined to document the struggles
of everyday people and their fight for food and shelter.
This first-hand account was published as ‘The People of the Abyss’.
Since food is the essential concern of life and the starting point to stave off misery,
you will hear, in this video, his experience of eating at a coffee house in the East End.
By the time of London’s visit such an establishment had essentially slipped from
its original function in the 17th to 18th Centuries of serving coffee and acting as a
venue for sharing news and political discourse among scholars and
businessmen. Instead, many had become the dingy and fetid haunts of the working
classes, who patronised them for the cheap food they served up
– if you could call it such: for the cooked meats could be tough, musty or tainted.
And the coffee? Well, the name was no more than a misnomer, for the concoction
that could be drunk with your crust of bread might look muddy like coffee,
but be anything but: more likely a mix of chicory,
plant refuse and anything in between.
This assumes that people had money to pay for a meal, and of course many couldn’t
even afford to purchase sustenance in such eating houses,
as cheap and dubious as it was. But his is a story that speaks to the charity of the
East End community for those in chronic want. He also reveals a stark reality:
The fact that if you could earn enough coins to pay for a meal on the streets of London
- you were faced with food of questionable quality and nutritional value.
Poverty didn’t end with finding food to eat if it couldn’t fill your stomach.
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Another phrase gone glimmering, shorn of romance and tradition and all that goes to
make phrases worth keeping! For me, henceforth, “coffee-house” will possess
anything but an agreeable connotation. Over on the other side of the world,
the mere mention of the word was sufficient to conjure up whole crowds of its historic
frequenters, and to send trooping through my imagination endless groups of wits
and dandies, pamphleteers and bravos, and bohemians of Grub Street.
But here, on this side of the world, alas and alack, the very name is a misnomer.
Coffee-house: a place where people drink coffee. Not at all. You cannot obtain
coffee in such a place for love or money. True, you may call for coffee,
and you will have brought you something in a cup purporting to be coffee,
and you will taste it and be disillusioned, for coffee it certainly is not.
And what is true of the coffee is true of the coffee-house. Working-men, in the main,
frequent these places, and greasy, dirty places they are, without one thing about
them to cherish decency in a man or put self-respect into him. Table-cloths and
napkins are unknown. A man eats in the midst of the debris left by his predecessor,
and dribbles his own scraps about him and on the floor. In rush times,
in such places, I have positively waded through the muck and mess
that covered the floor, and I have managed to eat because I was
abominably hungry and capable of eating anything.
This seems to be the normal condition of the working-man, from the zest with which
he addresses himself to the board. Eating is a necessity, and there are no frills about it.
He brings in with him a primitive voraciousness, and, I am confident,
carries away with him a fairly healthy appetite. When you see such a man,
on his way to work in the morning, order a pint of tea,
which is no more tea than it is ambrosia, pull a hunk of dry bread from his pocket,
and wash the one down with the other, depend upon it,
that man has not the right sort of stuff in his belly, nor enough of the wrong sort of stuff,
to fit him for his day’s work. And further, depend upon it,
he and a thousand of his kind will not turn out the quantity or quality of work
that a thousand men will who have eaten heartily of meat and potatoes,
and drunk coffee that is coffee. As a vagrant in the “Hobo” of a California jail,
I have been served better food and drink than the London workman receives in his
coffee-houses; while as an American labourer I have eaten a breakfast for
twelvepence such as the British labourer would not dream of eating.
Of course, he will pay only three or four pence for his; which is, however,
as much as I paid, for I would be earning six shillings to his two or two and a half.
On the other hand, though, and in return, I would turn out an amount of work
in the course of the day that would put to shame the amount he turned out.
So there are two sides to it. The man with the high standard of living will always
do more work and better than the man with the low standard of living.
There is a comparison which sailormen make between the English and American
merchant services. In an English ship, they say, it is poor grub, poor pay,
and easy work; in an American ship, good grub, good pay, and hard work.
And this is applicable to the working populations of both countries.
The ocean greyhounds have to pay for speed and steam, and so does the workman.
But if the workman is not able to pay for it, he will not have the speed and steam,
that is all. The proof of it is when the English workman comes to America.
He will lay more bricks in New York than he will in London, still more bricks in St. Louis,
and still more bricks when he gets to San Francisco.
His standard of living has been rising all the time. The San Francisco bricklayer receives
twenty shillings per day, and at present is on strike for twenty-four shillings.
Early in the morning, along the streets frequented by workmen on the way to work,
many women sit on the sidewalk with sacks of bread beside them.
No end of workmen purchase these, and eat them as they walk along.
They do not even wash the dry bread down with the tea to be obtained for a penny
in the coffee-houses. It is incontestable that a man is not fit to begin
his day’s work on a meal like that; and it is equally incontestable
that the loss will fall upon his employer and upon the nation.
For some time, now, statesmen have been crying, “Wake up, England!”
It would show more hard-headed common sense
if they changed the tune to “Feed up, England!”
Not only is the worker poorly fed, but he is filthily fed. I have stood outside
a butcher shop and watched a horde of speculative housewives turning over the
trimmings and scraps and shreds of beef and mutton—dog-meat in the States.
I would not vouch for the clean fingers of these housewives, no more than I would
vouch for the cleanliness of the single rooms in which many of them and their
families lived; yet they raked, and pawed, and scraped the mess about in their anxiety
to get the worth of their coppers. I kept my eye on one particularly offensive-looking
bit of meat, and followed it through the clutches of over twenty women,
till it fell to the lot of a timid-appearing little woman whom the butcher bluffed
into taking it. All day long this heap of scraps was added to and taken away from,
the dust and dirt of the street falling upon it, flies settling on it,
and the dirty fingers turning it over and over.
The costers wheel loads of specked and decaying fruit around in the barrows all day,
and very often store it in their one living and sleeping room for the night.
There it is exposed to the sickness and disease,
the effluvia and vile exhalations of overcrowded and rotten life,
and next day it is carted about again to be sold.
The poor worker of the East End never knows what it is to eat good,
wholesome meat or fruit—in fact, he rarely eats meat or fruit at all;
while the skilled workman has nothing to boast of in the way of what he eats.
Judging from the coffee-houses, which is a fair criterion, they never know in all their
lives what tea, coffee, or cocoa tastes like. The slops and water-witcheries
of the coffee-houses, varying only in sloppiness and witchery, never even
approximate or suggest what you and I are accustomed to drink as tea and coffee.
A little incident comes to me, connected with a coffee-house
not far from Jubilee Street on the Mile End Road.
“Cawn yer let me ’ave somethin’ for this, daughter? Anythin’, I don’t mind.
I ’aven’t ’ad a bite the blessed day, an’ I’m that faint . . . ”
She was an old woman, clad in decent black rags, and in her hand she held a penny.
The one she had addressed as ‘daughter’ was a careworn woman of forty,
proprietress and waitress of the house. I waited, possibly as anxiously as the old
woman, to see how the appeal would be received. It was four in the afternoon,
and she looked faint and sick. The woman hesitated an instant,
then brought a large plate of “stewed lamb and young peas.” I was eating a plate
of it myself, and it is my judgment that the lamb was mutton and that the peas
might have been younger without being youthful. However, the point is,
the dish was sold at sixpence, and the proprietress gave it for a penny,
demonstrating anew the old truth that the poor are the most charitable.
The old woman, profuse in her gratitude, took a seat on the other side of the narrow
table and ravenously attacked the smoking stew. We ate steadily and silently, the
pair of us, when suddenly, explosively and most gleefully, she cried out to me,—
“I sold a box o’ matches! Yus,” she confirmed, if anything with greater and more
explosive glee. “I sold a box o’ matches! That’s ’ow I got the penny.”
“She must be getting along in years,” I suggested.
“Seventy-four yesterday,” she replied, and returned with gusto to her plate.
“Blimey, I’d like to do something for the old girl, that I would, but this is the first
I’ve ’ad to-day,” the young fellow alongside volunteered to me.
“An’ I only ’ave this because I ’appened to make an odd shilling
washin’ out, Lord luv me! I don’t know ’ow many pots.”
“No work at my own trade for six weeks,” he said further,
in reply to my questions; “nothin’ but odd jobs a blessed long way between.”
One meets with all sorts of adventures in a coffee-house, and I shall not forget
a Cockney Amazon in a place near Trafalgar Square, to whom I tendered a
sovereign when paying my score. (By the way, one is supposed to pay before he
begins to eat, and if he be poorly dressed he is compelled to pay before he eats).
The girl bit the gold piece between her teeth, rang it on the counter,
and then looked me and my rags witheringly up and down.
“Where’d you find it?” she at length demanded.
“Some mug left it on the table when he went out, eh, don’t you think?” I retorted.
“Wot’s yer game?” she queried, looking me calmly in the eyes.
“I makes ’em,” quote I. She sniffed superciliously and gave me the change
in small silver, and I had my revenge by biting and ringing every piece of it.
“I’ll give you a ha’penny for another lump of sugar in the tea,” I said.
“I’ll see you in ’ell first,” came the retort courteous.
Also, she amplified the retort courteous in divers vivid and unprintable ways.
I never had much talent for repartee, but she knocked silly what little I had,
and I gulped down my tea a beaten man,
while she gloated after me even as I passed out to the street.