Jack London

The People of the Abyss Jack London

Housing crisis. the devastating poverty witnessed here has obvious underpinnings: workers pay between one quarter and a half of their weekly income in rent and the rooms they occupy are unfit for animals, much less adults and children. London reports that there are '300,000 people in London, divided into families, that live in one-room tenements' (161) and a total of 900,000 live illegally in an area less than 400 cubic feet (ibid). Should the Public Health Act be properly enforced, he suggests, 900,000 people would be served with a 'notice to quit' (162). He reflects here on a visit to a tenement: 'there were seven rooms in an abomination called a house. In six of the rooms, twenty-odd people of both sexes and all ages, cooked, ate, slept and worked. The men sweated in one room measuring 7 foot by 8 making shoes in an area in which they could barely stand' (57). They work '12, 13, and 14 hours a day' with 'tacks flyin' out of mouth like from a machine' and their teeth as evidence were 'coal black and rotten' (ibid). Poor light, sanitation, dampness, vermin, lack of ventilation and personal privacy created environmental squalor that destroyed the moral and physical conditioning of decent hard-working people. A coroner's inquest into the death of a 75 year old woman heard from a witness to her wretched condition:
Such was the inadequacy of available housing stock, houses were 'let and sub-let down to the very rooms with the working man paying proportionately more for his lodgings than the rich man for his spacious comfort' (166). This sub-letting reached its ultimate extreme with the leasing of beds in 'doss houses' whereby a 'three relay system' leases a bed to three workers so that it never 'grows cold'. Each 'tenant' occupies the bed for eight hours before vacating it to another worker and so on. Health officers reported common instances of three people in a single bed and two adults sleeping underneath the bed in a room with a cubic capacity of 1,000 feet (ibid). But occupiers of rooms and beds were in so many respects the most fortunate of those encountered. London spends a night 'carrying the banner' or tramping the streets with no peace to be had in doorways or on benches. The law of the time forbad sleeping at night which meant that 'coppers' shone lanterns into every nook and cranny to rouse the sleeping homeless. On a wet night the homeless walker - soaked to the bone - will be on a rapid road to a broken constitution, particularly the elderly. When public parks open in early dawn, the homeless are stretched out on grass, dry or wet, like corpses.