Homeless man Gerard Kenna begging on Dublin's Grafton Street, on the day Ireland officially exited its recession, 2013.Niall Carson / Press Association. All rights reserved. In the summer of 1902, the great American writer, journalist and social activist Jack London undertook an immersive research project in the coalface of poverty in the East End of London which was subsequently published as The People of the Abyss a year later.
Fresh from his adventures in the Yukon goldrush that would inspire his classic adventure novels The Call of the Wild and White Fang, London’s immersion coincided with the coronation of a new king, Edward VII. The splendor and decadence of this state occasion only accentuated what he witnessed and experienced as a yawning and terrifying social gulf between the privileged and impoverished. London’s undertaking - thirty years before Orwell conducted a similar exercise in Down and Out in Paris and London – produced a searing, powerful and, at times, haunting account of raw capital colliding with the vulnerable poor to devastating effect.
Working from court and press reports and official state data, as well as first-hand observation, he found that one in four adults was destined to die on public charity ‘either in the workhouse, the infirmary or the asylum’. Life expectancy in the East End at the time was 30 years, with 55 percent of children dying before the age of five.
