Jack London’s ‘Abyss’ offers insights on homelessness today

Published 1:30 am Thursday, April 6, 2023

At about the turn of the last century, Jack London, the writer, spent some time mingling with people in the slums of the city of London. From this experience he wrote the book “People of the Abyss.” In it he describes the conditions among the homeless people of that time and place, which appear to partly parallel those of the homeless of our own time.

Then as now, the number of homeless were growing. Working class families were often living in subdivided apartments, occupying a single room in which they performed piecework jobs, paying for their own materials, with no minimum income. Malnourishment and unhealthy living conditions were steadily driving these marginal people out of their housing and into the streets.

Remarkably, London observed, this was not during a period of economic depression or some sort of national catastrophe in England. On the contrary, the nation as a whole was doing quite well economically.

London had seen something of the world, and recalled that he knew of a tribe of Inuit above the Arctic Circle, who shared everything. When times were good they all prospered, during hard times they all suffered together. But none of them went without when the tribe had anything to eat.

In our modern civilized society, sharing is done through taxation.This would require taxing the filthy rich and the merely affluent. Some of us would object that if we taxed ourselves to help the homeless, then they would bring us all down, and we would all be homeless.

This, of course, is highly unlikely, but it does conjure up a rather ludicrous image.

Charles DeBruler

Everett