London History

In 1933, as the US and Europe struggled to haul itself out of the Great Depression, George Orwell went ‘Down and out in Paris and London’ to see from the inside how the other half really lived. Although the book became a classic, it was, Orwell freely admitted, not entirely his idea. As a young man he had become enthralled and inspired by an earlier writer, who had taken the same trip into ‘darkest London’ 30 years previously.

But while nobody minded Orwell drawing on an earlier work for inspiration, Jack London’s People of the Abyss was more controversial - charges of plagiarism were to dog the American writer throughout his brief career. London was to die in 1916, at the age of just 40, having produced an astonishing 50 books, countless short stories and a mountain of journalism in a career spanning just 18 years. Combining this heroic output with a life of adventure, seafaring, prospecting and ranching, as well devoting himself to consuming enormous amounts of alcohol, London was (particularly toward the end) sometimes let the quality control slip a little. Critics have opined that he lacked patience for the sheer grind and length of novel writing (his true skill was in the short story). To keep the production line going, he would turn out fictionalised accounts of stories he read in the newspapers. Around the turn of the 20th century he would even purchase plot outlines and story plans from apiring young novelist Sinclair Lewis. Lewis would become a major literary figure in the 1920s, winning (and turning down) the Pulitzer Prize, and writing Elmer Gantry and It Couldn’t Happen Here. But London was nothing if not frank about it. ‘Expression, you see, with me, is far easier than invention,’ he candidly admitted to a friend. In the case of ‘Abyss’, London seems to have been inspired himself by Jacob Riis’s 1890 account of low life in New York, How the Other Half Lives. But whatever his source, nobody could deny that London lived the tramp’s life in London for himself - there was no faking it.

London was 27 years old when he hopped in a London taxi and told the startled driver to take him ‘to the East End’. In the opening pages of ‘People of the Abyss’ London rather plays on the impossibility of anyone from the West End ever visiting the East, even attempting to book a visit east of Aldgate from a branch of Thomas Cook in the City. The picture given is of a hidden world that most Londoners are unaware of - though as toffs had been coming east to slum it since time immemorial, half the clerks in the City travelled in every day from homes in the East End, and that the area had Tube stations by this point, you can’t help feeling that London was cooking up the horror somewhat.

London was pretty hardened by this time. His own life was ‘Boy’s Own’ stuff. He had been born in January 1876, probably as John Griffith Chaney. His father disappeared early (famed astrologer William Chaney denied in letters to Jack ever having been married to the boy’s mother, Flora Wellman). To add to this extraordinary confusion, the bulk of San Francisco’s civil and legal documents were destroyed in the earthquake of 1906, among them any wedding certificate and birth certificate. If Jack knew who he was, the truth died with him. He set about making his own life. Hardly at school, though an enthusiastic self-educator from the public libraries, by 16 he’d become a deckhand on seal-hunting ships. Back on dry land he had a succession of grim jobs - in a jute mill, in a power plant, in a cannery. During the depressed years of the late 1890s he even ended up as a tramp, hopping box cars, begging and sleeping rough. Periodically he would sign up for another voyage. If life in ‘the Abyss’ was tough, London had seen it tough himself.

It was to form a singular political sensibility. He was by no means a liberal (some of London’s views on race were, even by the standards of the time, pretty distasteful) and was strong on self-help and survival of the fittest, no matter how brutal the process. Yet his experiences fomented a powerful sympathy with the rights of the working classes and how badly they could be done down by business and commerce. Orwell described London as “a socialist with the instincts of a buccaneer and the education of a 19th-century materialist.” All London’s conflicting views were to be displayed when he accepted a commission from a US publisher to go undercover as a tramp in London and see how that other half lived … in London in 1903.

London History: 100 faces of the East End by John Rennie is available now; £8.99; ISBN: 978-1-4116-6608-5 at http://www.lulu.com/content/324701. A history of London and the people who made it. Pen pictures of Attlee, Captain Cook, Sir Walter Raleigh, Stalin, Gandhi, Lew Grade, Steve Marriott, Fu Manchu, Sylvia Pankhurst, Lionel Bart, The Tichborne Claimant, John Wesley, Terry Spinks, Joseph Conard and dozens more…