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    The People of the Abyss
    The People of the Abyss
    The People of the Abyss
    Ebook232 pages3 hours

    The People of the Abyss

    By Jack London

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    This antiquarian book contains an account of Jack London's time spent in the underworld of London in the late nineteenth-century. This thought-provoking and insightful account of life in London's underbelly highlights the chronic starvation and lack of shelter causing so much misery for so many city-dwellers. This text is recommended for those with an interest in nineteenth-century English life, and it is not to be missed by fans and collectors of London's seminal work. John Griffith "Jack" London (1876 - 1916) was an American writer and activist. Many antiquarian books such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive, and it is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, high-quality, modern edition. It comes complete with a specially commissioned biography of the author.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRead Books Ltd.
    Release dateJan 27, 2016
    ISBN9781447489238
    Author

    Jack London

    Jack London (1876-1916) was an American writer who produced two hundred short stories, more than four hundred nonfiction pieces, twenty novels, and three full-length plays in less than two decades. His best-known works include The Call of the Wild, The Sea Wolf, and White Fang.

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    • 5/5
      Jack London's The People of the Abyss is a great book. Somehow London always manages to make compelling topics I would not generally find interesting. His writing is always powerful. I can see the scenes he depicts in front of me; in fact, I feel I am in them. I find myself sympathetic to the characters. The world is a better place for having revealed itself to London and to have reflected back his interpretation of it.
    • 4/5
      In 1899 Jack London travelled to London and immersed himself in the worker neighborhoods of the East End. What follows is a horrifying account of daily life in the Industrial Age. The homeless paid to sleep in wooden coffins at night. Starving men ate used cigarette butts and rotten orange peels from off the dirty streets. Suicide and infanticide were rampant; some parents even maimed their children at birth so that they'd have better luck begging on the streets. Recommended for anyone who's merely curious, and invaluable to the social historian.
    • 3/5
      The premise is simple in 1902 Jack London, posing as an out of work American sailor, went undercover in the poverty stricken east of London.There are much more interesting, richer and more detailed accounts of poverty out there (Henry Meyhew springs to mind) although this still an interesting read, even whilst being a dated and extremely flawed book. It's interesting because in spite of his many flaws Jack London is an engaging writer, his passion and horror at the poverty keeps the account painfully alive whilst his socialist views and lack Victorian prudishness is, for the period, deeply refreshing.However it contains far far too much of Jack London and his giant ego. The tome veers wildly from boys own adventure (look how brave he is!) to heart wrenching accounts, to repetitive lengthy facts and figures. It can be funny but for all the wrong reasons, he seems to carefully select his interviewees and he has a bizarre superiority going on; our poor are better than your poor kind of thing.To be honest the whole thing makes me wonder what he would thought he would achieve. He may be right but alienating people who can change things never helps. I mean he even criticises the King! Yes yes I know, how cruel ;)A different and interesting account of poverty but one I would only recommend to Jack London fans.
    • 5/5
      The People of the Abyss - Jack London - published by Hesperus Press Limited."Where home is a hovel, and dull we grovel,Forgetting the World is fair." William Morris, The Voice of Toil.A quotation to the start of the Chapter on Children in this striking work by Jack London, written in 1903.If this reflection by William Morris was true in Jack London's eyes in 1903, sadly and with great shame it has to be said that nothing has changed for the many, today.Accepting that Jack London was looking for the worst situations he could find and his personal background and experiences, the comments and opinions he offers are nevertheless sound. Reading this book I found all too often quite painful. All the more so because my own father was an infant of seven when this was written, living in the suburbs of London, born into a family of fourteen living in a three bedroomed terraced house. Of the fourteen children born ten survived to adult hood. By the evidence recounted by Jack London, that so many survived was exceptional.It is impossible reading the many examples he gives, not to feel that there has been little if any improvement in the lives of those today who are existing in conditions not better than he describes. The gap between those who have plenty and those who have nothing then was great and today I fear it remains so, to an even greater extent.Any serious student of social history will easily find that his research has a bias that tends to over dramatise some situations but accepting that, the stories he tells make compelling reading and do provide a very real picture of the conditions existing at that time. It would be wrong to ignore the humanity that comes from his views. He was, as would any civilised person, deeply disturbed by his experiences.This is a well produced book and Hesperus Press have provided a clear and easily read edition that reflects well the nature of the original story. I have not seen the original edition although I have seen later editions produced in 1913. This new one is faithful in all ways to the original and makes a good addition to any library.
    • 4/5
      In 1902, Jack London went to the city of London and spent a few months posing as an unemployed American sailor in the East End slums. He lived with them, on the streets and in workhouses, and in The People of the Abyss he reports back on the living conditions he found there. They are horrific. Starvation, filth, disease... people standing hours in line trying to get a spot to sleep for the night, unable to find or keep jobs. Many of the people London met were merely unlucky - an illness, a death in the family, an injury that cost them a job, the "thing that happened" - and the next thing they knew they were homeless, no longer able to make ends meet (sounds familiar, no? The more things change, the more they stay the same). It is difficult reading, and London only hints at some of the worst of the problems. As other reviewers have said, this is by no means an unbiased, just-the-facts-ma'am book. London was outraged by what he saw. In the book, he lays blame at the feet of the government, society, the lack of jobs, and even do-gooders, stopping just short of calling for class revolution. For what it is worth, an outraged Jack London is a compulsively readable Jack London, for this reviewer. So, so difficult to put down.
    • 3/5
      This is a non fiction book where Jack London Lives with the homeless people of London. And some life to the old saying about "walking a mile in another man's shoes."
    • 3/5
      The old adage, "You can't judge a book by it's cover" certainly applies in the case of this particular book. Hesperus have put together a really lovely thick cover and good quality pages. I wanted to like it, I really did, and it initially started off well, being about poverty in London in the early 1900's. I wanted to be interested because my grandparents were born around 1910, and so not so far into the future of London's study of the people of London, which was 1902. I felt that he barely touched the surface of the people of the East End's lives, he wrote about the dire circumstances in which those people lived, and although you could sense his anger, I felt that all the time he was comparing our lives to those of those living in poverty in America, who he considered to be much better off. The book ended up being a chore to read and I forced myself to finish the last quarter of it, although I'm sure I didn't take much of it in.
    • 3/5
      First off let me say how much I like Hesperus Press editions. They are sturdy, well-made paperbacks, whose covers have been lengthened an inch or so and then turned in, like a book jacket. The paper is good and the print excellent. I have a set of their Dickens Christmas anthologies, which include the contributions by other people, and they are excellent. I have to say I didn't enjoy this one as much as those.If you've read Orwell - Road to Wigan Pier and Down and Out in Paris and London - or Henry Meyhew - London labour and the London Poor, you'll have found the same information better presented. Jack London was a poverty tourist, he dipped his toe into the tide of human misery but made sure he could scuttle back to better living pretty sharpish. That's not to say there aren't some good things, the stories of the individuals he met, his compassion for the underworld (by which he meant the underclass rather than criminals) and his perception that, once a person began the fall from even relative prosperity, it was next to impossible to get out of the Abyss. Less successful - his quoting of more systematic researchers and a rather brash Yankee triumphalism - he is forever claiming that the American poor did much better, though it is plain by this he meant white Americans, I doubt African-, Native- and Chinese-Americans of the period would have been quite so sanguine.
    • 4/5
      Jack London remains one of the most prescient observers of human society. This work of journalism is the product of his own immersion into the slums of London after witnessing the coronation of Edward VII in the capital of the British Empire in 1902. Hindsight reveals that the British Empire was at its height. The eponymous London was also at the height of his powers, and published his most famous work, "The Call of the Wild" in the following year back in California, which remained his home.This work is the first manacle of reportage by London which indicts the hands of the wealthy criminal class where "The Iron Heel" published in 1907 caught their feet. London had the insight and courage to expose as ineluctable fact that criminals in the name of capitalism would use every device of fraud and violence to seize the wealth and labor of the poor. These twin volumes prophecied the utterly pointless destruction of WWI and the rise of fascism which culminated in WWII.This edition is brilliantly prefaced by Jack Lindsay who provides historical background on London without indulging in any clap-trap ideological bias. The background touches upon London's reactionary streaks--his own racism, and views on women, affected by readings on Hegel and Nietzsche [4]--and whatever internal inconsistencies lie in the heart of a man who built up a fortune while advocating socialism. The Preface notes that it "was nothing new for a writer to make a journey into slumland and return to recount its horrors." Lindsay compares London to the Victorians who preceded him: William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, whose kitchens and beds for the poor were visited by London, wrote "In Darkest England" in 1890. He documented the horrific conditions "within a stone's throw of our cathedrals and palaces".George R. Sims, another colorful and highly productive journalist, repeatedly documented the perils of lives in the London slums. For example in his "How the Poor Live" and "Horrible London" in 1889.Charles Booth, the Unitarian philanthropist famous for providing a map of povertry in London, in "Life and Labour of the People in London" (1889). William T. Stead, the English journalist and editor who pioneered "new journalism" and investigative reporting, published numerous articles on urban poverty, especially in England, but including one series after living six months sub rosa in Chicago. In placing London in this historical setting, Lindsay notes that both Booths, and Sims, Mayhew and James Greenwood, among others, gave striking accounts of the terrible conditions for the poor in England. He notes that the life of the poor had been academically studied by W. Wyckoff, luridly depicted by William Stead, and scientifically analyzed by Charles Booth. But Lindsay offers the argument made by a reviewer at the time (in The Independent) that London offered a unique addition: London brought these conditions to life--making it "real and present to us". [7] London depicts the inhabitants as our brothers and sisters, unblurred by sentimentality.The authenticity of London's documentation is vouch-safed by the American's use of street cant. He also recites numerous "stories" told by the denizens of the crowded streets, "gardens" (patches of grass), doss-houses, and workhouses -- the Mile End Waste, the Spike, Whitechapel, Hoxton, Spitalfields, and Wapping. He found the women in Leman Street, Waterloo Road, Piccadilly, the Strand [100]. He could compare the places serving "skilly", a fluid concoction of oatmeal and hot water provided as breakfast and supper. [38] Includes his observations of the Coronation. He documents the rise of a "new race of street people". [94] London spells out how these brutalized degraded and dull "Ghetto folk" have been incapacitated and cannot, cannot, perform service to England, either as workers or as soldiers, because of their weakness and desperation. [94] He compares jails in America with the fare of an English workingman, and finds the latter severely lacking. The work also recites the latest statistical and economic data on pauperism in London. [101] Of particular import was his grasp of how many English were killed and maimed by their participation in the forms of "work" available to them--West End factories, carding and chemical concerns, slayed even the most splendid men and women. [104] London lines up the suicide cases. He presents the gestures--ghastly simulacrae--toward a "family life" made impossible for the desparate wailing for lasting employment to enable workers to earn food and shelter. Where the labor is so productive that a single workman can produce cloth for 250 people, and five men can produce bread for a thousand, yet millions starve. It comes down to "criminal management". [120]In a chapter on "drink, temperance and thrift", London addresses the fecklessness of most of the do-gooders and charities. He holds up the remedial exception in the work of Dr Barnardo Homes, the "child snatcher". The doctor took waifs not yet hardened to a vicious society, and sent them to Canada, where they had a chance to thrive. [124]In the final Chapter, London examines the "management". He compares the English "Civilization" with the Inuit living along the banks of the Yukan, in Alaska. [124]The Inuit have good and bad times, in which they all share, but chronic debt and starvation is unknown. London is one of the first to fix the label of "criminal mismanagement" to the political powers of the Kingdom, by documenting the numbers, the conditions, the markets, and the deliberate misappropriations of the wealthy who live off the poor.
    • 5/5
      What Jacob Riis did for New York City with his photos of tenements, Jack London did for London with his book, The People of the Abyss. The abyss that he referred to was the squalid East End of London, where the poorest of the poor lived and died.All of the horrors are there, described not by a dispassionate historian keeping a professional distance in his reporting, but in eyewitness accounts of and interviews with people living in appalling conditions. What I found most horrifying about this book is that so many things haven’t changed since it was written at the turn of the last century. His descriptions of homeless people forced by the police to literally walk all night due to a law which forbade sleeping in public places brought to mind the sweeps done in our own cities, forcing the homeless off the streets and out of our sight. Healthcare was an issue then just as it is now. Families were forced into poverty and sometimes starvation when the husband, the main breadwinner, was injured, became ill or died. The majority of bankruptcies in our own time are caused by overwhelming medical bills. More than a century ago when this book was written, when a man was out of work due to illness or injury, his wife was unable to adequately support the family because the only jobs open to her paid too little. Sadly, in our own time, women are still not able to adequately provide for their families on their own because they are paid, on average, 70 cents for every dollar a man earns doing the same job. A statistic that should outrage everyone (but strangely doesn’t) is that post-divorce, children slide down the economic scale, sometimes into poverty thanks to their mothers’ inability to earn a living comparable to their fathers who actually ascend the economic ladder post-divorce due their higher earning power.The cost of housing, rents equal to half their income, brings to mind the mortgage crisis we are suffering today. As the cost of housing during the last real estate bubble, reached stratospheric levels, families were forced to pay more and more of their income for housing, leaving little to actually live on. All it takes is a job loss or catastrophic illness for them to find themselves on the street as the banks foreclose on their homes. Their counterparts a century ago faced a similar fate for the same reasons. Job loss or illness resulted in the loss of the tiny rooms that they rented.Yet for all the similarities, there are important differences. We have laws governing the workplace and a social safety net that prevents the worst of the gruesome results of illness and unemployment described in this book. Laws about workplace safety and working hours prevent employers from exploiting their workers. Unemployment insurance replaces a portion of lost wages. Food stamps and free or reduced cost meals in schools stave off starvation. We have come a long way since 1902. After reading this book, I realized that we still have a long way to go.
    • 4/5
      This is a very interesting book set in London in the first decade of the twentieth century. You can read it as a social history as long as you remember what Alexander Masters writes in the foreword to the book; 'as an objective, trustworthy analysis, Abyss won’t do at all'.In 1902 Jack London moves temporarily into East End, disguised as a poor inhabitant. He observes and tells us about how the poor in East End live and how they go about their daily chores.Even if not everything in the book is considered trustworthy the stories tell us a lot of the persistence of social inequality in Britain. The atmosphere is vividly described and all that happens in the book seems genuine.Besides the stories of different people there are statistics, all showing the misery the working class lived in during the first years of the twentieth century.All together the book is absolutely worth reading, especially if you are interested in the history of England.

    Book preview

    The People of the Abyss - Jack London

    Jack London

    Jack London was born in San Francisco, USA in 1876. In order to support his working class family, he left school at the age of fourteen and worked in a string of unskilled jobs, before returning briefly to graduate. Around this time, London discovered the public library in Oakland, and immersed himself in the literature of the day. In 1894, after a spell working on merchant ships, he set out to experience the life of the tramp, with a view to gaining an insight into the national class system and the raw essence of the human condition. At the age of nineteen, upon returning, London was admitted to the University of California in Berkeley, but left before graduating after just six months due to financial pressures.

    London published his first short story, ‘Typhoon off the Coast of Japan’, in 1893. At this point, he turned seriously to writing, producing work at a prolific rate. Over the next decade, he began to be published in major magazines of the day, producing some of his best-remembered stories, such as ‘To Build a Fire’. Starting in 1902, London turned to novels, producing almost twenty in fifteen years. Of these, his best-known are Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set during the Klondike Gold Rush. He also produced a number of popular and still widely-anthologized stories, such as ‘An Odyssey of the North’ and ‘Love of Life’. London even proved himself as an excellent journalist, reporting on the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco and the Mexican Revolution of 1910.

    London was an impassioned advocate of socialism and workers’ rights, and these themes inform a number of his works – most notably his dystopian novel The Iron Heel, published in 1907. He even ran unsuccessfully as the Socialist nominee for mayor of Oakland on two occasions. London died in 1916, aged 40.

    PREFACE

    The experiences related in this volume fell to me in the summer of 1902.  I went down into the under-world of London with an attitude of mind which I may best liken to that of the explorer.  I was open to be convinced by the evidence of my eyes, rather than by the teachings of those who had not seen, or by the words of those who had seen and gone before.  Further, I took with me certain simple criteria with which to measure the life of the under-world.  That which made for more life, for physical and spiritual health, was good; that which made for less life, which hurt, and dwarfed, and distorted life, was bad.

    It will be readily apparent to the reader that I saw much that was bad.  Yet it must not be forgotten that the time of which I write was considered good times in England.  The starvation and lack of shelter I encountered constituted a chronic condition of misery which is never wiped out, even in the periods of greatest prosperity.

    Following the summer in question came a hard winter.  Great numbers of the unemployed formed into processions, as many as a dozen at a time, and daily marched through the streets of London crying for bread.  Mr. Justin McCarthy, writing in the month of January 1903, to the New York Independent, briefly epitomises the situation as follows:-

    The workhouses have no space left in which to pack the starving crowds who are craving every day and night at their doors for food and shelter.  All the charitable institutions have exhausted their means in trying to raise supplies of food for the famishing residents of the garrets and cellars of London lanes and alleys.  The quarters of the Salvation Army in various parts of London are nightly besieged by hosts of the unemployed and the hungry for whom neither shelter nor the means of sustenance can be provided.

    It has been urged that the criticism I have passed on things as they are in England is too pessimistic.  I must say, in extenuation, that of optimists I am the most optimistic.  But I measure manhood less by political aggregations than by individuals.  Society grows, while political machines rack to pieces and become scrap.  For the English, so far as manhood and womanhood and health and happiness go, I see a broad and smiling future.  But for a great deal of the political machinery, which at present mismanages for them, I see nothing else than the scrap heap.

    JACK LONDON.

    PIEDMONT, CALIFORNIA.

    CHAPTER I—THE DESCENT

    But you can’t do it, you know, friends said, to whom I applied for assistance in the matter of sinking myself down into the East End of London.  You had better see the police for a guide, they added, on second thought, painfully endeavouring to adjust themselves to the psychological processes of a madman who had come to them with better credentials than brains.

    But I don’t want to see the police, I protested.  What I wish to do is to go down into the East End and see things for myself.  I wish to know how those people are living there, and why they are living there, and what they are living for.  In short, I am going to live there myself.

    "You don’t want to live down there! everybody said, with disapprobation writ large upon their faces.  Why, it is said there are places where a man’s life isn’t worth tu’pence."

    The very places I wish to see, I broke in.

    But you can’t, you know, was the unfailing rejoinder.

    Which is not what I came to see you about, I answered brusquely, somewhat nettled by their incomprehension.  I am a stranger here, and I want you to tell me what you know of the East End, in order that I may have something to start on.

    But we know nothing of the East End.  It is over there, somewhere.  And they waved their hands vaguely in the direction where the sun on rare occasions may be seen to rise.

    Then I shall go to Cook’s, I announced.

    Oh yes, they said, with relief.  Cook’s will be sure to know.

    But O Cook, O Thomas Cook & Son, path-finders and trail-clearers, living sign-posts to all the world, and bestowers of first aid to bewildered travellers—unhesitatingly and instantly, with ease and celerity, could you send me to Darkest Africa or Innermost Thibet, but to the East End of London, barely a stone’s throw distant from Ludgate Circus, you know not the way!

    You can’t do it, you know, said the human emporium of routes and fares at Cook’s Cheapside branch.  It is so—hem—so unusual.

    Consult the police, he concluded authoritatively, when I had persisted.  We are not accustomed to taking travellers to the East End; we receive no call to take them there, and we know nothing whatsoever about the place at all.

    Never mind that, I interposed, to save myself from being swept out of the office by his flood of negations.  Here’s something you can do for me.  I wish you to understand in advance what I intend doing, so that in case of trouble you may be able to identify me.

    Ah, I see! should you be murdered, we would be in position to identify the corpse.

    He said it so cheerfully and cold-bloodedly that on the instant I saw my stark and mutilated cadaver stretched upon a slab where cool waters trickle ceaselessly, and him I saw bending over and sadly and patiently identifying it as the body of the insane American who would see the East End.

    No, no, I answered; merely to identify me in case I get into a scrape with the ’bobbies.’  This last I said with a thrill; truly, I was gripping hold of the vernacular.

    That, he said, is a matter for the consideration of the Chief Office.

    It is so unprecedented, you know, he added apologetically.

    The man at the Chief Office hemmed and hawed.  We make it a rule, he explained, to give no information concerning our clients.

    But in this case, I urged, it is the client who requests you to give the information concerning himself.

    Again he hemmed and hawed.

    Of course, I hastily anticipated, I know it is unprecedented, but—

    As I was about to remark, he went on steadily, it is unprecedented, and I don’t think we can do anything for you.

    However, I departed with the address of a detective who lived in the East End, and took my way to the American consul-general.  And here, at last, I found a man with whom I could do business.  There was no hemming and hawing, no lifted brows, open incredulity, or blank amazement.  In one minute I explained myself and my project, which he accepted as a matter of course.  In the second minute he asked my age, height, and weight, and looked me over.  And in the third minute, as we shook hands at parting, he said: All right, Jack.  I’ll remember you and keep track.

    I breathed a sigh of relief.  Having burnt my ships behind me, I was now free to plunge into that human wilderness of which nobody seemed to know anything.  But at once I encountered a new difficulty in the shape of my cabby, a grey-whiskered and eminently decorous personage who had imperturbably driven me for several hours about the City.

    Drive me down to the East End, I ordered, taking my seat.

    Where, sir? he demanded with frank surprise.

    To the East End, anywhere.  Go on.

    The hansom pursued an aimless way for several minutes, then came to a puzzled stop.  The aperture above my head was uncovered, and the cabman peered down perplexedly at me.

    I say, he said, wot plyce yer wanter go?

    East End, I repeated.  Nowhere in particular.  Just drive me around anywhere.

    But wot’s the haddress, sir?

    See here! I thundered.  Drive me down to the East End, and at once!

    It was evident that he did not understand, but he withdrew his head, and grumblingly started his horse.

    Nowhere in the streets of London may one escape the sight of abject poverty, while five minutes’ walk from almost any point will bring one to a slum; but the region my hansom was now penetrating was one unending slum.  The streets were filled with a new and different race of people, short of stature, and of wretched or beer-sodden appearance.  We rolled along through miles of bricks and squalor, and from each cross street and alley flashed long vistas of bricks and misery.  Here and there lurched a drunken man or woman, and the air was obscene with sounds of jangling and squabbling.  At a market, tottery old men and women were searching in the garbage thrown in the mud for rotten potatoes, beans, and vegetables, while little children clustered like flies around a festering mass of fruit, thrusting their arms to the shoulders into the liquid corruption, and drawing forth morsels but partially decayed, which they devoured on the spot.

    Not a hansom did I meet with in all my drive, while mine was like an apparition from another and better world, the way the children ran after it and alongside.  And as far as I could see were the solid walls of brick, the slimy pavements, and the screaming streets; and for the first time in my life the fear of the crowd smote me.  It was like the fear of the sea; and the miserable multitudes, street upon street, seemed so many waves of a vast and malodorous sea, lapping about me and threatening to well up and over me.

    Stepney, sir; Stepney Station, the cabby called down.

    I looked about.  It was really a railroad station, and he had driven desperately to it as the one familiar spot he had ever heard of in all that wilderness.

    Well, I said.

    He spluttered unintelligibly, shook his head, and looked very miserable.  I’m a strynger ’ere, he managed to articulate.  An’ if yer don’t want Stepney Station, I’m blessed if I know wotcher do want.

    I’ll tell you what I want, I said.  You drive along and keep your eye out for a shop where old clothes are sold.  Now, when you see such a shop, drive right on till you turn the corner, then stop and let me out.

    I could see that he was growing dubious of his fare, but not long afterwards he pulled up to the curb and informed me that an old-clothes shop was to be found a bit of the way back.

    Won’tcher py me? he pleaded.  There’s seven an’ six owin’ me.

    Yes, I laughed, and it would be the last I’d see of you.

    Lord lumme, but it’ll be the last I see of you if yer don’t py me, he retorted.

    But a crowd of ragged onlookers had already gathered around the cab, and I laughed again and walked back to the old-clothes shop.

    Here the chief difficulty was in making the shopman understand that I really and truly wanted old clothes.  But after fruitless attempts to press upon me new and impossible coats and trousers, he began to bring to light heaps of old ones, looking mysterious the while and hinting darkly.  This he did with the palpable intention of letting me know that he had piped my lay, in order to bulldose me, through fear of exposure, into paying heavily for my purchases.  A man in trouble, or a high-class criminal from across the water, was what he took my measure for—in either case, a person anxious to avoid the police.

    But I disputed with him over the outrageous difference between prices and values, till I quite disabused him of the notion, and he settled down to drive a hard bargain with a hard customer.  In the end I selected a pair of stout though well-worn trousers, a frayed jacket with one remaining button, a pair of brogans which had plainly seen service where coal was shovelled, a thin leather belt, and a very dirty cloth cap.  My underclothing and socks, however, were new and warm, but of the sort that any American waif, down in his luck, could acquire in the ordinary course of events.

    I must sy yer a sharp ’un, he said, with counterfeit admiration, as I handed over the ten shillings finally agreed upon for the outfit.  Blimey, if you ain’t ben up an’ down Petticut Lane afore now.  Yer trouseys is wuth five bob to hany man, an’ a docker ’ud give two an’ six for the shoes, to sy nothin’ of the coat an’ cap an’ new stoker’s singlet an’ hother things.

    How much will you give me for them? I demanded suddenly.  I paid you ten bob for the lot, and I’ll sell them back to you, right now, for eight!  Come, it’s a go!

    But he grinned and shook his head, and though I had made a good bargain, I was unpleasantly aware that he had made a better one.

    I found the cabby and a policeman with their heads together, but the latter, after looking me over sharply, and particularly scrutinizing the bundle under my arm, turned away and left the cabby to wax mutinous by himself.  And not a step would he budge till I paid him the seven shillings and sixpence owing him.  Whereupon he was willing to drive me to the ends of the earth, apologising profusely for his insistence, and explaining that one ran across queer customers in London Town.

    But he drove me only to Highbury Vale, in North London, where my luggage was waiting for me.  Here, next day, I took off my shoes (not without regret for their lightness and comfort), and my soft, grey travelling suit, and, in fact, all my clothing; and proceeded to array myself in the clothes of the other and unimaginable men, who must have been indeed unfortunate to have had to part with such rags for the pitiable sums obtainable from a dealer.

    Inside my stoker’s singlet, in the armpit, I sewed a gold sovereign (an emergency sum certainly of modest proportions); and inside my stoker’s singlet I put myself.  And then I sat down and moralised upon the fair years and fat, which had made my skin soft and brought the nerves close to the surface; for the singlet was rough and raspy as a hair shirt, and I am confident that the most rigorous of ascetics suffer no more than I did in the ensuing twenty-four hours.

    The remainder of my costume was fairly easy to put on, though the brogans, or brogues, were quite a problem.  As stiff and hard as if made of wood, it was only after a prolonged pounding of the uppers with my fists that I was able to get my feet into them at all.  Then, with a few shillings, a knife, a handkerchief, and some brown papers and flake tobacco stowed away in my pockets, I thumped down the stairs and said good-bye to my foreboding friends.  As I paused out of the door, the help, a comely middle-aged woman, could not conquer a grin that twisted her lips and separated them till the throat, out of involuntary sympathy, made the uncouth animal noises we are wont to designate as laughter.

    No sooner was I out on the streets than I was impressed by the difference in status effected by my clothes.  All servility vanished from the demeanour of the common people with whom I came in contact.  Presto! in the twinkling of an eye, so to say, I had become one of them.  My frayed and out-at-elbows jacket was the badge and advertisement of my class, which was their class.  It made me of like kind, and in place of the fawning and too respectful attention I had hitherto received, I now shared with them a comradeship.  The man in corduroy and dirty neckerchief no longer addressed me as sir or governor.  It was mate now—and a fine and hearty word, with a tingle to it, and a warmth and gladness, which the other term does not possess.  Governor!  It smacks of mastery, and power, and high authority—the tribute of the man who is under to the man on top, delivered in the hope that he will let up a bit and ease his weight, which is another way of saying that it is an appeal for alms.

    This brings me to a delight I experienced in my rags and tatters which is denied the average American abroad.  The European traveller from the States, who is not a Croesus, speedily finds himself reduced to a chronic state of self-conscious sordidness by the hordes of cringing robbers who clutter his steps from dawn till dark, and deplete his pocket-book in a

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