Entering the Workhouse

In Chapter 9, we see that Jack London finally succeeded in entering the Whitechapel workhouse casual ward. He opened the chapter with an apology to his body for what he forced it to endure.

Again, engaging in conversation with the men sharing his predicament, he learned that many knew no better way to get on in the lives they had. The men told stories of their experiences in the various spikes (workhouses), some with happy endings, some with sad ones. They gave a warning of what awaited the infirm within the workhouse infirmary, the “blackjack” or “white potion,” they believed was given to hasten the departure of those who lingered in disease and had become a burden to the relief system. They shared knowledge of those who hated them, those who felt that the human beings who entered the relief system were barely human and deserving of no compassion. Those people frequently saw paupers as society’s pirates, conmen, selfish individuals not willing to do their share in life and who knowingly drag everyone else down. Some of the haters were those who worked within the relief system itself.

A conversation between Elizabeth and John Stride in Say Anything But Your Prayers helps to express some of the feelings. In this scene, Elizabeth is home in the evening after performing her daily labor of oakum picking at the Poplar workhouse for the out relief she and her ill husband are receiving:

In her second week of out relief labor, Elizabeth could not contain her complaints any longer. “I understand the workhouse guardians want the work to be a hardship so only the truly needy seek relief,” she said to John, “but why must they work us until we’re miserable?”

“For fear wages will suffer,” he said, “Parliament doesn’t want relief to compete with labor.”

“Jobs are so hard to come by, wages drop anyway,” Elizabeth said. “There are so many hungry people who’ll die without relief.”

“Some workhouse Guardians have good intentions. At least once a week, though, I read in the newspaper that some crow or another in Parliament is squawking about how those who bear the harsh treatment deserve it because they lack the moral strength to do better. You know that’s the common belief.”

Indeed, he was’t telling Elizabeth anything she didn’t already understand. When she’d worked in the coffee shop, she’d heard plenty of well-dressed people push such ideas about the poor. Most were careful not to sound too heartless. Working with Lettie at laundries and kitchens, she’d noticed the same sort of message was well received and repeated by many laborers who treated the poor as scapegoats, despite the fact that the workers themselves suffered low wages, long hours, and no redress with employers who had little regard for the needs of those they employed.

“Holding Back Tears” copyright©2014 Alan M. Clark. Interior Illustration for JACK THE RIPPER VICTIMS SERIES: SAY ANYTHING BUT YOUR PRAYERS by Alan M. Clark

John shook his head. “As long as people see the poor as mumpers, prigs, and sharpers, employers will do as they please.”

“I’m no thief or con artist!” Elizabeth said. “I don’t go to the workhouse because I’m not willing to do better.”

“I know,” John said, gently reaching to take her dry, cracked hands. “You’re a hard working woman.”

When she’d arrived for the first time in London so long ago, Elizabeth was alarmed by the large crowds and the abundance of activity. She’d thought of the city as a great, hungry beast trying to digest her. At present, she saw the workhouse as the London beast’s gastric mill, a gizzard full of hard knocks meant to grind the toughness out of those the city might have trouble digesting otherwise. She was determined not to let it beat her, but feared she would soon meet her limit.

The scene above takes place in the year 1877. The ranks of the homeless had grown exponentially and the conditions within the relief system had worsened immensely in the following twenty-five years. Jack London ate the bitter food of the workhouse, and stayed the night, barely able to sleep in a filthy hammock within inches of his neighbors and surrounded by men reeking of bodily neglect, noisy in their gastric and respiratory distress, and crying out in their sleep from nightmares. The next day, the labor he was given for the relief benefits he’d received was to help keep clean the workhouse infirmary. While doing so, he was exposed to the virulent and potentially deadly refuse of the sick and dying. The conditions being harsher than he’d imagined and figuring he’d got the sampling he needed to talk about the experience with verisimilitude, he decided at the end of the work day to flee through the gate that had been opened to admit the dead wagon, which had come to the workhouse to collect the bodies of five inmates. He was required by the system to stay another night or forfeit the right to apply for relief in the future. The author did not hesitate in making his decision.

Workhouse Infirmary

I spoke to a conservative friend about what Jack London was doing in writing The People of the Abyss. Her response was, “If he’d really been willing to know what it was like, he wouldn’t have set up the extra room as a retreat, and he wouldn’t have picked summer as the time to do the investigation.”

I thought that an extraordinary dismissal of the author’s effort.

Another, ultra-conservative responded similarly, but with more vehemence. “Jack London was a communist. The fact that he did it during warm weather and had a room to go hide in when things got tough shows he was just a bleeding heart. The poor were probably encouraged by communists. London has always had a lot of immigrants. The book is tripe.”

Hmmmm? Sounded to me like someone trying to apply 21st century right wing talking points to 1902 London. I know a lot of people, many of them brave and generous, willing to make sacrifices for the greater good, but I do not personally know anyone who has the guts to do anything like what Jack London did just to see how the unfortunates of the world suffered. I am certainly not the sort of person brave enough to do that.

Immigrants were the problem then too, huh?

Scapegoats are a-dime-a-dozen when people are scared that they will not have enough or that their world might have to change a little to allow for someone else. There are always those seeking followers, individuals willing to stoke those types of fears to gain and solidify power. We have so-called leaders in America today who use those tactics. It’s easy to follow such strong men, because they point out the best scapegoats, heap ridicule on them in a particularly clever way, and thereby provide a convenient target for unfocused anger.

The trick with scapegoats is not getting to know them too well. They must remain out of focus in order for their role to continue. Stick with stereotyping the scapegoat or suffer uncomfortable compassion and discover that a real human being exists under the heavy cloak of suspicion and turpitude they’ve been forced into. The soft people of the society to which I belong, and I include myself in this—with our myriad conveniences and comforts, with our television and internet-groomed perspectives and personalities, and our sated bellies and psyches—we should be very careful about what and how we learn about how the other half live. Sorry—my fraction of one half may be a little off.

Yes, sarcasm. I get petty and small at times.

Many of those Jack London met in the workhouse were those who fell on hard times through no fault of their own, had no family to help them, and could find no way out of their predicament. Some were merely too old to be considered employable in a job market with too few jobs in a society filled with eager young people seeking work. Some suffered damage from performing the work they were qualified to do and could no longer function in the field of their expertise. So many people died suddenly of communicable diseases, especially those living in the close quarters of the East End, that sometimes all but one member of a family had passed on. In that case, the entire family safety net for the individual remaining was gone.

When I hear conservatives and libertarians, especially those who will brook no compromises, talk about giving the markets freedom and deregulating, I think of the laissez-faire capitalism of Victorian England, which had in the time of Jack London’s investigation just spilled over into the Georgian Era. I think of the abuses against workers the system allowed. I think of the poisoning of the environment and consequently the poisoning of the citizens. I think of the ineffective safety net for the old and infirm. I think of the power of greed and wonder that so many willingly or cynically disregard that in their political calculations.

Some regulations are meant to help society. Some are meant to line the pockets of those who lobbied for them, but the problem isn’t one-sided. Where I live in Eugene Oregon, I have to have a smoke alarm in each room in my house. Clearly, someone wanted to sell more smoke alarms. There are also regulations to prevent my neighbors from allowing waste, raw sewage, and chemicals in the runoff from their property into the storm sewers. That helps preserve the life that depends on the flow of clean groundwater and helps keep the rivers that constitute our municipal water sources from becoming poisonous. So many people fish those streams and depend on them for commerce of many types. A fellow down the street from me was running a mechanic shop out of his home garage, working mostly on outboard engines and snowmobiles. He was shut down for allowing waste, including gasoline and old oil from his business to run into the street drains. He saw that as a great injustice.

My response to my conservative friend concerning Jack London making his investigation in summer and establishing a retreat in the form of a warm, dry room: “The author put himself and his health at risk in order to gain understanding and to share what he found.”

I’ll add to that response here for my ultra-conservative acquaintance: Jack London could have just written an adventure story. He was good at it, and the ability had earned him money and fame.

—Alan M. Clark
Eugene, Oregon

Get a free ebook copy of The People of the Abyss from Project Gutenburg—available in various formats including Kindle and Epub, : http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1688

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Visit Alan M. Clark online: www.alanmclark.com

About Alan M Clark

Author and illustrator Alan M. Clark grew up in Tennessee in a house full of bones and old medical books. His awards include the World Fantasy Award and four Chesley Awards. He is the author of seventeen books, including ten novels, a lavishly illustrated novella, four collections of fiction, and a nonfiction full-color book of his artwork. Mr. Clark’s company, IFD Publishing, has released 44 titles of various editions, including traditional books, both paperback and hardcover, audio books, and ebooks by such authors as F. Paul Wilson, Elizabeth Engstrom, and Jeremy Robert Johnson. Alan M. Clark and his wife, Melody, live in Oregon. www.alanmclark.com

Sweat shop cartoon

In chapter 6, we find the origin of the expression “sweat shop” and get a glimpse of the miserable jobs, repetitive and requiring no imagination or intellect, that the people of the abyss were grateful to have. Tiny factories existed within single rooms of tenements that were largely still used as residences. These sweating dens, as the were called, were run by what were known as sweaters. The sweated were people, including children, who worked in such little factories for up to 14 hours a day, finishing products started elsewhere, such as clothing, shoes, saddles, and many other manufactures. To hold a job of that sort, the worker had to seem eager, as well as being fast and efficient at the work. You didn’t want to get old or worn down in any way that might compromise your ability to do the job. Countless unemployed were waiting in the wings to replace any who fell behind. And, of course, machinery, like the sewing machine, was quickly replacing huge chunks of the manual labor. Again, this was an employer’s job market, and those employers could be as particular and ruthless as they chose to be.

Sleeping Rough by Day

The people were grateful to have these jobs? Just when we decide that the work isn’t worth it, Jack London is shown the alternative. He’s taken to a park that is overflowing with homeless. They are a miserable, diseased lot of men and women of all ages taking up most of the horizontal surfaces within a fenced garden area. They lean against one another, they use each other as pillows as nearly every one of them sleeps. The park closes at night and no sleeping is allowed there after dark. The police were charged with the task of preventing the homeless from sleeping out of doors.

—Alan M. Clark
Eugene, Oregon

Get a free ebook copy of The People of the Abyss from Project Gutenburg—available in various formats including Kindle and Epub, : http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1688

Preorder A Brutal Chill in August
Visit Alan M. Clark online: www.alanmclark.com

About Alan M Clark

Author and illustrator Alan M. Clark grew up in Tennessee in a house full of bones and old medical books. His awards include the World Fantasy Award and four Chesley Awards. He is the author of seventeen books, including ten novels, a lavishly illustrated novella, four collections of fiction, and a nonfiction full-color book of his artwork. Mr. Clark’s company, IFD Publishing, has released 44 titles of various editions, including traditional books, both paperback and hardcover, audio books, and ebooks by such authors as F. Paul Wilson, Elizabeth Engstrom, and Jeremy Robert Johnson. Alan M. Clark and his wife, Melody, live in Oregon. www.alanmclark.com

In chapter 5, we get the merest glimpse of the sort of strife that occurred among people living in such close quarters. Jack London describes a fight among primarily women that occurred in the yard behind his room as he went about his writing for the day. He’d been in the midst of expressing his views on the downward spiral individuals, and indeed, generations had experienced in “the abyss,” how poor nutrition and lack of hope had sapped the strength of a people he saw as essentially strong, capable human beings. The anger involved in the fight outside seemed to have little vitality, although blows were traded and rocks used as weapons. The author didn’t appear to be alarmed, perhaps because he knew that those at odds hadn’t had sufficient nutrition to do each other real harm.

Many of the poor, who were lucky to have a bit of meat maybe once a week and fresh vegetables somewhat more frequently, ate mostly carbohydrates in the form of potatoes, bread, and alcohol. One inexpensive and rather tasteless delivery system for carbohydrates was flour stirred into water to form a quick and easy liquid meal. That may not sound like much today, but it was not uncommon among the poor in the past.

The poor often ate food that those of a higher station would not. Trotters were sheep’s feet, with the fur blanched off. Mmmm—sounds delicious, all that pale, naked sheep skin! Broxy was the meat of diseased sheep, sold for less than that of the healthy animals. Those in service in a higher class household could apply for something called pig wash. Anything that had been served at the family table, had not been totally consumed, and was no longer wanted would be considered pig wash; a joint of meat that was going bad, moldy vegetables and bread—that sort of thing. Basically leftovers in a time in which little was refrigerated—certainly nothing belonging to the poor.

Again, many saw alcoholic drink as a reasonable alternative to eating meats and vegetables. Although knowledge of microbial life and the dangers it posed were still not well understood by the general public in 1902, the health risk from rotting food was. With alcoholic drink as food, at least people knew they wouldn’t get sick. The lesson of alcohol as something to purify had been well-learned during periods of mass death in the city from water-born illness like cholera. Before the modern sewer system was built, many of the people of London had taken the habit of putting gin in their water, even for children.

—Alan M. Clark
Eugene, Oregon

Get a free ebook copy of The People of the Abyss from Project Gutenburg—available in various formats including Kindle and Epub, : http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1688

Preorder A Brutal Chill in August
Visit Alan M. Clark online: www.alanmclark.com

About Alan M Clark

Author and illustrator Alan M. Clark grew up in Tennessee in a house full of bones and old medical books. His awards include the World Fantasy Award and four Chesley Awards. He is the author of seventeen books, including ten novels, a lavishly illustrated novella, four collections of fiction, and a nonfiction full-color book of his artwork. Mr. Clark’s company, IFD Publishing, has released 44 titles of various editions, including traditional books, both paperback and hardcover, audio books, and ebooks by such authors as F. Paul Wilson, Elizabeth Engstrom, and Jeremy Robert Johnson. Alan M. Clark and his wife, Melody, live in Oregon. www.alanmclark.com

In chapter 4, Jack London found an affable fellow to room with. The author engaged him in conversation, and learned that the man was a hapless seaman, 22 years old, who had no aspirations for better work, starting a family, or truly anything other than earning the necessary funds to feed his drinking habit. If he didn’t want family, was it because he saw something like the image above in his mind’s eye when he imagined it? Despite seeming beaten down by crushing poverty and having no drive for anything better, the man was likable and intelligent and had a sense of humor. His father was a heavy drinker, and that seemed to be an acceptable course for the young man.

The only ones lower in station than this man in British society of the time were the “unfortunates,” those chronically unemployed or unemployable people who begged on the streets. Even his manner of speaking, his accent and the vernacular of his speech, which the author recorded with some attention to detail, no doubt marked him as one of the lowest class. That alone would have stood in his way had he tried to climb the ladder of success. Although perhaps not satisfied with his lot in life, the man seemed pleasantly resigned to it.

What will we do with the drunken sailor…

I am an alcoholic, 26 years sober. I emerged from a particularly sad state because of the love of family and friends, but most of all because there are survivors of alcoholism who know something about what it takes to live with such a disease and remain sober, and who were willing to help me. That’s primarily a result of Alcoholics Anonymous, AA for short. Before AA, virtually all alcoholics perished with or from the disease. If they did not die from an accident that mortally wounded, or ended up in an asylum for the mentally-ill, then they died a slow death from the over-exposure to alcohol that destroys internal organs, especially the liver. AA came into existence in 1935. It’s success rate is difficult to calculate, and has been placed as low as 3% and as high as 40%. I’ve heard slightly better statistics concerning substance abuse treatment, many forms of which incorporate the 12 step program of AA. In my life, despite the low numbers, I could see human beings surviving alcoholism. That helped me to have hope.

Perhaps the poor sot Jack London found did not see any alcoholics surviving their illness. In a time when physical comfort and an easy way to unload stress was badly needed by the down and out, and much of the available sustenance took the form of alcoholic beverages, the culture was saturated with substance abusers, the condition perhaps seeming to be quite natural and acceptable. Many saw alcoholic drink as a reasonable alternative to other foods.

Still, being a drunkard in that environment? I’d want to have my wits about me to more effectively compete for resources, jobs, and shelter, unless I merely had no hope. In that case, I suppose I might fear being fully conscious and feeling the low grade pain of hunger, the anxiety of thinking about finding shelter and my next meal. Perhaps a permanent buzz providing a certain level of anesthesia would seem a good idea.

If he had no hope, what, then, accounted for the man’s sense of humor and affable nature? I’ve found in my research into the Victorian era poor that they seem to have had a reservoir of vitality despite their predicament. I suspect that it is as simple as the fact that they only knew what they had, and what others of their kind had, and had had for generations. They had their place within a culture of dramatic inequality, but that was the way it had always been. Envy and coveting served little useful purpose in a situation in which one needed to focus what energy and faculty was available on the day to day grind of survival.

That’s not to say that there wasn’t much crime and occasional unrest. I’m merely surprised there was no more than there was. Perhaps lack of contrast plays a role as well, since these people did not wake up one morning after living most of their lives with 21st century standards to find themselves in such aching poverty. No—as Jack London points out eloquently, they got there through generations of moving in that direction.

One of the reasons I enjoy writing the tales of the Jack the Ripper Victims is that it gives me the opportunity to contrast what people had then with what we have now. Few more powerful means exist in communication than this sort of contrast to help break through the complacency many of us don so easily in modern times.

—Alan M. Clark
Eugene, Oregon

Get a free ebook copy of The People of the Abyss from Project Gutenburg—available in various formats including Kindle and Epub, : http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1688

Preorder A Brutal Chill in August
Visit Alan M. Clark online: www.alanmclark.com

About Alan M Clark

Author and illustrator Alan M. Clark grew up in Tennessee in a house full of bones and old medical books. His awards include the World Fantasy Award and four Chesley Awards. He is the author of seventeen books, including ten novels, a lavishly illustrated novella, four collections of fiction, and a nonfiction full-color book of his artwork. Mr. Clark’s company, IFD Publishing, has released 44 titles of various editions, including traditional books, both paperback and hardcover, audio books, and ebooks by such authors as F. Paul Wilson, Elizabeth Engstrom, and Jeremy Robert Johnson. Alan M. Clark and his wife, Melody, live in Oregon. www.alanmclark.com

In chapter 3, with the help of his detective acquaintance, Jack London found a refuge from the East End within the East End, a small lodging of better quality than most in the area that he could periodically visit to wash himself, keep warm, and assemble his text. That gives us an opportunity to learn something of the housing prospects for those living in the East End.

Most of the housing was of the single room variety. Whole families, sometimes more than one family lived in one room. I learned in research for my Jack the Ripper Victims Series that houses in many neighborhoods built early in the 19th century or earlier, those meant for a single family and having several rooms, were broken up into single room dwellings by the latter part of the century. The vast majority of those dwellings had no indoor plumbing. Indeed most had no room for bathing facilities. Privies were outdoor facilities, usually shared by several households. People availed themselves of public bathhouses when they had need to wash. These conditions persisted into the early 20th century, and generally had not improved by the time Jack London made his stay in the East End.

Over the course of the first half of the 1800s, London, already the largest city in the world, had tripled its population, and a similar level of growth continued for the rest of the century. The loss of labor positions during the industrial revolution had forced the unemployed out of the countryside and small towns into the big city. People came to London also from other parts of the world where there were similar problems finding work. By mid-century, more than 50% of the population of the city were born elsewhere. Landlords found it more profitable to split larger homes into tenements of one-room dwellings. Neighborhoods in which landlords took this approach soon became slums. As more and more Landlords took up the practice, the slums spread like a blight through the old neighborhoods. Large sections of London suffered severe squalid conditions, the worst being the East End. In 1888, the time of Jack the Ripper, there were approximately 800 people living per acre in Whitechapel. Those who could afford to do so fled to take up residence on the outskirts of the city. When eventually those neighborhoods suffered the blight, people fled further and the city kept growing, swallowing up many smaller towns.

Peabody Buildings

Some of the first housing projects (an American term) were installed in the city of London by American philanthropist, George Peabody. He was a banker and financier. He helped finance the Transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, and created educational opportunities in various parts of the U.S. for blacks as well as whites, even before the American Civil War. Peabody loved London and the British people and decided to try to help alleviate their poverty. He bought up land in the worst rookeries of the city, razed the buildings to the ground, and put up tenements, usually 4 story structures arranged in boxes or “U” shapes with garden courts between. Access was through a locked gate. All adult tenants had a key to the gate. The only requirement for application for rental was that the one applying have employment.

Polly Nichols and her family lived in Peabody D Block, Duke Street in South London for several years. She no doubt counted herself extremely lucky. Her flat had 3 rooms. There was a water closet shared by neighbors on the landing outside their front door, and bathing and laundry facilities on the roof. Some of those buildings still exist today. They were so loved that when, during WWII, some of the buildings were bombed, they were rebuilt and improved. Those still in existence got electricity, some as late as the 1950s.

While writing about all this for the novel A BRUTAL CHILL IN AUGUST, about the life of Polly Nichols, and researching the Peabody Buildings, something nagged at me, something that seemed familiar about the Philanthropist, but for the longest time I couldn’t figure out what it was.

Peabody Demonstration School in 1925

Then it came to me. I’d hated my junior high school in Nashville, Tennessee, gave up on my education, and failed the eighth grade. My parents enrolled me in a private school so I wouldn’t have to go back to the place I hated so much. The new one was a demonstration school, attached to an educational college, a college for teachers. The demonstration school existed so that student teachers could get experience teaching in a classroom. I was continuing my education at the Peabody Demonstration School attached to George Peabody college, a school started by the philanthropist. I was bowled over with the discovery. I suddenly felt embedded in the history I was trying to portray in the novel, and that gave me an odd feeling, somewhat thrilling. I did finally pass the eighth grade and was forgiven the lost year later by my high school in San Francisco.

Engraving by Gustave Doré

Jack London wasn’t so lucky as to land in one of the Peabody Buildings. He described the dwelling he found as opulent in comparison to the very few other accommodations available. For one thing, he wasn’t required to share the single room or his bed. He was used to open skies, dwellings more spacious, surrounded by at least a small plot of land, and he wondered at the willingness of Londoners to tolerate such condition. All the housing he’d encountered, he described as shoulder to shoulder, with but a tiny yard in back surrounded by a wall. Many of those “yards” were paved with stone, with no greenery, and virtually no trees to be seen throughout entire neighborhoods.

For the richest country in the world, huge chunks of their capital seemed a shameful slum.

—Alan M. Clark
Eugene, Oregon

Get a free ebook copy of The People of the Abyss from Project Gutenburg—available in various formats including Kindle and Epub, : http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1688

Preorder A Brutal Chill in August
Visit Alan M. Clark online: www.alanmclark.com

About Alan M Clark

Author and illustrator Alan M. Clark grew up in Tennessee in a house full of bones and old medical books. His awards include the World Fantasy Award and four Chesley Awards. He is the author of seventeen books, including ten novels, a lavishly illustrated novella, four collections of fiction, and a nonfiction full-color book of his artwork. Mr. Clark’s company, IFD Publishing, has released 44 titles of various editions, including traditional books, both paperback and hardcover, audio books, and ebooks by such authors as F. Paul Wilson, Elizabeth Engstrom, and Jeremy Robert Johnson. Alan M. Clark and his wife, Melody, live in Oregon. www.alanmclark.com

Take note of the haze in the air–that’s not just because this is an old photo.

In chapter 2, Jack London went to visit his detective acquaintance, nicknamed Johnny Upright, who lived in one of the best neighborhoods—that isn’t saying much—within the East End. The man wasn’t home, but London met the detective’s wife, daughters, and a woman servant. Playing the part of a lower class individual of the area and dressed as he was in rags, the family tried to turn the writer away. Finally he let on without explaining that he was bringing a financial opportunity to the man of the house. Still, he wasn’t admitted to the home, and sat out in the rain until the servant girl came for him. The wife apologized, and sat him in the dining room to await the return of her husband.

Knowing what I do about the hardships of life in London of the period, the author’s description of the daughters is poignant.

…pretty girls they were in their Sunday dresses; withal it was the certain weak and delicate prettiness which characterizes the Cockney lasses, a prettiness which is no more than a promise with no grip on time, and doomed to fade quickly away like the color from a sunset sky.

Perhaps Johnny Upright was doing well enough financially that his daughters didn’t have to work, but I doubt it. Assuming they were wed and began families of their own, they would probably have to do some sort of work to help support their husbands and the children on the way. Eventually perhaps even those children, while still children, would have to work as well. If Johnny Upright’s daughters became spinsters, he would certainly expect them to pull their weight with some sort of earning occupation.

Employment for the lower classes was fraught with risk of one sort or another. After reading extensively about the various sorts of occupations available for the poor in a time of vast unemployment, an employer’s market so to speak, I wrote this in my upcoming novel A Brutal Chill in August about the difficulties Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols had trying to find work as a young adult:

Polly and Bernice Godwin had worked at home as fur pullers on and off since 1853. The piece work involved pulling the loose undercoat from rabbit pelts so that the furs would not shed the down once they were used to line garments. The action created a myriad of tiny broken hair fibers that floated freely in the air. The girls could not avoid breathing the particles into their lungs. The undercoat that didn’t float away, they saved in bags to sell for a small sum per pound.

At fourteen years of age, they both wanted to find better work. Bernice had her father’s blessing to look for a job.

“You’ll stay home, do your piece work, and keep house,” Papa had told Polly. Even so, she believed she might persuade him if she found work. With heavy competition for labor, positions rarely became available.

“I’ve heard the Ryan paper factory needs a rag sorter,” Polly told Bernice one day. “Tomorrow, I’ll go try to get the position.”

Bernice’s eyes became large and she shook her head. “The rags are collected from all over the city. They don’t care as some come from the worst places. The vermin, the lice, the disease—you shouldn’t want that.”

Polly reconsidered.

While they looked into jobs at the Jessup cotton spinning mill, Polly spoke to her brother about the possibility. “Eddie told me the boss there pushes his workers to move fast to meet quotas,” she told Bernice, “and the steam-powered machinery snatches a limb or a life at least once a month.”

Bernice took a job at the white-lead works for a short time. One day she returned home with a haunted look about her. “I quit. I found out the girl I replaced wasted away and went mad. Then I learned that happens to most of the girls as works there—five already this year.”

The rate of accidents, poisoning, and disease, and the stress upon the body of the different types of work available had all become discouraging factors. Polly imagined industry as a hungry giant that preferred to feed on the young and tender, chewing or biting off a limb, crushing a head or chest, setting a poisoned trap to catch the inexperienced off guard, leaving many unfortunates ill, maimed, or dead.

And of course the environment of London itself was a danger. Above we have a photograph taken in London during the 19th century, and a painting by Claude Monet created in 1871. Literally tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Londoners were killed by the pollution in the air, water, and food. The air was filled with the chemicals and particulates that results from burning coal. New industries popped up everywhere to support the burgeoning population and to exploit the cheap labor market. Small factories occupied converted tenements or houses that once held families in residential neighborhoods. Sometimes, only a part of such a tenement or house was occupied by industry while the rest still functioned as a residence for individuals or families. With an increase in the use of chemistry, and with little knowledge of the damage many chemicals inflicted upon the bodies of those exposed to them, industries, such as match making, destroyed the lives of their workers and those living within close proximity to production. Those who suffered often did so without knowing why until it was too late. Matchmaking is only one example of the industrial poisoning of Londoners. Deadly chemicals were everywhere. They were used in medicines and in prepared foods as preservatives. Madness abounded, if not as a result of the emotional hardships of life, then from chemical damage to the brain. The piece work, fur pulling, as portrayed in the excerpt I provided from A Brutal Chill in August, caused pulmonary diseases.

Things were getting better, though. Child labor was prohibited below the age of ten in 1878. Compulsory education for children ages 5 to 10 began in 1880, and the government actually started funding that in 1891. By 1918, 16 years after Jack London stayed in the East End, the compulsory education age was expanded to include children 5 to 14 years of age.

Yes, knowing what I do about labor in London of the time, the author’s description of Johnny Upright’s daughters’ fragile, transient beauty is indeed poignant.

—Alan M. Clark
Eugene, Oregon

Get a free ebook copy of The People of the Abyss from Project Gutenburg—available in various formats including Kindle and Epub, : http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1688

Preorder A Brutal Chill in August
Visit Alan M. Clark online: www.alanmclark.com

About Alan M Clark

Author and illustrator Alan M. Clark grew up in Tennessee in a house full of bones and old medical books. His awards include the World Fantasy Award and four Chesley Awards. He is the author of seventeen books, including ten novels, a lavishly illustrated novella, four collections of fiction, and a nonfiction full-color book of his artwork. Mr. Clark’s company, IFD Publishing, has released 44 titles of various editions, including traditional books, both paperback and hardcover, audio books, and ebooks by such authors as F. Paul Wilson, Elizabeth Engstrom, and Jeremy Robert Johnson. Alan M. Clark and his wife, Melody, live in Oregon. www.alanmclark.com