You may recognize
Jack London from his books Call of the Wild and White Fang but during the end of Queen Victoria's reign and the coronation of
Edward VII he donned rags and entered the underworld of East London to view how people in the poorest part of England were living - he describes them as the bottom of the social pit. Seventy years after
Charles Dicken's depictions very little had changed. With the industrial revolution, fewer people could achieve larger output of goods, but this only obtained creature comforts for the 40,000 wealthier people (who showed in the 1881 census to have no occupation). Forty million people in England lived in poverty. Many of those people had insufficient food to be able to work efficiently and even with the houses in the East End of London renting out rooms to hold sometimes more than one family, many were still unsheltered. It was unlawful to sleep in a park or on the streets at night and if caught it was a 14 day jail sentence. Thus, during daylight work hours people slept on park benches. One in 4 adults were destined to die in the workhouse, infirmary or asylum, while 55% of children died before the age of 5. Unclean air was also a problem. A curator of
Kew Gardens studied smoke deposits on vegetation and calculated 6 tons of soot and hydrocarbons for every 1/4 square mile in London. Yet, Jack London was surprised how many people rejoiced during the coronation of Edward VII. He couldn't understand so much merriment and drinking and delight at
viewing the finery of the nobility with their pomp and circumstance while the Londoners were starving.
Huxley, the Medical Officer of the East End stated that the life of the "savage" in Alaska was preferable to the "civilized" Christian in London. In Alaska, on the banks of the Yukon River, people survived by fishing and hunting. Animal skins provide warm clothing and there was plenty of timber to build shelter and use for fire wood. In England they toiled to buy food, but never seemed to earn enough to feed their family, and most wore rages. Too many did not have shelter. Jack London sums it up: Civilization has been mismanaged.
