The American novelist, activist and journalist Jack London (1876-1916) is widely known today for his stories drawn from his experience of the Klondike Gold Rush – `The Call of the Wild’ (1903) and `White Fang’ (1906) being amongst the most popular. They are characterised by an almost breathless style, recounting stories of animal bravery in a world of harsh natural and human struggle. His output was prodigious, and across genres from short stories to poetry (most of it largely forgotten today) and then reportage. Of the latter, `The People of the Abyss’ (1903) based on a stay in the UK in 1902 was perhaps the most significant. It went on to inspire George Orwell (see entry for him) in his own journeys and writings three decades later.
While much of the book focussed on the conditions of people living in London, there is a significant episode in which London recalls his travels to pick hops in Kent. In chapters 14 and 15, he describes his journey through the agricultural heartlands of the country, labouring in hop fields, and finally arriving in Maidstone. His version of the life that hoppers lived is harsher and more dramatic than that of Orwell’s:
`It is estimated that Kent alone requires eighty thousand of the street people to pick her hops. And out they come, obedient to the call, which is the call of their bellies and of the lingering dregs of adventure-lust still in them. Slum, stews, and ghetto pour them forth, and the festering contents of slum, stews, and ghetto are undiminished. Yet they overrun the country like an army of ghouls, and the country does not want them. They are out of place. As they drag their squat, misshapen bodies along the highways and byways, they resemble some vile spawn from underground. Their very presence, the fact of their existence, is an outrage to the fresh, bright sun and the green and growing things. The clean, upstanding trees cry shame upon them and their withered crookedness, and their rottenness is a slimy desecration of the sweetness and purity of nature.’ (`Call of the Wild,’ Chapter 14, available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/london/abyss/ch14.htm).
London’s portrait of rural life in the Wealden area of Kent contrasts sharply with the more bucolic descriptions contained in the earlier work of Dickens (whose harshest writing was about urban conditions), and the claim by a not-usually hyperbolic William Cobbett 80 years earlier when travelling through this area that it was `the finest seven miles that I have ever seen in England’ (William Cobbett, `Rural Rides’, Penguin Edition, Harmondsworth, 1967, 211). Perhaps there was some dramatization that London indulged himself in. His reports after all had clear political aims, and were guided by his own creative disposition. That can be seen clearly enough in the novels he had written. Even so, his version of a kind of pilgrimage through the Kent landscape stands valuably against those by Chaucer, Cobbett, Dickens, Orwell and, in more modern times, Graham Swift (in `Last Orders’). London states how he;
`passed through Teston and East and West Farleigh shortly after the storm, and listened to the grumbling of the hoppers and saw the hops rotting on the ground. At the hothouses of Barham Court, thirty thousand panes of glass had been broken by the hail, while peaches, plums, pears, apples, rhubarb, cabbages, mangolds, everything, had been pounded to pieces and torn to shreds. All of which was too bad for the owners, certainly; but at the worst, not one of them, for one meal, would have to go short of food or drink. Yet it was to them that the newspapers devoted columns of sympathy, their pecuniary losses being detailed at harrowing length. “Mr. Herbert L— calculates his loss at £8000;” “Mr. F—, of brewery fame, who rents all the land in this parish, loses £10,000;” and “Mr. L—, the Wateringbury brewer, brother to Mr. Herbert L—, is another heavy loser.” As for the hoppers, they did not count. Yet I venture to assert that the several almost-square meals lost by underfed William Buggles, and underfed Mrs. Buggles, and the underfed Buggles kiddies, was a greater tragedy than the £10,000 lost by Mr. F—. And in addition, underfed William Buggles’ tragedy might be multiplied by thousands where Mr. F—’s could not be multiplied by five.’ (Ibid)
London’s work has real value because he does not just observe, but gives voice to the `people of the abyss’ in his next chapter – `The Sea Wife.’ Here, arrived at Maidstone, he finds lodging in what he calls the poor quarter of the town:
`You might not expect to find the Sea Wife in the heart of Kent, but that is where I found her, in a mean street, in the poor quarter of Maidstone. In her window she had no sign of lodgings to let, and persuasion was necessary before she could bring herself to let me sleep in her front room. In the evening I descended to the semi-subterranean kitchen, and talked with her and her old man, Thomas Mugridge by name. And as I talked to them, all the subtleties and complexities of this tremendous machine civilisation vanished away. It seemed that I went down through the skin and the flesh to the naked soul of it, and in Thomas Mugridge and his old woman gripped hold of the essence of this remarkable English breed. I found there the spirit of the wanderlust which has lured Albion’s sons across the zones; and I found there the colossal unreckoning which has tricked the English into foolish squabblings and preposterous fights, and the doggedness and stubbornness which have brought them blindly through to empire and greatness; and likewise I found that vast, incomprehensible patience which has enabled the home population to endure under the burden of it all, to toil without complaint through the weary years, and docilely to yield the best of its sons to fight and colonise to the ends of the earth.’ (https://www.marxists.org/archive/london/abyss/ch15.htm)
He goes on to record the hardships they had endured – the fifteen children, `gone or dead’ that Mrs Mugridge had given birth to, now scattered from places as far afield as Australia, America, and Argentina. Travelling around Britain in the period when it was economically and politically most globally strong and dominant prompted London to ask some uncomfortable questions about how sustainable this all was:
`The most complacent Britisher cannot hope to draw off the life-blood, and underfeed, and keep it up forever. The average Mrs. Thomas Mugridge has been driven into the city, and she is not breeding very much of anything save an anaemic and sickly progeny which cannot find enough to eat. The strength of the English-speaking race to-day is not in the tight little island, but in the New World overseas, where are the sons and daughters of Mrs. Thomas Mugridge. The Sea Wife by the Northern Gate has just about done her work in the world, though she does not realize it. She must sit down and rest her tired loins for a space; and if the casual ward and the workhouse do not await her, it is because of the sons and daughters she has reared up against the day of her feebleness and decay.’ (Ibid)
London returned to the US, and died in California aged only 50, in 1916. The questions prompted to him in Maidstone however were to echo from his work through to that of Orwell and others for the following decades. Britain’s hunt for a role as its colonial possessions dwindled was to be a long, often vexed and painful one. In some ways, it remains unresolved today, through manifests itself in very different ways. London’s very brief Maidstone foray in 1902, and his rendition of that is therefore not just of literary significance, but also has historical and political importance.