La Plus ca Change...

Read this book. It's short. It's shocking. It's powerful.

England 100 years ago and it's like yesterday - the squalor still exists - now people don't starve to death covered with vermin, but children still suffer, lives are still hideous, and the underclass flourishes.

Reading this, and Orwell's "Road to Wigan Pier", you become aware that not only Black slaves were exploited in Englnd (and America, too - See Upton Sinclair, "The Jungle"). The only difference between black and white slaves were that the whites thought that they were free, but were actually worse off than slaves with owners because they had no economic value to their masters, were totally expendable and easily replaceable from the common heap of labour.

On the surface, things are totally diferent, however, we are again (or perhaps still) in a situation where there are more workers than jobs, and "the good employer is undercut by the bad, and the bad by the worse".

Salutory.

I unwisely went into the university bookshop, just to do some browsing, saw this and came out £9 poorer. It looks very interesting.

Started reading this. It seems a lot like The Road To Wigan Pier and Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell, but published thirty years earlier.

I have not read this all yet, but from what I have read, I would say it is better than The Road To Wigan Pier or Down and Out in Paris and London. Orwell did report what the people he met had said, but he tended to report his owns impressions more often. Jack London reports more the sayings of the people he meets. Jack London had a big, well educated brain, a young, strong body, and a total absence of fear. I am sure these attributes helped him to make this great bit of reportage. Bits of what I have read reminded me of some other books I have read recently. I have sometimes wondered whether Robert Tressell was exaggerating a bit in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. I saw an 100 year old film clip on Reel Britain recently, filmed outside some factory gates. The factory workers all seemed fairly happy and healthy, reasonably well fed and well dressed. I guess the factory at which they worked provided fairly steady employment. In People of The Abyss, there was a young socialist who reminded me very much of Robert Owen from The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. So much so, that I would be surprised if its author, Robert Tressell, had not personally known him. Jack London reports of a young lad who was dying of TB and coughing up his lungs in a house where one person he meets works making shoes. The lad's mother was a widow and he was her only child. On another occasion, Jack London says he that was talking to an old sailor while queuing up for a bed in the workhouse. This old man, rather unbelievably, had won a Victoria Cross, having fought everywhere from China to The Indian Mutiny. I thought “Flashman”, only as he was a sailor, a bit of Aubrey/Maturin too. Even the old man's age, 87, seemed rather a stretch. I have read all of George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman books, including one called Mr American (a good book) in which he appears as an old man. Maybe the real Flashman might have ended up like the old man, only Flashman was officer class so probably not. It reminded me also of bits of a biography of George Gissing I read. Gissing's first wife was a prostitute and an alcoholic. After separating from her, he paid her £50 a year for her upkeep. This was not enough to live on well, but enough to have somewhere to flop down at night and get drunk. When Gissing looked through her room after she had died, all he found was a dress hung on a door hook, some crusts of bread in a drawer along with some of his love letters. Getting drunk was what many of the working class poor tried to do, although this does not correspond with The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. They had no prospects, they lived hand to mouth, old age was not worth contemplating. Jack London talks about an evening he spent at a pub with one young man. He did not want to get married or have a family, because he had watched his father come in late after working hard all day, be scolded by his mother and forced to hand over all his wages. The young man would rather work when he could find it, then drink it all away, then try to find more work. London reports an episode where two women have a fight in earshot, encouraged by onlookers. All this reminded me a bit of Gissing's second wife, who was a right harridan. Still, poverty and stress does this to you I expect. It is a bit of a shock to see conditions had not changed much by the 1930s when Orwell was carrying out his undercover work. According to Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, social conditions had much improved by the 1950s. Wages were better and unemployment was low, although many of the working class were still feckless. The last book I finished, Lionel Asbo, brings working class, big city life up to date. Fecklessness, petty crime, drunkeness and violence were still portrayed as normal, but at least people were not sleeping out in the open or going days without food.