The People of the Abyss

"It is a really extraordinary book. It precedes George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London by decades. It’s 1902, and he treats the east end of London as if it is, in his antiquated phrase, the ‘darkest Africa.’ As if it’s this exotic and dangerous realm that he’s adventuring into. There’s this great comic bit at the beginning where he goes into Cook’s, a map shop in Covent Garden which was the place where all the adventurers would go before embarking on these great international voyages and he says: ‘I’m going to take this journey into the east end of London.’ They pale and say: ‘We can’t help you with that, sir. We’ve got no maps of that place.’ It really was a ‘here be monsters’ situation, and it was only an hour away on foot. It’s fantastic to read. London’s got such a mastery of language. It’s slightly purple, kind of overwritten, but I guess it suits the subject matter, the way he paints these gothic pictures. There’s an extraordinary anger to it as well. When I first got into writing, everyone talked about the idea of ‘the new journalism’ – people like Gay Talese, Hunter S Thompson, Tom Wolfe, and the rest, as being the originators of the form. But it’s just not true. The People of the Abyss is a much, much earlier example of the kind of writing that would sit very happily in that genre. Yes, it is shocking, the things that he sees, and the sense of danger that leaps from the page as you’re reading it. I haven’t been down to the east end since without thinking of The People of the Abyss . It’s one of those books that once you’ve read it, it doesn’t leave you. There’s also a very interesting chapter where he goes with others out to Kent to do hop picking. There’s all this promise of work, but he ends up somewhere around Maidstone – which is a dreary, built-up area these days, but it wasn’t then – and there’s been a great hailstorm, which has damaged all the hops. So you’ve literally got these hundreds of people just sleeping in the roads, fighting over scraps of work. Like something from The Grapes of Wrath , but in Maidstone. It’s extraordinary."