Jack London’s Extraordinary Photos of London’s East End in 1902
Men sleeping in Green Park.
In 1902 the American author Jack London visited his namesake city – at the time when it was still the largest in the world. In a book that became to be known as The People of the Abyss he described the time when he lived in the Whitechapel district sleeping in workhouses, so-called doss-houses and even on the streets.
It was said that about half a million people were living in these awful and terrible conditions in Britain’s capital city. London took the photographs that illustrated his extraordinary book (between 1900 and 1916 the American writer took more than 12 thousand photographs).