The People of the Abyss

[1] London attempted to understand the working-class of this deprived area of the city, sleeping in workhouses[2] or on the streets, and staying as a lodger with a poor family.

A contemporary advertisement for the book compared it to Jacob Riis's sensational How the Other Half Lives (1890), which had documented life in the slums of New York City in the 1880s.

[4] Reviewing the book for the Daily Express, journalist and editor Bertram Fletcher Robinson wrote that it would be "difficult to find a more depressing volume".

It featured in H. G. Wells's popular 1901 book Anticipations multiple times, along with the phrase "the People of the Abyss",[6] which he would use again in Chapter 3 of Mankind in the Making (1903).

In 1907 London used the expression "the people of the abyss" in The Iron Heel,[7] a work of dystopian science fiction set in the United States.