It's a beautiful day over here in East London. The sun is setting. I'm sitting on the canal. We're just approaching golden hour,

and it's time to record another episode of Riley's Comey Book Club. Who's ready for some slightly more serious in tone version of me saying stuff? So, further ado, welcome to the Comedy Book Club, May edition, where we are talking about

an unusual book, because the other ones I've done have been, I think, more or more recent

books about sort of current issues.

And I thought this one was really interesting

because it's a much older book.

That's still about very relevant issues.

So People of the Abyss by Jack London.

It is available free online.

I'll include a link in the episode description.

But what we're talking about here is it was it

originally written sort of as a travel travel piece is Jack London despite the

fact that he's called London's American guy a travel writer from California who

was also sort of ardent socialist anti--imperialist, all this good stuff, who was on assignment,

initially to go to London to cover the coronation of King Edward, I think it in Edward in like 1900-ish.

And the assignment was to do so sort of mixing with the characters from the East End.

However, what he saw while in London and in the East End kind of provoked him to do something different.

He ended up staying there for seven weeks, mixing in with the

people who lived in the East End and worked in the East End, embedding himself in the workhouses,

and in the sort of, well, they were called coffee shops, but they were really coffee shops,

in the houses and the dwellings, interviewing people,

and trying to find out the real dimensions of the causes of poverty. It became a sort of

...