TGNC

Here you can find downloadable PDFs of each chapter of this book, along with comments and comparisons to 2011 UK living standards.  I've also uploaded the full, non-commented version of the book.

What I want to try and do here is note how we are changing - evolving - in the social sense and to suggest where this evolutionary pathway is leading us.  If I'm right, then we're in for a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but it is how long we take and the methods we choose to use to journey along the rainbow that will shape the generation whose job will be to distribute the gold in the pot.

There are, as far as I can see, two ways to make this evolutionary journey.  we can either allow things to take their natural course over the next couple of centuries, while our children's children compete for ever-decreasing financial resources, or we can pre-empt the next footstep in Nature's plan and avoid all the nastiness.

The first way will lead to bloodshed as well as sacrifice; the other will avoid the bloodshed while still arriving at the same result.  Knowing humanity as I do, I can foresee a red path to the future, and that's a shame because it will be yet another opportunity to improve the lot of all people that we will have ignored and, consequently, lost.

Here's a couple of links to go with Chapter 1.  They describe one area of East London that echoes parts of what Jack London says.  There are some good photos, as well as quotes from Charles Dickens as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canning_Town

http://apps.newham.gov.uk/History_canningtown/pic01.htm  (change picture numbers up to 70 - there are gaps in the sequence) - A history of the Abbey Marshes below West Ham, where Silvertown came to exist.

My own interest in this area of London is that it is where my paternal ancestors, immigrants from what was the Spanish Netherlands in the 1600's, lived and toiled as sweated labourers (silk weavers) under the very conditons that the book describes.

There is a direct comparison between the Haves and Have-Nots within the paternal side of my family tree.  Working in the kind of squalor that Jack London describes, one of my ancestors, James Vango, is recorded as having woven the silk brocade that was used in Princess (later Queen) Victoria's wedding dress.