Hoping to interest Cosmopolitan editor Bailey Millard in a series of reports from the Snark voyage, Jack London wrote to him on 18 February 1906. London offered The People of the Abyss, his eyewitness account of life in London’s East End, as proof that he could ‘deliver the goods’. He mentioned the research he had done and the material he had gathered. He also maintained that he had taken ‘two-thirds of the photographs with [his] own camera’. 1 London did not specify whether he had in mind the American edition of The People of the Abyss, published by the Macmillan Company (New York, 1903); the English edition, published by Isbister...