The People of the Abyss by Jack London — Read

Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the time, / City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime? / There among the gloomy alleys Progress halts on palsied feet; / Crime and hunger cast out maidens by the thousand on the street;

There the master scrimps his haggard seamstress of her daily bread; / There the single sordid attic holds the living and the dead; / There the smouldering fire of fever creeps across the rotted floor, / And the crowded couch of incest, in the warrens of the poor.