In July of that year he was in London, where he visited the famous Russian political exile and writer, Alexander Herzen.

In London Dostoevsky came face to face for the first time with the industrial society which he regarded as “the triumph of Baal.” The thing that struck him most was the contrast between the “colossal façade” of riches, luxury, and general prosperity of the few and the abject poverty of the many and their “coolie-like” acquiescence in their fate. “In the face of such enormous riches, such immense pride of the spirit of domination, and such triumphant perfection of the creations of the spirit,” Dostoevsky wrote in the April, 1863, issue of Vremya, in which he described his impressions of his first visit abroad, “the starving soul is humbled and driven to submission, seeking salvation in gin and dissipation and beginning to believe that this is the way things ought to be. Facts oppress the spirit, and if scepticism is born, it is a gloomy, accursed sort of scepticism which seeks salvation in religious fanaticism.”

This is the glimpse of London in the early sixties of the last century that Dostoevsky gives in the same issue of Vremya:

“In London you can see crowds so vast, and in such an environment, as you will not see anywhere else in the world. For instance, I was told that every Saturday night half a million workers, men and women, with their children, spill into the streets like a flood, flocking to certain parts of the town, and all through the night, till five o’clock in the morning, they are taking part in a bacchanalian revel, eating and drinking like beasts, to last, one would think, the whole week. All this, of course, means going short for the rest of the week, saving up their meagre earnings gained with toil, sweat, and curses. In the butchers’ and grocers’ shops flaring gas jets are burning, lighting up the streets brightly. It is as though a ball had been prepared for these white negroes. The people swarm round the open taverns and in the streets, eating and drinking everywhere. The public houses are as gay as palaces. All are drunk, but not cheerfully; everything is sombre, dull, and somehow ominously quiet. Only from time to time is this brooding silence, which weighs so heavily upon everything, broken by loud curses and bloody fights. All seem to be set on getting dead drunk as quickly as possible. Wives are no better than their men and get drunk with them; the children run about and crawl among them.

“On such a night, at two o’clock in the morning, I lost my way and wandered about for hours in the streets among the countless multitudes of this gloomy city, driven to ask the way almost by signs as I don’t know a word of English. I found my way at last, but the impression of what I had seen weighed on my mind for three days and would not let me rest. The common people are the same everywhere, but here everything is so overwhelming and so startling that what existed before only in my imagination, now confronts me as a solid reality. Here you are no longer aware even of people, but of an insensible human mass, a general loss of consciousness, systematic, resigned, encouraged. When you look on these outcasts of society, you feel that for a long time to come the prophecy will not be fulfilled for them; that for a long time there will be no palm branches for them, nor white robes; that for a long time they will call in vain to the throne of the Almighty, ‘How long, O Lord!’

“But they know this themselves, and so far they have been protesting against the wrongs society has inflicted on them by forming all kinds of dark religious sects. We are surprised at the folly of people embracing such superstitions, but we fail to realise that what we see here is a rejection of our social formula, an obstinate, unconscious, instinctive separation, a separation at all costs, for the sake of salvation, a separation accompanied by a feeling of disgust with us, and fear, too. These millions, abandoned and driven away from the rich man’s table, jostling and crushing each other in the outer darkness in which they have been flung by their more fortunate brothers, are groping blindly to knock at the gates—any gates, looking desperately for a way of escape from the suffocating dark cellar. Here we are witnessing a last desperate attempt to hold together in a community among themselves, prepared to abandon even the semblance of human beings, so long as they can have a life of their own, so long as they can keep out of our way.

“Anyone who has ever visited London has probably been to the Haymarket, if only once. This is the quarter which is at night crowded with women of the street. In the Haymarket I saw mothers who had brought their young daughters, girls who were still in their teens, to be sold to men. Little girls of about twelve seize you by the hand and ask you to go with them. Once I remember seeing among the crowd of people in the street a little girl who could not have been more than six years old. Her clothes were in tatters. She was dirty, barefoot, and beaten black and blue. Her body, which could be seen through the holes in her clothes, was all bruised. She was walking along aimlessly, hardly knowing where she was, and without apparently being in any hurry to get anywhere. Goodness knows why she was roaming about in the crowd; perhaps she was hungry. No one paid any attention to her.