In 1896, author Arthur Morrison gained notoriety for his bleak and violent A Child of the Jago, a slum novel that captured the desperate struggle to survive among London’s poorest. When a reviewer accused Morrison of exaggerating the depravity of the neighborhood on which the Jago was based, he incited the era’s most contentious public debate about the purpose of realism and the responsibilities of the novelist. In his self-defense and in his wider body of work, Morrison demonstrated not only his investments as a formal artist, but also his awareness of social questions. As the first critical essay collection on Arthur Morrison and the East End, this book assesses Morrison’s contributions to late-Victorian culture, especially discourses around English working-class life. Chapters evaluate Morrison in the context of Victorian criminality, child welfare, disability, housing, professionalism, and slum photography. Morrison’s works are also reexamined in the light of writings by Sir Walter Besant, Clementina Black, Charles Booth, Charles Dickens, George Gissing, and Margaret Harkness. This volume features an introduction and 11 chapters by preeminent and emerging scholars of the East End. They employ a variety of critical methodologies, drawing on their respective expertise in literature, history, art history, sociology, and geography. Critical Essays on Arthur Morrison and the East End throws fresh new light on this innovative novelist of poverty and urban life.
Author(s): Diana Maltz
Series: Among the Victorians and Modernists
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 270
City: New York
Cover
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Figures
Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Morrison’s Early Life and Writings
A Child of the Jago
The Reception of Jago and Morrison’s Artistic Choices
Japanese Art
Detective Fiction
Returning to the East End Imaginary
Morrison’s Moves and the Importance of Essex
Last Years
The Advent of Morrison Studies
The Focus of This Essay Collection
The Structure of the Essay Collection
Notes
Part I Vulnerable Bodies
1 Classed Childhood in Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago and Victorian Slum Fiction
Victorian Narratives of Classed Childhood
The Problem of Childhood in the Slums
Conclusion
Notes
2 Visual Disability and Criminality in Morrison’s The Hole in the Wall
“Cunning With a Life’s Blindness”: Portraits of Blindness
Common Cause: Lime, Injury, and Industry
Visual Acuity and Moral Worth
Notes
3 Photographic Realism and the “Ragged Boy” in Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago (1896), To London Town (1899), …
Introduction
The Form of the Ragged Boy
Five Feet Two, Solemnity Great: Dicky Perrott
Conclusion
Notes
Part II Social Investigation
4 Erasing Women’s Labor: Neglecting Female Reformers in the Slum Fiction of Besant, Harkness, and Morrison
Introduction
“Like a Tamer Among Beasts”: The Iron Discipline of Father Sturt in A Child of the Jago
“I Do Not Expect to Do Better Than Men […] It Will Be Enough If I Do as Well”: Mythologizing Male Genius in All Sorts and ...
Protecting the Slum Sister in In Darkest London
Conclusion
Notes
5 “Not What It Was Made Out”: Hygiene, Health, and Moral Welfare in the Old Nichol, 1880–1900
“Metropolitan Degradation”: Linking Poverty With Dirt
Keeping Clean in Adversity
Conclusion: Reputations
Acknowledgments
Notes
6 “Enterprising Realists”: Tracing the Influence of Charles Booth’s Life and Labour On A Child of the Jago and Other Slum Fictions
“That Gift of the Imagination Which Is Called ‘Realistic’.”
Classes C to E: “Respectable Poverty” in Booth and Morrison
Two Important Novelists, Gissing and Morrison, in Jay’s Orbit
The Knock at the Door: Compiling the Curate’s Notebook
Riven With (The Same) Contradictions: Booth, Jay, and Morrison
Morrison’s First-Hand Experience and Booth’s Best Guesses
Checking Up On Morrison’s “Facts”
“Chronicles of the Sordid”: Popular Fiction Takes a Sociological Turn—Harkness, Rook, and Whiteing
Booth’s Eight London Class Categories
Notes
Part III Crime and Money
7 Afterlives of A Child of the Jago
A Child of the Nichol: Arthur Harding’s “My Apprenticeship to Crime”
The Shadow of the Jago: Alexander Baron’s King Dido
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
8 Morrison’s Camorra: Organized Crime in Transcultural Context
Defining Organized Crime
Morrison and the Hooligan After 1900
Camorra Culture
The Camorra in the English-Language Periodical Press
Stories of Naples and the Camorra
Proximity and Distance Among Morrison’s Criminals
The Movement to Corporate Crime
Conclusion: Dorrington’s Perfection of Systems: Moving Things and Using People
Acknowledgments
Notes
9 Investment and Housing in Gissing’s The Unclassed and Morrison’s “All That Messuage”
Abraham Gets His Due in The Unclassed
The Capitalist as Victim in “All That Messuage”
Postscript
Acknowledgments
Notes
Part IV Resituating Morrison
10 Disconnecting and Reconnecting Morrison: Professional and Specialist Authorship
Life and Work: Apprentice Years at the People’s Palace
Market Writing: Slums, Zoos, Private Detectives
Discovering Japan
Professionalism and the Question of Specialization
Notes
11 Essex and the Metropolitan Periphery in To London Town, Cunning Murrell, and “A Wizard of Yesterday”
The City, the Slums, and the River: Morrison’s Imaginative Places and Existing Views of Him
Morrison and London’s Outer Rings
To London Town and the Birth of Greater London
More Urban Than at First Sight: Cunning Murrell and “A Wizard of Yesterday”
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
