SOURCE : A review of "Tales of Mean Streets," in The Bookman, Vol. 1, No. 1, February, 1895, pp. 121-22.

[The following review praises Morrison's Tales of Mean Streets.]

[Tales of Mean Streets] is an unmistakably strong book. The East End and its dwellers have never before been painted from the same standpoint, nor in so vigorous and independent a fashion. That it gives the inevitable picture which sojourners in the neighbourhood must carry away, we certainly do not assert. It is distinctly limited, but limited because its point of view is individual, its purpose scrupulously truthful. Mr. Morrison's intention has been to tell just what he has seen, idealising nothing and keeping back little. He has carried it out with a frankness which no doubt some readers will term brutal, and which certainly wants some courage to face. They are pictures of misery, cruelty, sordidness, he gives us for the most part, pictures rather than descriptions; the moral showman never appears at all to pull a long face, or shake his head, or say "How pitiful!" or "How wrong!" The reader is left to make his own reflections, and they will not be comfortable ones, on "Lizerunt," "Without Visible Means," and "On the Stairs." Mr. Morrison has plainly a bias; and who has not? With the right or wrong of that bias literary criticism has nothing to do, provided he give it logical and forcible expression. It is, however, perfectly legitimate to take objection to the long monotony of dreariness, which the slight facetiousness of "The Red Cow Group," the comic mixture of rascality and hysteria in "A Conversion," the patient pluck in "Three Rounds," and the grim independence of "Behind the Shade," are not enough, and hardly of a kind, to relieve. It is fair to say that there is something wanting in his picture—something pertaining to rational happiness and unselfish endeavour, which experience has led one to expect in streets however mean. We need not accept his as the whole picture, but who will dare to say it is not true in great part? The book is far from heartless; indeed, possibly it is just because the observer's feelings were not of that easy kind that can be relieved by mere words of pity that his stories are so grim and so ungenial. So much for the effect of the tales on our emotions. Regarded merely from the point of fiction, they are the work of an unusually vigorous writer, whose vision is clear and whose dramatic sense is vivid, and who, in putting his scenes and pictures into words, invariably takes the best and shortest way. An introduction has been written for the American edition; and a portrait of Mr. Morrison will be found among our News Notes.