SOURCE : "A Slum Novel," in The Saturday Review, New York, Vol. 82, November 28, 1896, p. 573.

[In the following essay, Wells notes the shortcomings of A Child of the Jago, yet praises it as "admirably conceived and excellently written."]

The son of the alcoholic proletarian, the apparently exhausted topic of Dr. Barnardo, has suddenly replaced the woman with the past in the current novel. We have had him clothed in Cant as with a garment in the popular success of Cleg Kelly, and we have had him presented, out Mr.-Henry-James-ing Mr. Henry James in pursuit of the mot juste, in the amiable Sentimental Tommy. And two men of knowledge as well as ability have been dealing with him in the new spirit of sincerity. No doubt this is, as yet, but a beginning. Next year the artful publisher will be asking his young authors for books about poor boys born in sin and vermin and displaying with infinite pathos the stunted rudiments of a soul, and the still more artful bookseller will be passionately overstocking himself with innumerable imitations. It is indisputable that the rediscovery of Oliver Twist is upon us. The imitator, that pest of reviewers, that curse of literature, will catch him and keep him. After the fashion of these latter days, we shall all be heartily sick of him long before we are allowed to hear the last of him. So far, however, he has been a fairly interesting person.

A Child of the Jago is indeed indisputably one of the most interesting novels this year has produced. We have admired Mr. Morrison already for his "Lizer'unt"; we have disliked him for his despicable detective stories; and we will frankly confess we did not think him capable of anything nearly so good as this admirably conceived and excellently written story. It deals with a well-known corner of the East End, not only with extraordinary faithfulness, which indeed is attainable to any one reasonably clear of cant and indolence, but also with a really artistic sense of effect. It is beyond doubt that Mr. Morrison must be full of East End material, and never once through this book does he drop into the pitfall of reporting. A Child of the Jago is one of those rare and satisfactory novels in which almost every sentence has its share in the entire design.

The design, it must be confessed, is a little narrow. It is as if Mr. Morrison had determined to write of the Jago and nothing but the Jago. It is the Jago without relativity. The reader will remember the spacious effect at the end of Mr. Conrad's Outcast of the Islands, when Almayer shook his fist at the night and silence outside his sorrows. Mr. Morrison never gets that spacious effect, although he carries his reader through scenes that would light into grandeur at a glance, at the mere turn of a phrase. The trial scene of Josh Perrott for the murder of Weech, and the execution scene that follows, show this peculiar want of breadth in its most typical manner. Mr. Morrison sticks to Josh Perrott, hints vaguely at the judge, jerks with his thumb at the Royal Arms, moves his head indicative of policemen, as though he was uneasy in such company. The execution is got off in three pages with a flavour of having been written in a hurry, is, indeed, a mere sketch of one of the characters for the fuller picture there should have been. It seems all the slighter, because it comes immediately after an elaborately written murder, action as finely executed as one could well imagine, and just before the equally stirring concluding chapter, the killing of Dick Perrott in a street faction fight. Moreover, by this brevity the latter chapter is brought too close to the murder chapter. Instead of crest and trough, a rise and cadence of emotion, we end in a confusion, like water breaking on a rocky beach. Had the father and son been presented in antagonism with some clearly indicated creative and destroying force, with Destiny, with Society or with human Stupidity, the book might have concluded with that perfect unity of effect it needs and does not possess.

But this want is not a failure with Mr. Morrison so much as the expression of his peculiar mental quality. He sees the Jago, is profoundly impressed by the appearance of the Jago, renders its appearance with extraordinary skill. But the origin of the Jago, the place of the Jago in the general scheme of things, the trend of change in it, its probable destiny—such matters are not in his mind. Here, perhaps, is his most fundamental utterance, àpropos of a birth:—

Father Sturt met the surgeon as he came away in the later evening, and asked if all were well. The surgeon shrugged his shoulders. 'People would call it so,' he said. 'The boy's alive, and so is the mother. But you and I may say the truth. You know the Jago far better than I. Is there a child in all this place that wouldn't be better dead—still better unborn? But does a day pass without bringing you just such a parishioner? Here lies the Jago, a nest of rats, breeding, breeding, as only rats can; and we say it is well. On high moral grounds we uphold the right of rats to multiply their thousands. Sometimes we catch a rat. And we keep it a little while, nourish it carefully, and put it back into the nest to propagate its kind.'

Father Sturt walked a little way in silence. Then he said: 'You are right, of course. But who'll listen, if you shout it from the housetops? I might try to proclaim it myself, if I had time and energy to waste. But I have none—I must work, and so must you. The burden grows day by day, as you say. The thing's hopeless, perhaps, but that is not for me to discuss. I have my duty.'

The surgeon was a young man, but Shoreditch had helped him over most of his enthusiasms. 'That's right,' he said, 'quite right. People are so very genteel, aren't they?' He laughed, as at a droll remembrance. 'But, hang it all, men like ourselves needn't talk as though the world was built of hardbake. It's a mighty relief to speak truth with a man who knows—a man not rotted through with sentiment. Think how few men we trust with the power to give a fellow-creature a year in gaol, and how carefully we pick them! Even damnation is out of fashion, I believe, among theologians. But any noxious wretch may damn human souls to the Jago, one after another, year in and year out, and we respect his right—his sacred right.'

There speaks Mr. Morrison. It is practical on the face of it, and quite what would occur to a man looking so nearly at Whitechapel that the wider world where the races fight together was hidden. But the fact is that neither ignorance, wrong moral suggestions, nor parasites are inherited; the baby that survives in the Jago must needs have a good physique, the Jago people are racially indistinguishable from the people who send their children to Oxford, and the rate of increase of the Jago population is entirely irrelevant to the problem. The Jago is not a "black inheritance," it is a black contagion—which alters the whole problem. An d Mr. Morrison knocks his surgeon's case entirely to pieces by his own story; for he shows, firstly, in Mrs . Perrott that to come into the Jago is to assimilate one-self to the Jago; and, secondly, in Kiddo Cook, that a vigorous, useful citizen may come out of it.