SOURCE: "Ethnography in the East End: Native Customs and Colonial Solutions in 'A Child of the Jago,'" in English Literature in Transition: 1880-1920, Vol. 37, No. 4, 1994, pp. 490-501.

[In the following essay, Kijinski explicates the connection between London's nineteenth-century poor and native peoples of Africa in the time of colonization and the anxiety both groups produced in the English upper classes because of their foreigness and "degradation."]

One sign of the anxiety that many British citizens felt at the end of the nineteenth century about England's future position as an imperial power was the widely shared concern over how poverty and urban living conditions were debilitating the working classes. Recruiting problems during the Boer War had been unnerving: an alarmingly large number of working-class recruits were found to be unfit for service. In 1904, an Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration was established to investigate this problem. The question had to be asked: had conditions in urban England created a generation of men unfit to protect the interests of the overseas empire? Worse than this, the homeland itself was placed in jeopardy; it appeared that within the very heart of the British Empire an alien and almost invisible group of "sub-standard" urban dwellers was coming into existence by a reverse process of evolution. As Harold Perkin comments, the presence of this group posed "a covert and insidious threat from poverty itself to the physical, intellectual and moral fitness of the nation."

One of the most important novels that allowed the middle-class public to envision these aliens within their midst was Arthur Morrison's A Child of the Jago (1896). The novel presented an examination of inhabitants of a particularly poor section of London's East End. Morrison, who had already gained a reputation as a chronicler of East End life with his Tales of Mean Streets (1894), had first-hand experience—both personal and professional—of life in the less-fashionable parts of London. Born and raised in the East End, he worked first as an office boy and then as a third-class clerk for the architect's department of the School Board of London. In 1886 he was selected to be the secretary to the Beaumont Trust, which funded the People's Palace. Putting into concrete form Walter Besant's ideas about educating the poor, the People's Palace offered opportunities for recreation and self-improvement to residents of the East End. Under Besant, Morrison became sub-editor of the Palace's publication, the Palace Journal, which featured news and information about the cultural activities offered by this institution.

Morrison's Child of the Jago is a fictional counterpart of such factual reports on London's poor as Andrew Mearns's The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (1883), William Booth's In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890), and A. Osbourne Jay's Life in Darkest London (1891)—all written by men with a religious mission to the poor. Morrison, in fact, wrote his novel in response to a suggestion from Jay. Jay urged Morrison to use his talents as a literary artist to give the public as a picture of the Old Nichol, a particularly poor and violent East End neighborhood where Jay worked as a pastor. The Old Jago is the name that Morrison would give to this area.

As the titles of Jay's and Booth's books indicate, these investigations of life among Britain's poor build upon contemporary interest in African exploration and colonization, as does Morrison's novel. The value of the African/British comparison is suggested by Booth, who notes that ethnographic accounts of "degraded" African people had won the attention of British readers: "This summer the attention of the civilised world has been arrested by the story which Mr. Stanley has told of 'Darkest Africa' and his journeyings across the heart of the Lost Continent." Booth suggests, however, that this interest in a "native other" could be focused on populations much closer to home:

But while brooding over the awful presentation of life as it exists in the vast African forest, it seemed to me only too vivid a picture of many parts of our own land. As there is a darkest Africa is there not also a darkest England? Civilization, which can breed its own barbarians, does it not also breed its own pygmies? May we not find a parallel at our own doors, and discover within a stone's throw of our cathedrals and palaces similar horrors to those which Stanley has found existing in the great Equatorial forest?

Booth, Mearns, and Jay had alerted readers to the existence of this degraded and home-grown "native" through their compilation of factual reports on the lives of the London poor. Morrison, however, as a novelist, creates a fictional world that becomes a living urban jungle and presents his middle-class readers living subjects—"natives" who are surprisingly human but who live within a series of cultural structures that fall outside those norms taken for granted by the average British citizen of the late nineteenth century. Dwellers in the Jago are human and thus—like the inhabitants of the "prehistoric" world of Conrad's Heart of Darkness—particularly frightening, but they are also "natives," the regressive, devolving "other," living within a progressive, evolving culture, and thereby placing it in jeopardy.

Morrison's attempt to present middle-class readers with a vivid account of this alien population gained immediate—but controversial—popularity. H. G. Wells, for example, reviewing the novel for the Saturday Review, found it to be a powerful account of London slum life—although it was not didactic enough to satisfy Wells completely. The influential H. D. Traill attacked the novel as a representative of what he calls the "New Realism." Traill compares Morrison's novel to the work of another realist, Stephen Crane, and concludes that Morrison's work is much superior to that of Crane:

Above all, Mr. Morrison wields a certain command of pathos, a power in which Mr. Crane is not only deficient, but of which he does not even appear to know the meaning; and were it not for a certain strange and, in truth, paradoxical defect, of which more hereafter, in his method of employing it, he would at times be capable of moving his readers very powerfully indeed. In a word, the English writer differs from the American by all the difference which divides the trained craftsman from the crude amateur, and he deserves to that extent more serious and detailed criticism.

But in spite of this favorable comparison with Crane, Traill attacks what he sees as the programmatic realism of the novel because, he claims, the method paradoxically renders Morrison's account of the Jago too unreal: "What, however, has most astonished one of Mr. Morrison's critics fresh from a perusal of A Child of the Jago, is the impression of extraordinary unreality which, taken as a whole, it leaves behind it." Roger Henkle, in a recent article on late-Victorian fictional accounts of the urban poor, perceptively comments on why Traill is unable to credit Morrison's portrait of the Jago: "First, he rejects Morrison's premise that the urban slums constitute a fully fleshed-out subsociety, with its own set of codes so antithetical to bourgeois norms for the lower classes. Second, he recoils from the notion that there might be a place where people live who cannot be reached and redeemed by either sentiment or economic 'logic'." As Henkle argues, Traill is unable to credit the existence of subjects within the heart of London whose basic cultural norms are outside the middle-class sense of experience.

It should be remembered that during the time Morrison was working on A Child of the Jago, British interest in systematic methods for describing "exotic" populations was at an all time high, as evidenced by the appearance of increasingly professional studies in ethnology, folklore, and urban sociology. Al l of these fields shared in common a method which involved exacting observation by an expert who had qualified himself to present new and systematically organized knowledge on the group being observed. In addition to his long personal acquaintance with the East End, Morrison further qualified himself to write this novel by systematic study of the Old Nichol. Jay commented on how carefully Morrison prepared himself before he began writing die book: "Mr. Morrison's laborious and persistent care amazed me. He would take nothing for granted; he examined, cross-examined and examined again as to the minutest particulars, until I began to fear his book would never be begun. Till then I never realised what conscientious labour art involved." Morrison prepared himself to produce a portrait of a native population in much the same way as an ethnographer of the time would have. Morrison's (and Jay's) hope that the novel would help to bring about public awareness and reform was also in keeping with the general tendency of Victorian ethnography. As George Stocking has noted in his discussion of E. B. Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871)—a key work of late-Victorian ethnography—ethnographers of the time worked to aid progress and promote reform by exposing elements of contemporary society that had not kept up with the process of cultural evolution: "Active thus both in 'aiding progress and removing hindrance,' Taylor's science of culture was 'essentially a reformer's science'."

With the care and aims of a late-Victorian ethnographer, Morrison brings us into the world of this novel, a world so alien to the reader that the guidance of a professional is required from the very first chapter. The reader is given the precise boundaries of the region that will stand at center focus of the book; Morrison even includes a map of this foreign territory, a "Sketch Plan of the Old Jago." But more importantly the reader is made to see that the Jago—though in the heart of London—is as foreign to the average Englishman as any region in Africa. Here is the reader's first glimpse of the Jago:

It was past the mid of a summer night in the Old Jago. TTie narrow street was all the blacker for the lurid sky; for there was a fire in a farther part of Shoreditch, and the welkin was an infernal coppery glare. Below, the hot, heavy air lay a rank oppression on the contorted forms of those who made for sleep on the pavement: and in it, and through it all, there rose from the foul earth and the grimed walls a close, mingled stink—the odour of the Jago.

Morrison next places within this foreign atmosphere and geography a population which he describes in terms that place them outside any norms one would expect to operate in a civilized, modern city: "Old Jago Street lay black and close under the quivering red sky; and slinking forms, as of great rats, followed one another quickly between the posts in the gut by the High Street, and scattered over the Jago." Here and consistently throughout the novel, the natives of the Jago are referred to as rats, their neighborhood a network of breeding grounds. Nor does the language spoken by the Jagos do much to connect them to the middle-class reader. Here is the first dialogue that we are presented with in the novel:

"Ah—h—h—h," he said, "I wish I was dead: an'kep' a cawfy shop." He looked aside from his hands at his neighbours; but Kiddo Cook's ideal of heaven was no new thing, and the sole answer was a snort from a dozing man a yard away.

Kiddo Cook felt in his pocket, and produced a pipe and a screw of paper. "This is a bleed'n' unsocial sort o' evenin' party, this is," he said. "An 'ere's the on'y real toff in the mob with 'ardly'arf a pipeful left, an'no lights. D'y' 'ear, me lord"—leaning toward the dozing neighbour—"got a match?"

"Go fell!"

Indeed, the language of the Jago so differs from the dialect of the middle-class reader that Morrison consistently feels compelled to offer narrative commentary on its meaning and even provides the reader with a "Glossary of Slang and Criminal Terms."

Once these surface features of difference are established, Morrison goes on to examine the customary life of the natives of the Jago. What we find is a picture of the poor crucially different from those presented by mid-Victorian novelists—such as Dickens, Gaskell, Kingsley, and Disraeli—interested in the "condition of England" question. Morrison's poor are not simply normal people fallen on hard times. Instead, the very cultural structures by which they experience their lives put them outside the purview of all "advanced" norms of contemporary Christian culture. Morrison dramatizes this most emphatically through his exploration of what passes for normal domestic relations in the Jago. George Stocking notes that post-Darwinian Victorian ethnography focuses, far more than one might expect, on "two particular human institutions: religion and marriage. …" Further, he goes on to demonstrate Victorian ethnographers focused on native marriage customs and formalized relations between men and women as an index to the overall level of civilization of a people. As Stocking notes, Victorian ethnographers considered the treatment of women to be a key indicator of how far a given culture had traveled along the road of moral evolution:

… the pedestal of Victorian domesticity was the high point of evolutionary progress. As Herbert Spencer put it, "the moral progress of mankind" was in no way more clearly shown than by contrasting the "position of women" among savage and civilized nations: "At the one extreme a treatment of them cruel to the utmost degree bearable; and at the other extreme a treatment which, in some directions, gives them precedence over men."

Morrison makes use of this formula to assign the most primitive status to the Jagos, making it clear that the abuse of wives is not randomly committed by less admirable members of this society but rather that it is the norm—ritualized and even insisted upon. For example, the mother of Dicky Perrot—the boy whose development the novel chronicles—is, in part, an outcast from the world of the Jago because her marriage includes no ritualized violence: "A s for herself [Hannah Perrot], she was no favourite in the neighbourhood at any time. For one thing, her husband did not carry the cosh [an instrument used to bludgeon a victim who is to be robbed]. Then she was an alien who had never entirely fallen into Jago ways; she had soon grown sluttish and dirty, but she was never drunk, she never quarreled, she did not gossip freely. Also her husband beat her but rarely, and then not with a chair nor a poker."

The idea of what is normal behavior is crucial here. For the Victorian ethnographer, the existence of "criminal" behavior (as defined by middle-class standards) among a native people was not necessarily proof of the degraded state of that people. What marked a people as degraded was the acceptance of "criminal" or deviant behavior as normal. Ethnographers such as Tylor and Lubbock argued that the fact that what is seen as aberrant or criminal behavior in civilized nations is promoted as the norm in "savage" societies offers convincing evidence for the existence of moral—as well as material—evolution among European peoples. As Tylor notes, "a Londoner who should attempt to lead the atrocious life which the real savage may lead with impunity and even respect, would be a criminal only allowed to follow his savage models during his short intervals out of gaol." This is precisely what puts the Jagos beyond the pale: they have developed a society on savage principles within the very heart of metropolitan London. Consider, for example, this passage in which we are presented with what passes for a not only acceptable, but even admirable, domestic/business relationship between Jago men and women. A Jago denizen sees a young, respectable man being led into the district by a woman, and makes this comment: "There's Billy Leary in luck ag'in: 'is missis do pick 'em up, s'elp me. I'd carry the cosh meself if I' d a woman like 'er." The narrator then offers this explanatory comment:

Cosh-carrying was near to being the major industry of the Jago. The cosh was a foot length of iron rod, with a knob at one end, and a hook (or a ring) at the other. The craftsman, carrying it in his coat sleeve, waited about dark staircase corners till his wife (married or not) brought in a well-drunken stranger: when, with a sudden blow behind the head, the stranger was happily coshed, and whatever was found on him as he lay insensible was the profit on the transaction. In the hands of capable practitioners this industry yielded a comfortable subsistence for no great exertion. Most, of course, depended on the woman: whose duty it was to keep the other artist going in subjects. There were legends of surprising ingatherings achieved by wives of especial diligence: one of a woman who had brought to the cosh some six-and-twenty on a night of public rejoicing. This was, however, a story years old, and may have been no more than an exemplary fiction, designed, like a Sunday School book, to convey a counsel of perfection to the dutiful matrons of the Old Jago.

Thus, criminal behavior is more than tolerated; it becomes an ideal.

What seals the case of the Jagos as a dangerous "other" within the heart of an advanced civilization, what makes colonial action against them necessary, is that ritualized violence as a community response to the environment around them has made the Jagos true aliens, even in such basic matters as physicality and response to pain. Throughout the novel Morrison develops a picture of residents of the Jago as physically degenerate. As I have noted, he consistently refers to the Jagos as rats; even Dicky Perrot, the boy on whom the reader's attention is primarily focused, is viewed by the narrator as a "ratling from the Jago." According to Morrison, Jago rats so greatly vary from the physical norms of Englishmen that an outsider would not even be able to determine with any accuracy the age of a Jago child: "A small boy, whom they met full tilt at the corner, staggered out to the gutter and flung a veteran curse after them. He was a slight child, by whose size you might have judged his age at five. But his face was of serious and troubled age. One who knew the children of the Jago, and could tell, might have held him eight, or from that to nine." The outsider needs the ethnographer to interpret correctly even the bodies of these natives. The untrained observer must discover that even what one would think of as the universally understood sign of smiling needs reinterpretation in the Jago: "Now the Jago smile was a smile by itself, unlike the smiles in other places. It faded suddenly, and left the face—the Jago face—drawn and sad and startling by contrast, as of a man betrayed into mirth in the midst of great sorrow. So that a persistent grin was known for a work of conscious effort."

But even more important than the observable physical differences of the Jagos are the communal styles by which they inflict, observe, and endure violence to the body. The most memorable scenes of the novel present the ritualized violence which is part of the pattern of existence in the Jago. We see the continually smoldering feud that goes on indefinitely between two leading Jago clans—an example of native tribal warfare. Another source of communal violence is the ongoing war the Jagos wage against residents of neighboring Dove Lane. Morrison comments on the ritualized, normalized character of these sources of violence: "The feud between the Jago and Dove Lane was eternal, just as was that between the Ranns and the Learys; but, like the Rann and Leary feud, it had its paroxysms and its intervals." The narrator then goes on to examine the customs of violence among the natives. One of the most striking passages describes a woman warrior, much admired for her prowess as a street fighter:

Once a succession of piercing screams seemed to betoken that Sally Green had begun. There was a note in the screams of Sally Green's opposites which the Jago had learned to recognise. Sally Green, though of the weaker faction, was the female champion of the Old Jago: an eminence won and kept by fighting tactics peculiar to herself. For it was her way, reserving teeth and nails, to wrestle closely with her antagonist, throw her by a dexterous twist on her face, and fall on her, instantly seizing the victim's nape in her teeth, gnawing and worrying.

Sally is fully described as a native warrior taking part in a ritual display of power:

Down the middle of Old Jago Street came Sally Green: red-faced, stripped to the waist, dancing, hoarse and triumphant. Nail-scores wide as the finger striped her back, her face, and her throat, and she had a black eye; but in one great hand she dangled a long bunch of clotted hair, as she whooped defiance to the Jago. It was a trophy newly rent from the scalp of Norah Walsh, champion of the Rann womankind, who had crawled away to hide her blighted head, and be restored with gin. None answered Sally's challenge, and, staying but to fling a brickbat at Pip Walsh's window, she carried her dance and her trophy into Edge Lane.

What is particularly damning, however, is not the existence of this woman, but the response of the Jagos to the violence that she embodies. What is absent in the Jago response to this violence is a normal fear of bodily pain or of any empathy for the physical suffering of others. Instead, periods of widespread violence are met with enthusiasm; members of the community become delighted observers or participants.

In this, and in many other ways, Morrison equates the residents of the Jago with natives of a "less advanced" culture. For example, he demonstrates that Jagos are able to work only for short periods of time, that they are unable to understand the laws of delayed gratification, and that they live exclusively in the present. He shows that the skillful "colonial" administrator—in this case an admirable Anglican pastor, "Father" Sturt, who actually lives and works among his poor parishioners—needs to treat the "natives" as one would treat large children. Through this procedure Sturt is able to keep order among the natives, when they enter the clubhouse that he has created for them, without their ever really understanding how completely they are under his control: they were "all governed with an invisible discipline, which, being brought to action, was found to be of iron." Morrison even demonstrates that, as natives, Jagos may be cunning but certainly not intelligent: "But it was the way of the Jago that its mean cunning saw a mystery and a terror where simple intelligence saw there was none."

It is not surprising, then, that Morrison, although attempting to present even this semi-criminal East End neighborhood with sympathy, offers the reader reasons to believe that drastic measures are to be taken toward places like the Jago, that the residents of these areas are not in any real sense English citizens but rather alien beings living according to alien cultural codes. Toward the end of the novel, Morrison records this conversation between "Father" Sturt and a young surgeon who has just overseen the birth of Dicky Perrot's brother:

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."

One can almost hear muted echoes of "Exterminate all the brutes."

What is most troubling for Morrison is that the Jago cannot be destroyed simply by destroying the neighborhood. When the buildings making up the Jago are torn down, he comments on the ineffectiveness of simple slum clearance: "The dispossessed Jagos had gone to infect the neighbourhoods across the border, and to crowd the people a little closer. … And so another Jago, teeming and villainous as the one displaced, was slowly growing, in the form of a ring, round about the great yellow houses." Keating describes Morrison's bleak view of the possibility of reclaiming these marginal poor, and his chilling belief that, unless drastic measures were taken, they would simply continue to produce a criminal race: "That Morrison believed they could not be reformed is clear from A Child of the Jago and he later publicly endorsed Jay's proposal for the establishment of Penal Settlements which would solve the problem of heredity by wiping out the entire strain." Those sentenced to such penal settlements would remain there for life and would not be allowed to reproduce.

William Booth was particularly fascinated by Stanley's distinction between those African natives who would, and those who would not, conform to standards of industry: "O f these pygmies there are two kinds; one a very degraded specimen with ferret-like eyes, close-set nose, more nearly approaching the baboon than was supposed to be possible, but very human; the other very handsome, with frank open innocent features, very prepossessing. They are quick and intelligent, capable of deep affection and gratitude, showing remarkable industry and patience." In a sense, Morrison had given the middle-class reader the domestic equivalents of these two types of African native. In Tales of Mean Streets (1894) he had presented readers with portraits of mostly (but not exclusively) respectable East Enders. With A Child of the Jago he examines those who will not conform. Strangely human and at the same time alien, they pose a threat to the heart of the empire.

Morrison's ethnographic account of these natives that somehow have come to exist at home underlines the need for radical solutions on the colonial model. When we view this call for radical action in light of the lessons that the twentieth century has taught us about final solutions, the stance that Morrison takes toward the Jagos becomes particularly frightening. An d yet Morrison was convinced that he was writing in the best interests of the working poor of London. He would go on to write two more working-class novels—To London Town (1899) and The Hole in the Wall (1902)—which offer more positive accounts of how the effects of urban poverty can be overcome. It is in contrast to these more sympathetic portraits of the poor that Morrison's willingness to classify the Jagos as totally alien becomes most problematic. Although Morrison calls for sympathy for all the people whose lives he chronicles, his insistence on the Jagos' difference, even in matters that pertain to such basic cultural codes as responding to physical suffering, marks them as a problem that needs to be dealt with in ways that would not be appropriate for dealing with "non-natives." The novel is particularly urgent because it suggests that this native other, which has come into existence within a seemingly civilized country, is not a closed category. The existence of such "natives" can serve as a catalyst that allows the process of reverse evolution to begin to degrade the respectable poor. Through this fully realized dramatization of alien subjects on home soil, Morrison demonstrates the need for an active "colonial" policy to be put into effect within the very heart of England.