SOURCE : A review of "Tales of Mean Streets," in The Spectator, Vol. 74, No . 3480, March 9, 1895, pp. 329-30.

[In the following review, critic praises Tales of Mean Streets, but contends that Morrison's characters are not typical of London's East End dwellers.]

These tales [Tales of Mean Streets.] paint with a marvellous literary skill and force the life which the author by implication alleges to be the normal life of the London poor. Were this the East-End, the whole of the East-End, and were the East-End nothing but this, then indeed are we of all men most miserable. If the squalor, the cruelty, the drunkenness, the deadly and grinding monotony, the total lack of all that is wholesome and loveable in human nature, here so vividly depicted, were really typical of the poorer streets of London, we should have to admit that we are face to face with a moral situation as awful and as terrifying as any that the world has ever encountered. If "Lizerunt," the factory girl, and Billy, the man who lives on her and his mother, truly represented the people of the mean streets, and if the social and political forces now at work were giving us such people as their normal product, one must feel that our society is rotten to the core, and that the sooner it is smashed to atoms the better. But we do not believe that the life here set forth is typical, or that Billy is a normal character, and we venture to say that those who know the East-End at first hand, and who most deplore its miseries, would be the first to endorse this denial. We do not say that Mr. Morrison has not drawn from the life. He may have done so and yet not painted the typical East-Ender. What we assert is that he has taken the worst characters in Mr. Booth's Class A—the class of the semi-criminals and the morally and physically degraded—and has set them up, or appeared to set them up, as if they were truly representative of East London. But Class A, as Mr. Booth showed us, is only some 9 per cent, of the East End.

Let us show by quotation what sort of people are Lizerunt and Billy. Lizerunt (Elizabeth Hunt) worked in a pickle factory. She married late, i.e., at seventeen, Billy Chope, who supported life by taking from the widowed mother with whom and on whom he lived, the proceeds of her mangling. When he married Lizerunt, after a courtship in which knocking her down and kicking her was an episode, he had two women to provide money for him instead of one, and this suited him exactly. He grudged Lizerunt her babies, however, as they kept her from work. At last his mother began to sicken, and, as the poor will, developed the instinct of saving enough money to bury her. Billy found the little hoard and seized it—

"'No, Billy, don't take that—don't!' implored his mother. 'There'll be some money for them things when they go 'ome—'ave that. I'm savin' it, Billy, for something partic'ler: s'elp me Gawd, I am, Billy.'—'Yus,' replied Billy, raking diligently among the clinkers, 'savin' it for a good ol' booze. An' now you won't 'ave one. Bleedin' nice thing, 'iding' money away from yer own son!'—'It ain't for that, Billy—s'elp me, it ain't; it's case anythink 'appens to me. On'y to put me away decent, Billy, that's all. We never know, an' you'll be glad of it t'elp bury me if I should go any time—'—'I'll be glad of it now,' answered Billy, who had it in his pocket; 'an' I've got it. You ain't a dyin' sort, you ain't; an' if you was, the parish 'ud soon tuck you up. P'raps you'll be straighter about money after this.'—'Let me 'ave some, then—you can't want it all. Give me some, an' then 'ave the money for the things. There's ten dozen and seven, and you can take 'em yerself if yo like.'—'Wot—in this 'ere rain? Not me! I bet I'd 'ave the money if I wanted it without that. 'Ere—change these 'ere fardens at the draper's wen you go out: there's two bob's worth an' a penn'orth; I don't want to bust my pockets wi' them.'"

That is how Billy treated his mother. How he treated his wife while she was expecting her first baby, is told in the previous chapter. Billy kicks Lizerunt because she will not give him money, and then goes out. By the time he comes back the baby is born. After looking at it he asks, "Where's my dinner?"—

"'I dunno,' Lizer responded hazily. 'Wot's the time?'—'Time? Don't try to kid me. You git up; go on. I want my dinner.'—'Mother's gittin' it, I think,' said Lizer. 'Doctor had to slap 'im like anything 'fore 'e'd cry. 'E don't cry now much. 'E—'—'Go on; out ye git. I do'want no more damn jaw. Git my dinner.'—'I'm a-gitting of it, Billy,' his mother said, at the door. She had begun when he first entered. 'It won't be a minute.'—'You come 'ere; y'aint alwis s' ready to do er' work are ye? She ain't no call to stop there no longer, an' I owe 'er one for this mornin.' Will ye git out, or shall I kick ye?'—'She can't Billy,' his mother said. And Lizer snivelled and said, 'You're a damn brute. Y'ought to be bleedin' well booted.' But Billy had her by the shoulders and began to haul; and again his mother besought him to remember what he might bring upon himself. At this moment the doctor's dispenser, a fourth-year London Hospital student of many inches, who had been washing his hands in the kitchen, came in. For a moment he failed to comprehend the scene. Then he took Billy Chope by the collar, hauled him pellmell along the passage, kicked him (hard) into the gutter, and shut the door. When he returned to the room, Lizer, sitting up and holding on by the bedframe, gasped hysterically: 'Ye bleedin' makeshift, I'd 'ave yer liver out if I could reach ye! You touch my 'usband, ye long pisenin' 'ound you! Ow!' Arid, infirm of aim, she flung a cracked teacup at his head. Billy's mother said, 'Y'ought to be ashamed of yourself, you low blaggard. If 'is father was alive 'e'd knock yer 'ead auf. Call yourself a doctor—a passel o' boys—! Git out! Go out'o my 'ouse or I'll give y'in charge!'

This is no doubt in one sense a true description, but is only true of a small and exceptional class in the East-End. It requires, however, a certain effort not to regard it as typical as well as true. If we read a vivid account of the cruel and savage husband in Mayfair we recognise easily enough that he is not a type of the West-End husband. We know, however, so little of East-End life at first-hand that we are apt to treat everything depicted with an East-End atmosphere as typical. It is the mistake of the traveller also who goes to the East and happens, as he well may, on some accidental and occasional piece of humanity or cruelty, as the case may be. Down it goes in his note-book as an instance of normal Arab goodness or wickedness, and unless he is able to live down this impression he is apt to think of "all Eastern peoples" as tinged with the particular vice or virtue which he came across in so sensational a way. But it may be said that Mr. Morrison does not merely paint East London by striking and sensational stories. In his introduction, he gives us a general description of the moral atmosphere of the mean streets. True, the effect of this general description seems hardly less appalling than that produced by the more dramatic portions of the book. Here is the description of the normal day in the street, and every day is normal. First comes the calling of the men by the policeman:—

"The knocking and the shouting pass, and there comes the noise of opening and shutting of doors, and a clattering away to the docks, the gasworks and the shipyards. Later, more door-shutting is heard, and then the trotting of sorrow-laden little feet along the grim street to the grim Board School three grim streets off. Then silence, save for a subdued sound of scrubbing here and there, and the puny squall of croupy infants. After this, a new trotting of little feet to docks, gasworks, and shipyards with father's dinner in a basin and a red handkerchief, and so to the Board School again. More muffled scrubbing and more squalling, and perhaps a feeble attempt or two at decorating the blankness of a square hole here and there by pouring water into a grimy flower-pot full of dirt. Then comes the trot of little feet toward the oblong holes, heralding the slower tread of sooty artisans; a smell of bloater up and down; nightfall; the fighting of boys in the street, perhaps of men at the corner near the beer-shop; sleep. And this is the record of a day in this street; and every day is hopelessly the same."

The children of the street and the life they lead wail in undertone in Mr. Morrison's description:—

"There is no house without children in this street, and the number of them grows ever and ever greater. Nine-tenths of the doctor's visits are on this account alone, and his appearances are the chief matter of such conversation as the women make across the fences. One after another the little strangers come, to live through lives as flat and colourless as the day's life in this street. Existence dawns, and the doctor-watchman's door knock resounds along the row of rectangular holes. Then a muffled cry announces that a small new being has come to trudge and sweat its way in the appointed groove. Later, the trotting of little feet and the school; the mid-day play hour, when love peeps even into this street; after that more trotting of little feet—strange little feet, new little feet—and the scrubbing, and the squalling, and the barren flower-pot; the end of the sooty day's work; the last home-coming; nightfall; sleep."

Mr. Morrison will not even let us hope that his mean street is the exception. It is the rule—

"Where in the East End lies this street? Everywhere. The hundred-and-fifty yards is only a link in a long and a mightily tangled chain—is only a turn in a tortuous maze. This street of the square holes is hundreds of miles long. That it is planned in short lengths is true, but there is no other way in the world that can more properly be called a single street, because of its dismal lack of accent, its sordid uniformity, its utter remoteness from delight."

So convincing and so excellent is Mr. Morrison's art, that it requires no small effort to pull oneself together, and ask again,—Is this true, and is it indeed a fact that all East London has upon it the weight of twenty Atlantics of grim, grimy, sordid, impenetrable, hopeless, helpless misery? We believe that it is not true. We shall be told that we are drugging a middle-class conscience in denying its truth, but we deny it. We believe that Mr. Morrison, like so many men before him, has painted his mean street in these hues of gloom and wretchedness, because he has imported into it the ideas of his own class. What the highly-educated and cultivated man of letters at this century's end dreads above all things is dull monotony. A life which does not run glittering like a brook in the open sunshine is not merely unblest, but the most terrifying, the most awful of earthly ills. Than that, he would rather face anything. But the plain men and women of this workaday world, though they may like a holiday and a spree, have no such horror of monotony. Their nerves are not shaken with wild vibrations by the dread of a yesterday, a to-day, and a to-morrow, which know no change. Besides, A's monotony is always more appalling to B than B's own. X, a head-clerk in the City, goes to the Bank every day by the same 'bus, and will do so till the unknown day on which each and every City man hails his last 'bus. This is monotony indeed; yet that very man heartily pities the eating-house waiter who spends his life calling out "a sausage on mash." Examine Mr. Morrison's account closely, and it is clear that the monotony is what horrifies him. But that monotony Providence has inexorably fixed on the shoulders of ninety-nine-hundredths of the human race. Can the results achieved by the one man in a hundred who escapes the monotony of existence be said to prove that life is necessarily better when unmonotonous?

But we must not seem to write as if we thought the life of the mean streets a desirable one. God knows there is much there to be morally and physically mended. The ugliness and griminess of life in the East-End is a great and terrible evil. We have no sort of sympathy with those who talk as if the ugliness and the grime did not matter.

They do matter; and it is not too much to say that the men and women who are reared, not in the woods and fields, but in the East-End as it is at present, cannot grow to perfection. For that reason we would do everything that communal effort can do to combat the dirt and the sordidness. And, first, the fog and the smoke. While London pours coal grit on its own head day after day, the poorer Londoners can never know the pleasure of cleanliness and fresh air. By all means let us abate the evils of London life, but do not let us delude ourselves into imagining that half London is inhabited by a race of Yahoos.

A last word as to Mr. Morrison's book as a whole. What we have said must not be taken in the least as said in depreciation of his art. He is a writer of great power. Again, we have not the least wish to speak as if he were deluding consciously the public into taking too black a view of the East-End. He is merely a painter who draws sombre subjects and works in sombre colours. To point this out, and to add that nevertheless the world is not a place without light and sunshine, is not to impeach either his art or his sincerity.