SOURCE : "Arthur Morrison," in Four Realist Novelists, Longmans, Green & Co., 1965, pp. 7-20.

[In the following essay, Brome discusses the realism of Morrison's novels that depict the lives of London's poor.]

A cloud of self-induced obscurity surrounds the life of Arthur Morrison, that small master among the group of English novelists who concentrated their attention on the working classes in their East End milieu during the late nineteenth century. The Times obituary about him is a bewildered piece of writing. A few lines giving the barest bones of his life are overwhelmed by a laboured examination of his work. According to Morrison himself, he was born in Kent in 1863, but his birth certificate places him immutably in the East End of London. His father he described as an engineer, but he was in fact an engine fitter. Professionally, he identified himself, later in life, as a civil servant and this may be considered a legitimate extension of the fact that he helped to run the People's Palace, a charitable 'mission' founded by Walter Besant in the East End of London in 1887. It was almost as if the man who so vividly evokes the horror, the poverty, the seaminess of late nineteenth century London, wanted to forget or run away from his roots.

His personality is similarly masked. Few interviews or sketches worthy of the name remain, and none reveals what manner of man he was, but there are hints in his contemporaries' comments of a touch of snobbery which might complicate his reasons for concealing his origins. He tired very soon of his life as 'a civil servant' and turned to journalism, becoming a member of the staff of a London daily newspaper. He married in 1892 Elizabeth Adelaide, the daughter of a Dover man. Their one son, Guy, died in 1921 of 'maladies consequent on his war service'. Morrison himself served as an inspector of special Constabulary during World War I, and had the curious distinction of telephoning the warning of the first Zeppelin raid on London. Little else of a personal nature has been recorded.

In 1892-3 he drew on his experiences of the East End to write a number of short stories the first of which, published in Macmillan's Magazine, attracted the attention of W. E. Henley, who was then steadily building up the reputation of the famous National Observer. Morrison wrote, at Henley's request, a number of new short stories which were gathered and published in one volume under the title Tales of Mean Streets in 1894, the year when Henley also discovered H. G. Wells. Perhaps it is irrelevant to ask for subtlety or depth of character in stories which set out brutally and bluntly to depict the darker side of life in the East End of London, but these early stories are not so effective as Morrison's first novel, A Child of the Jago, which appeared in 1896.

Morrison's intention in writing A Child of the Jago can be given in his own words: 'To tell the story of the horrible [Jago] … and of a boy who, but for his environment would have become a good citizen.' He sets the scene rapidly in the opening paragraphs:

It was past the mid of a summer night in the Old Jago. The narrow street was all the blacker for the lurid sky. … 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 grimed walls, a close, mingled stink—the odour of the Jago … there the Jago, for one hundred years the blackest pit in London, lay and festered.

Carefully avoided by most of those who came from the West End of London, the Jago was an awful Gothic spectacle of squalor, brutality and crime, which actually existed under another name in the East End of London, and many of its inhabitants knew what it meant to be driven by hunger into extreme behaviour.

A small boy, Dicky Perrott, streaks across this scene with the hunted vitality of a child whose wits have been sharpened beyond anything childhood should know, and whose spindly body is alive with the nervous tensions of desperate need. One day he stealthily insinuates himself into the ceremony of opening the new wing of the Institute, a procedure which allows Morrison fine scope for satirizing those West En d eminences, including a Bishop, who come to witness the results of their own charity and congratulate themselves on the wonderful effects of 'Pansophic Elevation' among the degraded classes. The canker in their midst, Dicky Perrot, hides himself behind the curtains of the room wherein the Bishop and other Eminences will retire to take tea after the ceremony. Presently the amiable Bishop, 'beaming over the tea-cup … at two courtiers of the clergy, bethought him of a dinner engagement and passed his hand downward over the rotundity of his waistcoat. "Dear, dear" said the Bishop glancing down suddenly, "Why—what's become of my watch".'

When Dicky Perrott bursts in on his family ten minutes later crying: 'Mother—Father—look! I done a click. I got a clock—a red un!'—he expects praise, but his father, carefully pocketing the watch, up-ends and beats him. From now on the horror of double-dealing, of dirt, crime and brutality grows as the novel unfolds scene after scene where gangwarfare outdoes in violence anything known today:

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, a champion of the Rann womanhood who had crawled away to hide her blighted head and be restored with gin.

Against this background, rendered with horrific detail, Dicky Perrott finds himself torn between Aaron Weech, the cunning fence who can dispose of anything so long as it is stolen, and Father Sturt, who gets Dicky a job as a shop-boy in the Bethnal Green Road and sets him on the path to respectability. Furious because he has lost a skilful child operator, Weech engineers the boy's dismissal and Dicky, once more the bewildered victim of forces he only dimly comprehends, drifts back to his old haunts and his old ways. Once again the Jago teaches him: 'Spare nobody and stop at nothing, for the Jago's got you, and it's the only way out except the gaol and the gallows.' In due course Josh Perrott, the father, murders Aaron Weech and Dicky is knifed in a street brawl. One solitary principle comes through the murk and the muck. When Dicky is dying Father Sturt asks him—'who did it?'—and he replies, 'Dunno Fa'er'. The lie—the staunch Jago lie. Thou shalt not nark.

Arthur Morrison developed into a distinguished practitioner of a new school of realism in English fiction which derived from Zola, Dickens and Gissing but in his hands became different from any of their work. Descriptions of slums and low life occur in Dickens, Charles Kingsley, Walter Besant and many others but Morrison disdained the quaintness of Dickens's slum characters and recoiled from any attempt to romanticise East End lives. He wanted to record the reality as it was.

Gissing in The Nether World gave a description of Pennyloaf Candy's terrible home in the East End of London which leads directly into Morrison's work, but Morrison carefully avoided the self-pity evident in much of Gissing's work:

In my East End stories I determined that they must be written in a different way from the ordinary slum story. They must be done with austerity and frankness, and there must be no sentimentalism, no glossing over. I felt that the writer must never interpose himself between his subject and his reader. I could best bring in real life by keeping myself and my moralizings out of it. For this I have been abused as hard and unsympathetic, but I can assure you it is far more painful for me to write stories than for you to read them.

There was no explicit moral anger in Morrison's work as there was with Dickens, and the French naturalism of Zola gave place to the empirical realism of England. The character which dominates A Child of the Jago is really the Jago itself. But it is presented without social comment, and for all the remorseless accuracy with which the author reveals every corner of this black and hopeless pit, he seldom suggests any explicit concern for its inhabitants. On the surface, Morrison seems to shrug his shoulders. Conditions are like this. Slum life has to be accepted and the destiny of those born within its precincts is played out under Morrison's direction with a dreadful inevitability. Take the dialogue in the first chapter of A Child of the Jago between Kiddo Cook and the stranger:

'Ah-h-h-', he said, 'I wish I was dead; and kep a cawfy shop.'

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

'Go t'ell.'

'O wot 'orrid langwidge … '

'Go t'ell.'

A lank elderly man who sat with his back to the wall, pushed up a battered tall hat from his eyes, and producing a box of matches exclaimed:

'Hell? And how far's that? You're in it … '

'Ah', Kiddo Cook remarked, as he lit his pipe in the hollow of his hands, 'that's a comfort Mr. Beveridge, anyhow.'

There is another element implicit in the book which tends to qualify its external realism. A black despair which verges upon hatred appears in over-emphasized descriptions, and bursts of emotion are sometimes expressed in acid sarcasm. For all his protestations, there are times when Morrison cannot keep his own feelings out of the book. Philanthropy and its half-sister charity may have brought about changes in the Jago, but they were full of smugness and humbug which Morrison exposes. His general method is to describe the surface reality in detail. He gets his effects by selecting and reiterating melodramatic episodes, but occasionally he goes beyond this naturalistic approach and ventures a moral judgement.

He did not create in Dicky Perrott a child as memorable as George Eliot's Maggie Tulliver because he deliberately foreswore insight into the hidden workings of character. In his view nature reacted on nature and produced a series of conditioned reflexes in Dicky Perrott. That was sufficient for him. The power of environment was more important than any hidden complex in the psychological makeup of the child.

It is possible to charge the method with superficiality. The wellsprings of human nature are subject to many complicated influences of which topographical environment is only one, if a major one, but it now becomes necessary to explore the theory of English realism in nineteenth-century fiction and its ancestor French naturalism.

One of the most repetitive and confused pieces of writing of which Zola was ever guilty, his prolonged essay, or series of interlocking essays, on 'The Experimental Novel' tries to relate the naturalistic school to the scientific method. It is a pity that no-one at that stage of critical history took the trouble to define clearly the differences between the words naturalistic, realistic and scientific, for the result was that the labels could sometimes be interchanged to the confusion of the whole scene. The main distinguishing feature between French 'naturalism' and English 'realism' was that French writers saw character and event as shaped by environment and other processes which could be scientifically defined. English writers tended to be interested in character as something essentially idiosyncratic, an end in itself, and action as often determined by the operations of chance.

What Zola meant by the école naturaliste can be stated fairly simply. Zola saw the late nineteenth century as an age of science, and believed that no subject which was not studied and developed according to the scientific method could claim attention as a serious branch of knowledge. The essence of the scientific method was centred on experiment, and as the scientist had passed from experiment in chemistry and physics to experiment in physiology, so the novelist must pass from the traditional novel to the experimental novel. He saw the novel partly as a means to social reform, and a moral element must therefore prevail in this new approach. The experimental novelist 'must do for man as a whole what the experimenting physiologist does for his body'. He would probe into inherited characteristics, take account of the influence of environment, dissect every action to discover its cause and effect and then, acknowledging the laws of scientific determinism, give an account from beginning to end of the interaction of mind, body and environment.

Strictly speaking, Zola was describing not the application of the scientific method to novel-writing but simply a new departure from an old creative tradition. Granted an overwhelming reverence for the new science, Zola wanted to make it part of literature, but there were only two points where they really met. First the rejection of the romantic tradition and the substitution of a realism which recorded what it saw no matter how nasty or sordid that reality turned out to be, and second, the belief that life and events were mechanistically determined. An experiment carried out under controlled conditions in the laboratory was very different from telling a story in a new way with more realistic observation. Zola wanted novels in future to be closely based on the realities of life and the underlying philosophy of scientific determinism. Henry Norman summed up the desired change in technique in the Fortnightly Review for 1 December 1883:

Do not contrive a complicated family or social puzzle of which your novel is to exhibit the process of solution, exhausting your ingenuity in making people misunderstand one another, and in placing obstacles in their way; but take a piece of real life for your basis and let your motives and means be those of our common existence.

The first translations of Zola's novels in England were received with disgust, and a public outcry led to the imprisonment in 1889 of his publisher, Vizetelly. For English readers, with their uneasy Victorian conscience, Zola had overstepped the borderline between the sordid and the pornographic. Always fascinated by the raw material of life, Zola had in fact set out to explore this in a series of novels telling the story of the Rougon-Macquart family and its enormous ramifications during the second Empire. This was intended to be not merely a picture of French life and society but also a study in heredity.

Arthur Morrison read La Terre, included in the second half of the series. It is almost certain that he also read Zola's rambling attempt to make a science of literature in The Experimental Novel, which was translated into English in 1893, the year before A Child of the Jago appeared. Literary periodicals in England also paid attention to the new French school and novels like George Moore's Esther Waters were stamped as naturalistic, but the growth of English realism had several distinguishing characteristics. It did not concern itself with science or the scientific method and in the hands of Morrison it had nothing to do with moralizing. Dickens had given it a peculiarly English twist by concentrating on 'characters' but neither Morrison nor Dickens accepted the assumption on which Naturalism as a literary movement was based—that man and his societies can be explained entirely in mechanistic or deterministic terms.

When challenged to explain the precise nature of his brand of realism, Morrison produced a rambling essay in the New Review for March 1897 which lost its way in an outburst of pique and failed to answer the question. Stung by an article in the Fortnightly, Morrison declared:

I decline the labels of the schoolmen and of the sophisters; being a simple writer of tales who takes whatever means lie to his hand to present life as he sees it; who 'insists' on 'no process' and who refuses to be bound by any formula prescription prepared by the cataloguers and pigeon-holers of literature.

He then gives his definition of realism:

It seems to me that the man who is called a 'realist' is one who, seeing things with his own eyes, discards the conventions of the schools and presents his matter in individual terms of art.

This, of course, will not do. It is not a definition of a realist; it merely describes a particular kind of artist. A man who sees things with his own eyes and presents them in individual terms too often imposes his own vision on the scene observed and loses the documentary quality which is a prime element in realism. Dickens ceases to be a realist when his Cockney characters are converted by his vision into comical caricatures and his slums take on a picturesque or quaint air. Trade unionism in Hard Times ceases to be an instrument of working class organization and becomes a form of pointless intimidation, which is very unrealistic.

Not so in the work of Arthur Morrison. If anything he tended to make the Jago more appalling than it was—if that were possible—by over-emphasizing its depravity and squalor. Certainly the London to which he was born provided him with a wealth of realist material. The rabid region east of Aldgate was a catacomb of evil-smelling alleys and tiny shops, of crumbling warehouses and sublet rooms, of a rancid river slithering furtively to the sea and mud flats which oozed into the city carrying their sour exhalation to the railway arches of Bethnal Green and the grim blackness of the Commerical Road. Thousands of people lived out their pallid lives without leaving the precincts of the slums and many died before they were forty of disease, malnutrition and the hazards of everyday life in places like the Jago. Of course, there were music halls, pubs and gaiety. Of course, on Saturday nights a zest for living burst through all the horrors and insisted on a coarse form of—was it happiness? Arthur Morrison did not deal in the reverse side of the coin. He was concerned with slums, poverty, hardship, to the exclusion of joy, and to that extent could be accused of being an inverted romantic rather than a realist.

He had a second very precise purpose in his writing, which made it necessary to exercise a special technique of selection. Before Gissing and Arthur Morrison, the literature of the East End of London was a stranger's literature seen from the outside. As V. S. Pritchett has written:

It lies under the melodramatic murk and the smear of sentimental pathos, which in the nineteenth century were generated by the guilty conscience of the middle classes. They were terrified of the poor who seethed in an abyss just beyond their back door. The awful Gothic spectacle of hunger, squalor and crime was tolerable only as nightmare and fantasy—such as Dickens provided—and the visiting foreigner alone could observe the English slums with the curiosity of the traveller or the countenance of the anthropologist.

Gissing and Arthur Morrison broke into this convention to write from within the slums, to make internal what had always been external. They looked out through the eyes of men, women and children living in places like the Jago and faithfully recorded what it meant to be involved, day in, day out, in a kind of poverty which was far removed from anything to do with the picturesque. Gissing's novels are full of misery and worthy pathos. Arthur Morrison's dispense with the pathos and convey the impression of a species adapting itself to horrors which should have overwhelmed it. His novels are different from picturesque or nightmare novels and different again from the 'character albums of the writers of low comedy'.

His second novel, London Town (1899), another Tale of East End Life 'among the better sort of people in those parts' was not very successful. Dealing with the extremities of East End life Morrison emerged supreme. When he tried to convey a slice of less extravagant life where people were not so hard-pressed and even the beauties of Epping Forest had their place, the note was less urgent, the descriptions less vivid, the narrative rambling.

The powerful colours of squalor and violence inevitably had an impact far greater than the quieter colours of the semi-respectable. It is a severe test of any writer to make the commonplace as interesting as the melodramatic. Morrison did not match up to it. He said, in a note which prefaced this second novel:

I designed this story, and, indeed, began to write it, between the publication of Tales of Mean Streets and that of A Child of the Jago, to be read together with these books: not that I pretend to figure in all three—much less in any one of them—a complete picture of life in the eastern parts of London, but because they are complementary, each to the two others.

Aware that his first novel had splashed down one kind of East End life in fierce colours, he tried to redress the balance by evoking more neutral scenes which would justify his claim to realism. He did not succeed. As if aware of this his third novel, Canning Murrell, was a total departure from what had gone before. It dealt with the activities of a witch doctor in rural Essex in the early 19th century.

Morrison's fourth novel—The Hole in the Wall—is his best and stands out among the novels of working class life in the late nineteenth century as a minor masterpiece. It returns once more to the techniques of A Child of the Jago. The Hole in the Wall was a public house in the notorious Radcliffe Highway of the East End, and the novel centres upon an orphaned boy, Stephen, brought up by his grandfather in an atmosphere of filth, murder, deception and theft. The viewpoint of the novel shifts from Stephen the boy to the omniscient novelist, one chapter being seen through Stephen's eyes, another taking the wider, third person perspective. It is a clumsy device. It breaks the consistency of the novel and the shifting viewpoint occasionally threatens verisimilitude. It would have been a far more severe test of Morrison as a novelist if he had limited himself to Stephen's viewpoint and seen everything through the boy's eyes. Indeed there are many indications that he intended to do just that, but the intractable material did not easily surrender to the single viewpoint and particularly to the viewpoint of a boy. In an attempt to bring the activities of all the characters into a cohesive whole he was driven to step out of Stephen's shoes.

The central theme of the novel is the effect on Grandfather Nat of the boy's relationship with him. The child is 'sheltered' by Nat, and as he observes the murky life of the pub, he gradually discovers that his grandfather is a receiver of stolen goods. Marr, a defaulting ship owner, disguises himself as a sailor to escape with £800 which eventually comes into the hands of Grandfather Nat. Marr gets drunk and is murdered by Dan Ogle, who at first intended no higher flight of theft than stealing a watch. There is a terrifying scene in which Marr, stunned and tottering between the two men, is dragged towards the river while they sing and bawl at the tops of their voices, pretending they are drunken sailors helping a pal to keep his feet. It is a pity, in one sense, that Morrison introduced that cliché character, a blind fiddler, because it modifies the austerity of his realism, but the fiddler finally indulges a form of brutality which lifts him clean away from any romantic tradition. While the wallet with the stolen £800 passes mysteriously to Grandfather Nat, the blind man is double-crossed, assaulted and ridiculed by Dan Ogle. He sets out to track Ogle down across the marshes and when he finds him asleep in a shed concealed by a lime quarry, he attacks him:

Floundering and tumbling against the frail boards of the shed the two men came out at the door in a struggling knot; Ogle wrestling and striking at random, while the other, cunning with a life's blindness, kept his own head safe and hung as a dog hangs to a bull. His hands gripped his victim by ear and hair while the thumbs still drove at the eyes the mess of smoking lime that clung and dripped about Ogle's head. It trickled burning through his hair and it blistered lips and tongue, as he yelled and yelled again in the extremity of his anguish.

The blind man has blinded his enemy. Just one word seems out of place in a description which is much longer and more powerful in the original; the word 'yelled'. It does not adequately convey the reaction of a man whose head is burning from lime and whose eyes are being put out by another man's hands. Such a man undergoing such an experience would have screamed.

The clash between the innocent boy's view of the events he witnesses and the depravity of most of the remaining characters, including Grandfather Nat, gives the novel the tension of moral conflict. As in A Child of the Jago, where the clash occurs between the evil of the Jago which itself becomes one of the main characters and the social goodness of Father Sturt, here the child's innocence and unquestioning affection modify Grandfather Nat's degenerate character. The people in A Child of the Jago tend to be good or bad, black or white, but in The Hole in the Wall they are more complex and the novel, in consequence, more sophisticated.

Once again the River Thames, dragging through its murkiest reaches, the wharves with cranes wheeling atiptoe, the marshy flats, sullen skies and the ghastly traffic in human beings trapped in one squalid conspiracy after another, combine to leave a memorable picture of one side of East End life conveyed in the most realistic terms. Only Stephen and Grandfather Nat emerge with any hope for the future:

Dan Ogle, blinded and broken, but silent and saving his revenge; Musky Meg, stricken and pitiable but faithful even if to death; Henry Viney, desperate but fearful and urgently needy; these three skulked at bay in dark holes by Blue Gate.

It remains to guess that Stephen and Dicky Perrot were both embodiments of the shy sensitive boy Arthur Morrison, who had been born into an East End jungle which he wanted to dissociate from his new and cultured life as a writer.

Following The Hole in the Wall, Morrison failed to develop as a novelist and produced nothing worthy of comparison. There are obvious reasons for this. In the first place, as a busy journalist his spare time was limited, and another powerful preoccupation had arisen to challenge his interest in creative writing. After the first four novels much of his spare time was spent studying Oriental painting. He left a fine collection of Chinese and Japanese drawings to the British Museum, and wrote a two-volume study of Japanese painting which is still respected by scholars in the field. He also wrote, as early as 1894, a series of detective stories which began with Martin Hewitt, Investigator. Within his work itself, however, lay the major reason for his failure to develop. Morrison was a craftsman who rose occasionally to the heights of original creation, but these experiences could not be sustained. Moreover he had stated and re-stated his particular message. He did not have the boundless creative energy of great novelists like Dickens and Zola, and the range of his interests was much more limited. His was a brilliant but minor talent which could not reach beyond the area it had already illumined.