Arthur Morrison

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Novels Notes

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SOURCE: “Novels Notes,” in The Bookman, Vol. XXXV, No. 210, March, 1909, p. 281.

[In the following review, the anonymous critic lauds the humor in Green Ginger.]

It is evidently time that we revised our judgment of Mr. Arthur Morrison. Whilst we have been persistently classing him as a grim and sombre realist, he has been developing into one of the most delightfully irresponsible of humorists. Of course we knew from “That Brute Simmons,” in his Tales of Mean Streets, and from certain of the tales in his Divers Vanities, that he had an abundant sense of humour, but we had not credited him with possessing the breezy, broadly farcical spirit of fun that fills the pages of Green Ginger with the best and heartiest food for laughter that you will find nowadays anywhere outside a book by Jacobs. Now and then, as in such stories as “Cap'en Jollyfax's Gun” or “The Copper Charm,” he gives you quaint and excellent character-sketches; everywhere the descriptions of persons and places are touched in vividly and with his accustomed skill; but when all's said you come back to the story—the tale's the thing, and though it might be easy to decide which of them has the most ingenious plot, which embodies the most gloriously odd or ludicrous incident, it is very difficult indeed to look back over them and say, where all are so wholly amusing, which is the liveliest and most laughable. Perhaps it is enough to say that the present reviewer, a hardened specimen of his tribe, has read every one of them, taking them in their order, and was only sorry they were not twice as many, and that if you would like to laugh, and to keep on laughing through three hundred and twenty-eight pages, you cannot do better than ask for Green Ginger, and see that you get it.

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A Study of Arthur Morrison