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Arthur Morrison's East End of London

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SOURCE: “Arthur Morrison's East End of London,” in Victorian Writers and the City, edited by Jean-Paul Hulin and Pierre Coustillas, De l'universite de lile III, 1979, pp. 147-82.

[In the following essay, Krzak describes Morrison's personal and professional connections to London's East End.]

Arthur Morrison, who died in December 1945 at the age of 82, is still described as a native of Kent in many reference books—for instance in the 1974 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica—despite new data found notably in P. J. Keating's introduction to the 1969 edition of A Child of the Jago. Such an indication is unfortunate since it may lead readers to think that his was an outsider's picture of London.

We may wonder what prompted Arthur Morrison to provide false information about his origins to Who's Who's first biographical enquiry in 1897, at a time when he was an established short-story writer and the novelist of A Child of the Jago. If we dismiss ignorance on his part—although we can understand why he chose Kent, his mother's native county, rather than Essex which he had adopted as his home—, we are faced with a riddle, only partially and unsatisfactorily solved by charges of deceit or social snobbery. Not that a deliberate wish to stand aloof was out of character in a man who, judging by the testimonies of acquaintances, was reserved and secretive. But there remains a mystery when we realize that this information would have provided an overwhelming argument to counter the fierce reactions and bitter attacks after the publication of Tales of Mean Streets and A Child of the Jago, especially during the controversy on realism initiated by H. D. Traill. Perhaps he felt that Victorian society could not acknowledge his rise from a working-class background. Whatever his true motives, personal and social, there is no need to capitalize on his mystification at this juncture. Indeed, we can reinstate him as a man of the people, born in Poplar, and the son of an engine fitter. Though we have no documents about his education, we know, from the 1871 census, that he was still in the East End at the age of eight; and, as he became an office boy at fifteen, he must have spent all his childhood east of Aldgate. Thanks to the encouragements of W.E. Henley, he made his way to realistic literature in the 1890s, via his secretaryship at the People's Palace in Mile End Road and journalism in Fleet Street.

The biography, as well as the historical and social context, underlines the significance of Morrison's work. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, a new outlook on the environment of industrial cities prevailed—London being regarded as an epitome and a development of the basic traits of urban life. Special emphasis was laid on hidden features, and fresh evidence was brought forward to question society's achievement, notably its policy towards the poor. The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, which forcefully sounded the alarm in 1883, was by no means an isolated appeal for changes and reforms. Several other publications and reports—Walter Besant's All Sorts and Conditions of Men in 1882 and George Gissing's The Nether World in 1889 are prominent literary examples—exposed shameful facts and were instrumental in arousing acute concern for city slum dwellers in the 1880s and 1890s.

Naturally, Mayhew's studies of London labour, Chadwick's and Greenhow's investigations of the 1840s and 1850s should be kept in mind when examining Morrison's descriptions of the 1890s, even though their perspective was different. The image of the unknown country was still used to describe the poverty-stricken areas, but Morrison's main interest focused on the urban growth of London as the cause of severe negligence despite successive reports and subsequent reforms. His presentation can be seen as resulting from a long investigation into living conditions which started with an enquiry into the paupers of mid-century London to end with Booth's study of the submerged population. From the “Cockney Corners”, which appeared as early as 1888, through the trilogy Tales of Mean Streets, A Child of the Jago and To London Town, to The Hole in the Wall, published in 1902, Morrison followed a path leading from fact to fiction, from a factual account to a more elaborate description of city life, from journalism to naturalism and realism.

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Morrison's earliest contribution to The People provides his first approach to a picture of London. As the announcement made it clear, this series of independent “sketches” was to “deal with localities and their peculiarities, rather than with individuals”.1 Its aim was to introduce the reader to several districts of London and to pinpoint their characteristic traits—Poplar and its Saturday market, Clerkenwell and its clockmakers and jewellers, the French restaurants of Soho, Bow Street Police Court, Whitechapel with its rows of houses, its homecrafts and ethnical groups, Jacob's Island, and the contrapuntal areas of Greenwich Park and Epping Forest.

Morrison successfully gives the impression of a dense population at certain key points of the capital, on London Bridge for instance every Saturday at noon, when “the pavement is filled by two solid streams of steadily hurrying human beings” and when pedestrians must dodge an incessant flow of traffic. Similarly on Saturday nights another gathering of people busy shopping in the East End is depicted in these words: “The broad Whitechapel road swarms with laughing, shouting, noisy human life. Buyers and sellers, rogues and dupes, drinkers and fighters. Each for himself and the thought of the moment!”. The struggle for life is felt all the more acutely as economic competition is magnified by the thick crowd and as London Hospital looms up in the vicinity, looking after those who “have come to grief in some of the thousand ways so easy among the dense population, the large works, and the traffic”. Urban concentration is an unquestionable factor of accidents in this “great cosmorama of life and death, joy and sorrow, health, sickness, and pain”. Morrison excels in drawing accurate sketches of people in the streets, but on the whole he sticks to a general description and watches with a critical eye both setting and city dwellers. His “explorer's mind” notices in Soho “bell-handles, thick on the door-posts, like stops on an organ, front door never shut, children rolling down the steps, dirty babies nursed by premature little women and ‘Apartments to Let' everywhere”, as so many signs of overcrowding, of the conditions of tenant and sub-tenant families, and of the corollary questions of child care and hygiene.2

In contrast with city life and to balance or counter the effects of urban overcrowding and pollution, Epping Forest is a godsend, whose proximity and advantages should be realized by the busy population of London, for, as Morrison puts it in his sketch, “Epping Forest is a Cockney Corner, from Epping to Wanstead Flats, and from Walthan Abbey to Chigwell, but one without smoke, chimney pots, noise and dirt; with whispering thickets, noble trees, grassy hollows and cool waters; with singing birds, humming insects, all sweet sounds. …” How surprising to find this quasi-lyrical description of nature coming from Morrison's pen! The author so appreciated this wholesome “lung” of the city, the benefits of which should fall to the working East Ender, that he settled on the outskirts of the forest, at Chingford, and later at Loughton.3 He publicly stated his marked preference for life in Essex,4 never far from London it is true, and was well aware of the threat of industrial or urban growth, of the continual encroachment of the town upon nature, upon the Hainault Forest for instance.5 The notion of an antithesis between town and country life, not original in itself, refers to a duality inscribed in Morrison's life and literary career. His emigration may be seen as corresponding to the typical aspiration of the East Ender he was. Rooted in the East End, he later developed a professional life in London and a private life in the country, chiefly in Essex. This parallel is present in the double current of his production—his East End studies and his Essex stories, united by the same insight into place and character, and an earnest commitment to faithful treatment. Besides, if his interest in oriental art lies beyond this duality, his commitments to the literature of detection, to journalism and to humorous short stories are essentially urban.

Whereas Tales of Mean Streets and A Child of the Jago are set in London only, To London Town depicts a migration to London from the country for economic reasons. Actually, several migratory movements, illustrating a general situation, are outlined in the plot. First, sons and daughters leave their rustic parents to come and work in the job-supplying East End of London; secondly, when an emergency arises, if the father dies for instance, the family returns to the parents or grandparents in the country; thirdly, when the latter source of supporting income becomes extinct, a new economic migration takes place—the industrious widow enters the labour market as head of the family while the elder son becomes an apprentice at the firm which used to employ his father. The facts and the events are exemplary in so far as the Mays are drawn by the centripetal force of London; the country is their native soil as well as a temporary refuge or source of comfort—it is motherly on both counts. Indeed, even though this orphaned family is uprooted and plunged into a highly competitive world, it is hardly touched by urban morality; only the younger generation represented by Johnny proves more adapted to a tougher milieu and more wary of city sharks or spongers. The Mays are still endowed with sturdy rustic qualities; they have retained a filial love for the country of their forbears, which they semi-consciously uphold as their ideal.

Contrasted with a world ruled by the economic struggle for bread, the country is idyllically associated with the notions of peace and quiet. But this position is far from being immune to change. As London keeps expanding, nature is slowly and relentlessly the victim of urbanization and industrialization. If the air in Essex is still “healthier and cleaner” than in London, the country has become a “poorer hunting ground” for butterflies, a prey to “the great smoky province that lay to the south-west”.6 London is a magnetic and tentacular force which draws the life-blood from the provinces through migration and impairs the country's unadulterated state through pollution.

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Apart from this image of the city threatening the countryside, Morrison's early descriptions of the outer environment of the poorer classes of London lay stress on the sameness of streets and houses. He notices in “Jacob's Island” a “very dull street” with “mean, black little dwelling houses”, and draws attention to the depressing atmosphere pervading this dreary, matter-of-fact world:

Back from the river, what a sorry blank is Jacob's Island! It is to-day, without exception, the saddest Cockney Corner we know. Not eminently crime-saddened, or poor or starved. Colourless, blank … Mean little houses, not old enough to be interesting and not new enough to be clean, cluster thick about Jacob Street, London Street, Hickman's Folly and their alleys (…) Jacob's Island is comparatively respectable, but, oh!, how fearsomely dull!

As in another sketch, “On Blackwall Pier,” which takes up the identical themes of sordid street monotony and hard living conditions, the crude facts are attended by pessimistic comment.7 This particular emphasis paves the way for his highly praised study entitled “A Street,” which dwells obsessively upon the drabness of surroundings.

If the setting in “Cockney Corners” can be regarded as a décor in the sense of a somewhat neutral visual presentation, in his subsequent work it loses its picturesqueness to assume social significance since it is directly, if negatively, related to its counterparts in more favoured districts. The architectural impression is strengthened by a parallel view of the inhabitants' way of life. Morrison establishes an inevitable link between outer appearance and actual existence, although this interpretation, which sets the tone for a realistic approach, is not borne out in all the “tales of mean streets”, for life is not necessarily dreary where living conditions are grim.

Morrison was not the first nor the last of his generation to have observed the uniformity of the streets and houses in London. Hubert Crackanthorpe for instance depicts the monotony of “shabbily symmetrical” streets, with “a double row of insignificant, dingy-brick houses”.8 In To London Town Morrison offers a similar description when the Mays come to the East End. If “the road narrowed and grew fouler, and the mouths of unclean alleys dribbled slush and dirty children across the pavements”, they eventually reach “a place of many streets lying regularly at right angles, all of small houses, all clean, every one a counterpart of every other” (TLT, pp. 76-7). Unlike some other areas, Shipwrights Row is renowned for its cleanliness and the colour pattern of the outside paintwork. Yet, monotony is spreading—the children travelling to Essex notice “close, regular streets of little houses, all of one pattern, (that) stared in raw brick, or rose, with a forlorn air of crumbling sponginess, amid sparse sticks of scaffolding” (TLT, p. 186)—as if London kept exporting a mass-produced housing pattern. The depressing monotony in certain quarters is intensified by overcrowding. Families gather near their places of work, in districts which soon become congested. These districts change character according to their inhabitants, whose number keeps increasing. People pile into quickly saturated lodgings—“eight, ten or a dozen human sleepers” in one room, in the extreme case of the Jago.9

Foul nooks and crannies inevitably developed in the texture of Victorian London, as backhouses enjoyed the cheap rents a working-class family could afford. Different types of slum dwellings emerged as demands rose and rents altered, tenancy being more or less temporary. The poorer labourers had to resort to these lodging ghettos, motivated by proximity of work and their financial resources. The ironically named Pleasant Court in Crackanthorpe's Vignettes (1896) is a good example—“To find it, you must penetrate a winding passage, wedged between high walls of dismal brick”. And Jago Court, the focal point in Morrison's novel, is a typical, though extreme, example of reclaimed backyards where all kinds of needy people have come to settle. Dr. Barnardo's article entitled “A Tale of a Mean Street” provides a parallel depiction of a narrow, ill-paved, East-End street and a dark cellar-like kitchen.10 An identical impression of an underground world pervades the crowded courts, typical of those built-in areas which have long passed saturation point, depicted by Octavia Hill in the 1870s. The spatial confinement becomes unbearable in the sultry atmosphere. In “a narrow paved court with houses on each side, the sun has heated them all day, till it has driven nearly every inmate out of doors”. The children especially are “crawling or sitting on the hard hot stones till every corner of the place looks alive”.11 The opening pages of A Child of the Jago offer an exact parallel. The Jago is the “blackest pit in London” and Jago Court, “the blackest hole in all that pit”. In the sultry and smelly atmosphere of summer nights, it is filled with rat-like human shapes. Because the contemporary picture, with its rhetoric, is so consistent, we may infer that Morrison's fiction is based on reliable facts, and insist on his first-hand knowledge of the places he describes—a knowledge he repeatedly stressed in reply to criticisms. His four years as secretary to the People's Palace, his observations as a journalist, and his careful documentation prior to writing (notably his “intimate study” of the parish of Trinity Church at Shoreditch which lasted a year and a half), bear witness to the credibility of his account.

There is both a gradation and an evolution in presentment. “A Street” underlines the bleak monotony of city streets in Poplar, where spectacular aspects are deliberately discarded. Yet, his denunciation of false, biased views of the East End as “an evil plexus of slums that hide human creeping things”,12 is contradicted by the image of the Jago in his first novel. Again, if the docks in To London Town, where the Mays used to live, are described in a subdued manner, and if the busy riverside at Blackwall Pier is less colourful (TLT, p. 35-7, 244), the dockland and Wapping area in The Hole in the Wall is much more picturesque and dangerous with its maze of “crooked lanes” and “small, ill-lighted streets”.13 Off the notorious Ratcliff Highway, lies Blue Gate, hazardous and ill-famed, set in mid-nineteenth-century London.

Habitation and reputation varied according to the district and the economic situations of the inhabitants of the East End. While regular workers lived in rather characterless though clean lodgings, casual labourers and new immigrants had to be content with unsuitable dwelling places, for financial reasons. They had to join other urban categories—marginal groups such as criminal types—, running the risk, repeatedly stressed, of being contaminated. As for the densely crowded areas, or rookeries, inhabited by a fluctuating, unstable population, they were often considered dangerous quarters—a threat to civilized society. The traditional haunts of disreputable characters, thieves and criminals, such as Whitechapel, Limehouse, Ratcliff Highway, were often painted in this light.

In point of fact, as the slum dwellers had little inclination to stay confined in their small dingy rooms, they repaired to the street, which was the meting place of natives and visitors, and a vantage point for the observant novelist. The streets in the East End were busy places at any hour, but on a number of regular and special occasions, people gathered in large numbers. While fun fairs, bank holiday rejoicing, and street fights tended to draw people from far and near, street markets assembled a more local crowd. Apart from adults, loafers or busy tradesmen and housewives, observers noticed the presence of a great number of children, which seemed to corroborate the idea of a prolific East End. Although school attendance was compulsory, it was seldom or inadequately enforced, so that, when unemployed, children were left on their own. Because of the absence of their fathers, ill or dead or in jail, which obliged mothers to rule the home, the children had to fend for themselves, unsupervised. As bread, not to mention money, was lacking, many of them became self-sufficient at an early age. They regarded the streets as a spectacle—witness the boys watching the clockmakers in a sketch called “Clerkenwell” (CC)—, but they were also on the lookout for a favourable opportunity—picking up an odd job like parcel carrying, or snatching things. Maturity soon fell upon their young shoulders, especially when, like Mother Sister Julia in Edwin Pugh's A Street in Suburbia (1895), the elder children helped to bring up little brothers and sisters, or when new family or social responsibilities prevailed. Early moral and economic independence was not a new fact in the late Victorian period, but a characteristic feature of the working-class children of East London. Dicky Perrott is the archetype of boys who, rather than playing games, were in search of food, or objects to exchange for bread, and who, like adults, had to rely on themselves only.

The documentary realism used by Morrison and some of his contemporaries to present a vivid description of the environment in East London also provided a basis for reflection. Many aspects of this environment seemed unworthy of a modern Victorian city; they were at variance with the ideals and principles expounded by contemporary society. These writers implicitly demanded that efforts should be made to relieve those shameful areas, those dark recesses which bore witness to obvious neglect in town planning, and also to abolish the actual and latent dangers of a marginal, segregated life to the population at large, but especially to children left without proper material care and moral support. If the later Morrison seems to have been more cautious about such possibilities, the young writer of the “Cockney Corners” did not hesitate to dwell on the positive merits of Epping Forest and public parks as essential lungs for oppressed East-Enders, just as he provided guidance in organizing the activities of young members when he was at the People's Palace.

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Morrison reveals that there is a definite physical and moral pattern of life in the East End of London, people being identified with their streets and their districts. From his descriptions of the drab lives in mean streets and the violent life in the Jago, we can gather that urban structures had a direct bearing on the material and mental conditions of people.

A direct consequence of the sanitary conditions, already exposed by Edwin Chadwick in the 1840s, was the high death-rate in slum areas. Shoreditch is an exemplary case, even in 1898: “Nowhere else in London can you gaze on such a scene of wretchedness. Houses hardly fit to be dog-kennels, breeding disease which brings the children of Shoreditch to the grave with terrible rapidity and suddenness. Four graves are dug here for every one in any other part of London”.14 Statistics showing population density and mortality rates were used to show the consequences of deplorable circumstances. Morrison did not fail to stress the phenomenon dramatically:

Albeit the Jago death-rate ruled full four times that of all London beyond, still the Jago rats bred and bred their kind unhindered, multiplying apace and infecting the world (p. 107).

Infant mortality was markedly more widespread in cities, and among poor urban working-class families. The death registers at Somerset House bear numerous mentions of still-born babies. Moreover, neglect and lack of food caused the untimely deaths of frail children, as we may observe in A Child of the Jago, in little Looey's case. Dicky Perrott's sister is soon replaced, however, by little Em and baby Josh, which demonstrates the high birth-rate prevailing in East London. For the same environmental reasons, children like Dicky “would never get really tall” (p. 109). In those substandard lodgings and insanitary conditions, the children were the first to suffer, as poverty was the cause of undernourishment and malnutrition, which accelerated disease and death.

Poverty was also related to, and aggravated by, drinking. In view of the social context, it is not surprising that drinking should have been so popular. The public houses were attractive, brightly lit places which stood out against the dreary surroundings, and afforded an outlet, a release from outer struggles and family troubles. Octavia Hill clearly points out the effect of the close, stifling courts on people's behaviour—during the hot evenings “the drinking is wildest, the fighting fiercest, and the language most violent”,15 while Robert Sherard indicates that “it is indeed rather on account of the physical exigencies of their work (and, we may add, of their lodgings) that these people, as a class, exceed and are intemperate”.16 Naturally, drinking was considered an aggravating factor in those unfavoured districts of the East End. Not only did it divert money from more immediate needs, but it also brought people into contact with disreputable characters. The pubs were indeed places where shady business transactions were often settled. Apart from “The Hole in the Wall” which chiefly enjoys an underground activity, there are several types of public houses in the Jago. “The Feathers” is described as “the grimiest and vilest of the four”, and in all of them there were frequent “bar riots”. At Mother Gapp's, fighting and rejoicing alternate. On great occasions, such as the homecoming of a released convict—Josh Perrott in the novel—the public house fulfils a social function, in that it proclaims reintegration and asserts its communal feelings. Hannah Perrott has to “prove herself not unduly proud” and indulge in gin-drinking, lest she should incur her neighbours' rebukes (p. 164).

Much of the money is spent on drinking—in poor districts shopping is done on Sunday morning after Saturday's drink, with what is left of the week's wages. The search for food and the basic necessities of life takes several forms, according to the ability of the housewife. Morrison points out in “A Workman's Budget”, published in 1901,17 that although generalization is difficult, the working-class woman is “commonly no fool and no idler”. Yet, recalling his personal experience—“I have met with perfectly amazing cases of masterly household management on slender means; and brilliant instances aside, the average workman's missis is a very good housewife”—, he implicitly infers that there are less happy cases. In fact, he acknowledges the existence of wide differences—“between the drunkard, whose household starves while he soaks away his wages, and the weakling, whose wife takes every penny and scarce gives him one back, there lie many degrees”—, between a Jago family and the Ropers or the Mays.

Hunting for the money necessary for subsistence and lodging involves a daily struggle. When illness strikes a working-class family, hardships increase. “Chrisp Street, Poplar” (CC), after a picturesque description of the streets, introduces the reader to the pathetic story of a couple emerging from a pawnshop:

Times have been hard with Joe and the missis. Joe has had rheumatic fever, and has spent his entire convalescence in hunting for a job. Day after day he has started out, good fellow, with a mendacious assurance to the missis that he didn't feel up to any breakfast, well knowing the little he left for her and the small Barkers even then. Evening after evening he has come home again—feetsore, hungry, disappointed, and well-nigh heartbroken—unsuccessful. And evening after evening his noble little missis has met him with a smile—poor soul, it gets harder to smile as the face grows thinner and the brain feels duller—with a smile and a kiss as warm and as true as even when she was a plump-faced nursemaid and he was a jolly 'prentice lad over on the island.

If the outlook is optimistic and the tone slightly sentimental, as the family is seen climbing uphill with courage and perseverance, this vignette depicting representatives of the “industrious poor” is nonetheless truthful enough.

To overcome adversity, pawning is the usual solution. From the “Cockney Corners” onwards, Morrison mentioned it in his works. When Josh Perrott is injured and is unable to work, his wife Hannah pawns a coat at a “leaving shop in a first floor back in Jago Row” (CJ, p. 138). In To London Town, Norah's dress is pledged as a direct consequence of the drinking habits of her mother. The same means was used to pay the rent. Otherwise, as a long term solution, it was possible to sub-let, or take in lodgers, but Hannah Perrott would not hear of this simply because “she doubted her ability to bully the rent out of them, or to turn them out if they did not pay” (CJ, p. 158)—which indicates that the practice was frequent.

Circumstances drove people along various paths, even beyond the limits of morality, to obtain basic necessities. Several methods were used to get money and clothing from the “profitable sentimentalist” in the Jago, although these methods were held in contempt by the “sturdier ruffians”, who preferred stealing. One of the devices consisted of “a profession of sudden religious awakening” (CJ, pp. 104-5), which reminds us of the study called “A Conversion” (TMS). Hesitant potential converts received “the boots, the coats, and the half-crowns used to coax weak brethren into the fold”. Similar behaviour is seen in children who do not normally attend school except when free gifts—coal or food—are distributed. Dicky, for instance, goes to school “at irregular intervals”, but “whenever anything was given away, he attended as a matter of course” (CJ, pp. 105, 109).

Hardships tend to favour a realistic approach to daily problems. Several examples of the suffering poor are given in “Cockney Corners”, especially in “London Hospital” (CC), where disease or injury leads to crises. A bricklayer, who has fallen from his scaffolding, is happy to see his wife, courageous and smiling:

His wife is sitting by him, with her little boy. See what a brave, bright face she keeps, and how gaily she reports her own well-doing, although the poor fellow himself well knows how few shillings there were in hand a month ago, when he first came in, and how she is charring hard for every mouthful she and the child eat.

The poignancy of the picture is enhanced if we are aware that Morrison's mother may have gone through a similar experience when his father was in hospital suffering from phthisis.

Diseases, death, brutal or violent events steel people to a stern, often stoic, attitude to life. Harsh realities and constant worries are not conducive to pleasure and laughter. Indeed, women with a tendency towards merriment or singing are regarded with suspicion and judged mercilessly, like the young countrywife in “A Street.”18 Lizerunt, in the opening “tale”, hardly experiences any pleasure in her almost inevitable progression from work at a pickle factory to charring, mangling, and finally to forced prostitution. Robert Sherard, who also describes “the mean miseries of the very poor”, insists on work as being their all-encompassing activity, which means that they have “no time for relaxation” and that “their entire energy is taken up in the hunting of the loaf”.19

Yet “the utter remoteness from delight”, which closes “A Street” and sets the tone for the Tales of Mean Streets, must be qualified. Even in “Lizerunt” courting represents a pleasant, if brief, spell of comparative happiness before marriage. Elsewhere life is brightened up, if not illuminated, on a few rare occasions, especially when a little time or money can be spared. Drinking can be a special occasion, even in the Jago, when Josh Perrott wins his fight for instance. In more favoured spots, a funfair (as in “Lizerunt”), or a ball at the Institute (as in To London Town, though it comes to naught for the young pair), are events that lit up the dull, workaday routine. Brief, fleeting pleasures, with no time wasted in refinement, characterize life in the East End.

Socially, if anonymity prevails in all great cities and particularly in the urban pattern of the East End, there is also a definite sense of community. Neighbours, because of proximity and promiscuity, exert a more or less overt pressure on each other, seemingly inspired by both a sense of bondage in poverty and a desire to be protected against social annihilation. On the positive side we see in To London Town the exchange of paint as a mark of good neighbourly relationship and solidarity; on the negative, the compulsory leave-taking of the May family once the shame of quarrelling and the accusation of adultery and bigamy have stained the shop's good name and the family's character. Respectability varies according to districts, but, as often as not, the fear of scandal and loss of people's esteem are compelling forces in matters of behaviour. Even in a district like the Jago, the Ropers find it hard to preserve their working-class decency. Their presence in the Jago results from unemployment; they are not integrated. Mrs. Roper is disliked because of her neatness and cleanliness, and her “aloofness from gossip”, just as her husband is rejected, for not drinking, or brawling, or beating his wife. This reluctance to comply with the Jago norm is a cause of antagonism; the Ropers are a disruptive example, or, as Morrison puts it, “a matter of scandalous arrogance, impudently subversive of Jago custom and precedent”. The tension is so acute that the Ropers, who have complained of robbery, are accused of “assailing the reputation of the neighbourhood” and, because they are but “pestilent outsiders”, are beaten up and plundered by their neighbours, only to be saved by the parson's timely intervention (CJ, pp. 72-3, 77). The Ropers are in fact an alien graft and are physically and morally rejected by the community; they are fought as a threat to its identity. Brian Harrison gives corroborative evidence when he points out that “slum dwellers disliked working men” who “gave themselves airs”, and that teetotallers were often insulted.20

Hannah Perrott experiences similar difficulties at first, because her background is different and she is “an alien who has never entirely fallen into Jago ways”. She neither drinks, nor gossips; nor is she beaten by her husband—a side reference to the normal relationship between husbands and wives. Her attitude is regarded as scornful aloofness and resented by other women, “irritated by such superiorities”, to the point of causing her harm—she is in fact beaten up as she belongs neither to the Ranns nor the Learys, the two families in feud (CJ, p. 65). Noncompliance thus exposes people to reprisal. In Hannah's case though, a slow process of acceptance and integration takes place, the physical preceding the moral change.

Respectability can be demonstrated in various ways. In “Behind the Shade” (TMS), two women, a widow and her daughter, live in a cottage at the end of “the common East End street”, but the neighbours disapprove of the independence enjoyed by this one isolated family, and gossip over the “piano-forte lessons” advertised in the window. Gradually their situation deteriorates and rather than appeal to public charity, they let themselves die of hunger. Two features are revealed; on the one hand a sense of conformity to a general “code of morals” even if it is a warped one, and self-respect on the other. To starve rather than beg stems from an attitude of stoic defiance. Echoes of the same notion were common enough at the time: a commentator noted in 1898 that “the reticence and reserve of the respectable struggling poor, who would prefer to starve in a garret rather than apply for the charitable doles, was not understood”.21 The idea expressed here establishes categories among the poor and the destitute, and takes for granted that charitable money was there for the asking, though there undoubtedly were misuses. What Morrison and his contemporaries often insisted upon, was the extreme point to which self-respect could lead. Typical is the attitude towards funerals—everything becomes subservient to the profound, stubborn urge to stage a “handsome funeral”. “On the Stairs” portrays an old mother who fails to help her dying son and keeps the money that could have brought him relief in order to procure the “mutes” and “plooms” required for a respectable departure, to be acknowledged by the whole neighbourhood. There are similar observations in To London Town,22 also in George Gissing's The Nether World. Elsewhere the characters express their horror of a cheap, plain coffin, and long for a “lovely” one—vainly in the case of Jack Randall in “All That Messuage.” Such an attitude may be the sign of imported middle-class notions, but it represents a characteristic outburst of self-respect or pride in the harsh life of the poor.

If we now return to the problem of the precarious existence of the working classes, we are led to note how often the chase for subsistence was frustrated, since work was insecure for the labourer whose hands were his sole property. In addition to the bad housing and sanitary conditions, the lack of security endangered the health and life of the working population. But unlike Sherard, who exposed the harsh and dangerous conditions in industry, Morrison did not dwell upon life in factories—except an engineering firm in To London Town. Instead, he depicted women at home, engaged in various occupations, such as rush-bag, sack or matchbox making. The latter especially enjoyed popularity among late Victorian observers. A Child of the Jago provides us with a well-documented picture—Morrison himself claimed to have assembled a few boxes. Hannah Perrot's case is typical in so far as “temporarily widowed” wives were numerous in the Old Nichol-Jago area since many men were “in the country”, i.e. in jail (p. 151). Several such activities, like shirt-mending, were in great demand, and were reserved for these more or less permanent widows. In the course of one of their removals, the Perrotts come to a room “wherein a widow had died over her sack-making two days before”, leaving hungry children (p. 118). She presumably tried to avoid going to the workhouse, to which her children were eventually sent. Hannah, like the other women, would rather be exploited by manufacturers, and work for a pittance, than depart to the “house”. Dr. T. J. Barnardo, in an article on the East End working classes, described their dread of the workhouse:

The workhouse? Ah! Well you hardly know, perhaps, the loathing and horror with which the industrious and decent poor contemplate the prospect of breaking up their little homes, of being separated from their children, and of committing themselves, without hope of deliverance, to the Union.23

The “Union” or the “house” meant the break up of families, since the sexes as well as children and parents were separated, and imposed restrictions on the independence of the poor. Outdoor relief was rarely given, but even when people were entitled to it and even though they were at the end of their tether, they radically refused the provisions of the Poor Law. Individualism and self-respect prevailed again.

Thinking of the slum population in this light, sociologists have divided families into clear-cut categories. Mayhew proposed several divisions according to the “honesty” of the poor, and distinguished between those “who will work”, those “who can't work”, and those “who won't work”, in other words, the “striving”, the “disabled” and the “dishonest”.24The range of people presented by Morrison provides a parallel with this classification. Just as there were various types of slums, so there were different classes of East Enders, “working class” being an ambiguous or inadequate term when applied to the second and third categories. The third one also includes criminals of the Jago type, as well as spongers on charity organizations or even on women like Mr. Burton in To London Town. In the preface to this story, Morrison described his new novel on the East End as forming with Tales of Mean Streets and A Child of the Jago “a trilogy intended to point a picture of a certain portion of life in the East End”. Although he insisted on the limits of his representation, he claimed that “in these three books there is a fairly wide range, from thieves and blackguards, through decent workmen and their wives, to the best classes of workmen, the last of whom make up the characters in To London Town.25 P. J. Keating's distinction between the poverty-stricken, the criminals and the respectable artisans in Morrison's work is another convenient way of describing the same three classes.26

Morrison tried to restore a truer perspective in an interview published in Cassell's Saturday Journal, stating that:

The ‘East-Ender’ is, more often than not, a respectable, hard-working man, who does his duty to his wife and children, and goes cleanly and honestly through the world. The great majority of the men work regularly and live in decent houses.

Here, the pendulum undoubtedly swung too far the other way, but the author at least tried to justify his view by adding that:

There is still in the East End an enormous multitude of people who seem almost of another race than ours, who bring up large families in poverty, live in dens rather than houses, and eat tomorrow what they earn to-day.27

It is refreshing to see him leave aside moral characteristics, and stress physical and genetic as well as social and environmental features. No doubt his exposure of the daily life of representative sections of East End Londoners led to a wholesome and salutary reaction. The realistic portrayal of the living conditions of the poor and the working classes resulting from the urban environment in the East End was to disturb consciences and to challenge the unruffled complacency of the time. Characteristic of the contemporary reception of Morrison's studies was the enlightened appraisal in the Literary Year Book for 1898 which commended their direct sociological significance: “In his two studies of the East End, Tales of Mean Streets and A Child of the Jago, Mr. Morrison has made his mark both as an artist and as a sociological observer. He gives as it were the subjective side of one of Mr. Charles Booth's pictures”.28

.....

Because of the complex interaction of several factors it is hard to assess exactly the negative influence of urban conditions upon people's lives. If overcrowding and poverty were sometimes perceived as leading to delinquency and crime, the mere association of urban and social evils was more often observed than their causality. The back streets and backyards in the slum areas of East London certainly created conditions which were conducive to crime. These blights in the urban fabric made it possible for people to evade both the Victorian sanitation and policing laws. In the crowded rookeries, criminals of all descriptions could find shelter, secure as they were from police interference, while the streets and main thoroughfares were regarded by them as hunting grounds. Jago Court is described by Morrison as “an unfailing sanctuary, a city of refuge ever ready, ever secure”, to the extent that higher rents had to be paid for “the privilege of residence in the Jago” (CJ, pp. 116-18), however questionable this advantage was in respect of sanitation and housing. Arthur Mee recalls Orange Court, in the Old Nichol area of Shoreditch, which “was approached by a tunnel from the street, and was on this account the favourite haunt of thieves”, adding that “the police dare not enter the court, as the men would watch them emerge from the tunnel and throw bricks at them”.29 It is not surprising in this context that people should have developed special norms of behaviour, verging on, if not altogether steeped in, criminality. Contagion did play a role. As J. J. Tobias points out in general terms, “groups of people, living in distinctive areas, had evolved a way of life of their own based on crime”, which forced other people to adopt the “same techniques, habits and attitudes”.30 A minority was thus capable of influencing a whole group and of giving a peculiar reputation to a given area.

Because of their unreachable recesses, the dockland and riverside areas of London, which play such prominent parts in A Child of the Jago and The Hole in the Wall, used to harbour and even favour dishonest deals and shady transactions performed by unscrupulous characters. The environment also palpably told on people's physical and mental health. William Booth insisted upon the “disease-breeding, manhood-destroying character” of congested housing, statistically involving about three million “submerged” people.31 Quite naturally, contemporary writers dwelt on the notion of degradation to bestiality, and resorted to animal imagery when depicting slum dwellers. Crowded courts would be compared to dens, unfit for human habitation. Morrison uses this image extensively in his description of the Jago, where people are debased into “slinking” rats living in foul dens.

The danger of contagion, previously mentioned, menaced young people especially. The children were often in the streets, and, for want of parental authority, were submitted to various harmful influences. R. L. Shoenwald, studying Chadwick's investigations in the 1830s, observes that exclusion of children from factories or reduced hours, has often turned them “out into the streets and swollen the ranks of juvenile delinquents”.32 Even after the creation of School Board inspectors there were many ways of playing truant. Moreover, the milieu had such a powerful impact on the children that they could not improve in it. They were “schooled, not educated”, as William Booth deplored. Many were born in workhouses, or were orphaned, experiencing, instead of a protective—though often inadequate—parenthood, the “competitive city life”. In that context of indiscipline and laissez-faire, young minds were an easy prey to social determinism.

A prison chaplain, the Reverend W. D. Morrison, observed in 1896 that “Juveniles in all ranks of life are exceedingly sensitive to public opinion, and, unless gifted with great inborn force of character, are apt to become what the world in general considers them to be”33—which pinpoints the pressure weighing on those young shoulders. The young were expected to behave the way their parents did; they had to bear the burden of their social origins as if they had committed unredeemable faults. Everyone was induced to follow the code of morals prevailing in his neighbourhood. Self-appropriation, for instance, was the means of defeating necessity in the Jago, and even “the one way to riches” (p. 81). Typical of this unwritten law is Dicky's reflection over his first theft, that “by all Jago custom and ethic it was his if only he could get clear away with it” (pp. 165-66). For those quick-maturing, self-sufficient boys, who modelled their conduct on the general pattern, the atmosphere was conducive to delinquency.

Yet, the notion of determinism seems to be absent from the following statement by W. D. Morrison:

There is a population of habitual criminals which form a class by itself. Habitual criminals are not to be confounded with the working or any other class; they are a set of persons who make crime the object and business of their lives; to commit crime is their trade; they deliberately scoff at honest ways of earning a living, and must accordingly be looked upon as a class of separate and distinct character from the rest of the community.34

This viewpoint, which in 1891 was by no means new, reminds us of the distinction made in 1851 by Mary Carpenter between the “perishing classes”, in danger of falling into crime, and the “dangerous classes”, living by theft. Logically, all reformatory endeavours were directed towards the former, the latter being judged unredeemable. The moral distinction between the deserving and the underserving poor became a sociological one, so that, despite this clear-cut categorization, it was still thought possible to alter conditions and circumstances so as to salvage endangered people, without examining the direct correlation between poverty and crime.

The existence of a criminal class was so much taken for granted that it found its way into fiction. In A Child of the Jago the criminal class is inseparable from the milieu that gives it nurture and support, and, behind the apparently individualistic and empirical character of its actions, it has developed an internal discipline and a structure capable of stimulating the young. Dicky Perrott entertains two hopes—owning a shop, and achieving the status of a mobsman, i.e. a first class thief. In his eyes both objectives are praiseworthy; they would earn him consideration on the economic and social levels. A high mobsman, like the Mogul, commands general respect in the underground world—he is a tyrannical ruler exerting his sway over a given urban territory. He generally enjoys “suburban respectability” (p. 143) and police immunity because of his established position based on wealth, so that he can operate safely as the brain behind important swindles or robberies. He is the ruthless captain at the top of the criminal hierarchy, and there is intense rivalry among cabin-boys, or street urchins—young Dicky is a good example—to resemble most closely the man they at once admire and dread.

The actions performed are measured with a special yardstick which distinguishes several categories of crime, from pilfering to shoplifting, and from house-breaking to burglary, just as thieves fall into classes and are manipulated by fences and mobsmen. The latter control people, supervise fights and organize betting in the Jago. Once a young boy like Dicky has proved his worth, he may be contacted and engaged by a receiver—Aaron Weech uses food and flattery to coax the hungry boy into working for him. A whole substructure is thus revealed. When the chase after the thief becomes too hot, stolen goods are dropped into the fence's yard, conveniently concealed from the public eye. On the other hand, when Josh Perrott wants to sell the watch he has stolen from the Mogul, or King of the High Mobsmen, the news has already got abroad and he vainly goes from Mother Gapp to pawnbrokers and to Weech. The latter treacherously informs the Mogul in the hope of a reward from this powerful protector. This incident points to an active underground organization, which controls individuals to preserve its cohesion.

For a better understanding of environmental influences on young people, we may examine Dick Perrott's exemplary case, and try to grasp the meaning of the rise and eventual downfall of a talented boy who could have made his way to the top. Forced to fend for himself at an early age, he soon realizes that “he must take his share, lest it fall to others” (p. 71). Necessity accelerates maturity and self-sufficiency. The lack of food in the cupboard and the fact that “there seemed nothing at home worth staying for” (p. 73), reduce him to loitering and pilfering, then to petty larceny with groups of other boys where he is noticed for his efficiency. He soon becomes an expert thief, and wins grades, the birchrod being part of his experience. This progression follows the lines traced by Old Beveridge in his advice to Dicky, when he urged him to become a high mobsman, “one of a thousand”—which implies that luck is necessary in the strife to find room at the top. All means are justified to reach this end—“Learn to read and write, learn all you can, learn cunning, spare nobody and stop at nothing, and perhaps”—Dicky might become one of the High Mob. “It's the best the world has for you, for the Jago's got you”, Old Beveridge adds (p. 91). The moral standard of behaviour directly originates from this East End corner.

The second pole of his potentiality is presented by Father Sturt, but it presupposes a transformation in outlook. No doubt Dicky senses that it is “a chance of life”, but the dream of becoming “a tradesman, with a shop of his own and the name ‘R. Perrott’, with a golden flourish, over the door” (p. 122), is soon shattered by the jealous villainy of Weech the fence, and the shopkeeper's prejudices. Old Beveridge's lessons and Weech's philosophy cannot be ignored, especially when life proves too firmly rooted in Jago reality. Dicky's defeat confirms his predestination—“He was of the Jago, and he must prey on the outer world, as all the Jago did” (p. 130)—and should not long after an impossible ideal. The other—and better—way out, somewhat artificially reiterated by the dying Dicky, is impossible. He feels further branded and rejected when his father is executed: “Now he went doubly sealed of the outcasts: a Jago with a hanged father … He was a Jago and the world's enemy” (p. 185). He is inexorably doomed: he is destined either for the Gallows or for the High Mob.

One is led to think that such children become outcasts because they are cast out by society, and restricted to their self-contained world of crime. Dicky's position is conditioned by two driving forces: hunger or necessity on the one hand—theft or crime are alternatives to starvation—, ambition on the other—the desire to reach a high criminal status. These forces, especially the second, must be related to pressures and influences stemming, not only from congested slums, but also from the jungle-like atmosphere people have been steeped in from their childhood. These are hereditary causes, not in the sense of genetic developments due to alcoholism for instance, though this factor is not to be neglected, but because criminal fathers, parents and neighbours are the models on which children frame their image of the world. The street is their school. Old Beveridge is Dicky's real teacher; Father Sturt only an occasional preceptor from the outside who has neither the time nor the influence necessary to alter the situation. Conditioning affects adults as well as children; because they are unable to bear physical or moral rejection, individuals are sucked under. The phenomenon that Jocelyn Bell calls “sinking to Jago level”35 reaches the Ropers—who are later offered a chance to escape—and also affects Hannah Perrott.

Social commentators seem to have been especially aware of the inversion or distortion of moral values, though criminality was seen as an inherent product of the environment. Of the same district in Shoreditch a writer observed: “There are men here whom it is impossible to convince that stealing is a crime. They were born into evil, bred on stealing, and it is their means of livelihood”.36 In the fiercely competitive street life of late Victorian London, a certain type of class war was being waged. In Morrison's Jago, people not only take to plundering each other's property, but keep delivering attacks on the well-stocked shops in Meakin Street, and on wealthy passers-by—walking in some streets of East London was actually fraught with dangers for everyone. But their predatory instinct carries them further afield. Dicky ventures as far as St Paul's, while Josh takes the train to Canonbury to commit burglary, disturbing the suburban tranquillity enjoyed by a High Mobsman who directly exploits East End thieves (pp. 139-40). Warehouses are also visited—the “great goods depot of a railway company” at the end of Bethnal Green Road and the neighbouring tobacco factories are preyed upon by the Jagos. The “fat's a-running” industry, i.e. snatching goods from vehicles and running away, is part of the sport practised by the able-bodied and younger members. “To venture a load of goods up Luck Row” was perilous indeed, the narrator observes when describing the experience of a newly-appointed carman who rashly chases a thief into the Jago area (pp. 109-13). After plundering, the compromising objects are quickly disposed of. Other instances of stealing, burgling, peter-claiming, swindling are also depicted in Divers Vanities (1905). In The Hole in the Wall, fighting, smuggling, violence and murder flourish unhindered by the river. Dicky himself sometimes resorts to the riverside area, as well as to the market-places in Mile End and Stepney, or to Liverpool Street Station to do some bag-carrying, though the struggle is all the more savage as he intrudes upon territories where the local boys claim their hunting right. He is more secure in his own district and shares this feeling with his father. In the Jago's movement from exposure to shelter, from enemy territory to family or community (and vice versa), can be seen a pattern characteristic of hunters in primitive societies: the man roams abroad, till he finds the food or the articles necessary for his sustenance and that of his family.

As in tribal groups there is an endless feud between families, the Ranns and the Learys inside the Jago, but also an eternal feud, racial in character, between the Jago area and Dove Lane, with peaceful spells between the battles underlined by bouts of general rejoicing at Mother Gapp's. Nevertheless, they are united by a common feeling against the police: hostility and distrust. Their code of morals forbids them to “nark”, and retaliation threatens informers—Aaron Weech is thus murdered by Josh Perrott when the latter is released from prison. As for Dicky, he refuses to tell the name of his young assassin. “Thou shalt not nark” is one of the first commandments of the Jago creed. Any police intervention is resented as a violation; people observe the law of silence or attempt to baffle any investigation.37 In Darkest England there can be no intrusion or trespassing.

This specifically urban type of criminality was partially due to the presence of uncleared, foul spots, notably in East London. Distressing slum-dwelling conditions, coupled with destitution and disease, could not but sharpen the moral and social problem of criminality, which became all the more acute as urban growth gathered pace and as the rift between East and West, the poor and the rich, widened. Moreover those facts were variously perceived by the public. The existence of a hard core of criminals amidst a working class community did cast a shadow over the East End as a whole. Morrison's descriptions were sometimes misread and their actual bearing misinterpreted. A book reviewer went so far as to warn his readers: “let us not delude ourselves into imagining that half London is inhabited by a race of Yahoos”. This sweeping statement prompted the author to react in a letter to the editor of the Spectator in which he insists on his personal knowledge of life in East London and rejects the unfair generalization.38 The concept of dangerous classes, mentioned above, was part of the prejudiced associations latent in the mind of the middle-class public. Though Morrison's work has no strictly statistical basis, it has sometimes been incorrectly judged, just as Mayhew's description of street folk has been made to encompass all the poor and working-class population of London. Despite his protests, Morrison may nonetheless have unwittingly contributed, through the very forcefulness of his East End studies, to lay an undue emphasis on the question of urban violence and criminality among the poor, east of Aldgate. His stories have given the city poor a metaphorical dimension which appears to be responsible for simplified modern visions of the “brutal, murderous London of the late 19th century”, to cite V.S. Pritchett's words.39

If determinism is sometimes blurred or hard to define, human behaviour proceeding both from a broadly genetic process and an environmental phenomenon, A Child of the Jago is clearly basically naturalistic in character. Théodore de Wyzewa, a contemporary French critic, perceived it to be so in his article entitled “Un naturaliste anglais”, published in 1897.40 Although the English equivalent of Zola did not develop as a naturalist, his picture is sociologically significant. The existence of criminal rookeries was known, but a detailed description was needed to throw the issues into sharp relief, to shake the sensibilities and rouse the conscience of the middle-class. The demonstration agrees with J. J. Tobias's insistence on the strict relation between environment and crime when he writes: “These youngsters were criminal in England because of lack of work and because of the pernicious effects of a morally unhealthy urban environment”.41 In Dicky Perrott's tragedy we find a striking exposure of society's sly ways of rejecting an individual's attempt to better his condition. Society maintains and safeguards its rigid hierarchy. In the same way as the Jago dictates its law to its immigrants, the world outside the ghetto keeps the status quo. The novel may in fact be seen as presenting a realistic and pessimistic view of urban and social mobility.

H. D. Traill, in his attack of the book in The Fortnightly Review, to which Morrison replied in The New Review,42 asserted that it was not impossible to escape from the Jago, thus refuting Dicky's predicament. In an interview given in 1907,43 Morrison himself indicated this possibility if only in the form of a radical break—transplantation through the adoption of children for example. In the same interview the author expressed his intentions and expounded his views of the “curse of environment”:

In A Child of the Jago it was my desire to show that, no matter how good a boy might be, or how great his abilities, there was no chance for him if he was put in the wrong environment, and that if his lot was thrown among the habitual criminals, he was inevitably bound to become a criminal.

More explicit of the naturalistic nature of his picture is his earlier analysis published in 1900 where he stresses the fundamentally deterministic value of his demonstrative case:

The root of the whole problem is the child, and it was to show this that I wrote the story of the Jago, one of the worst of all the districts in the East End. I took a boy through the whole of his life in the environment of the Jago, and tried to show how he was crushed at every turn, and how helpless any effort to uplift him was.44

Upbringing and environment are powerful influences: “stealing became a moral habit” to the boy—which means that, as Dicky is morally determined, the moral debate is irrelevant and the social one is essential. “So criminals are made and paupers are brought into the world”, Morrison concludes, implicitly accusing society.

If statistical data are rare in Morrison's novel—we know that there are seventy males on ticket of leave in Old Jago Street alone (p. 151)—, William Booth's work, In Darkest England, provides us with figures on criminality and suicide which substantiate his idea of the oppressing forces bearing on the population that is “partially, no doubt, bred to prison, the same as other people are bred to the army and to the bar”. In his mind society is to blame for the existence of “the hereditary criminal”, since in many cases such causes as poverty or “sheer starvation” are determining factors:

Absolute despair drives many a man into the ranks of the criminal class, who would never have fallen into the category of criminal convicts if adequate provision had been made for the rescue of those drifting to doom. When once he has fallen, circumstances seem to combine to keep him there.45

Dicky Perrott's life is a study in depth of the impossible emergence of a talented boy. Family education and experience in the street are too powerful to be discarded, so that, despite a brave attempt at improvement—through decent, honest work—, the criminal context proves the victor. The Jago frustrates his higher ambitions, plunges him into its murderous ways, and eventually, causes his death.

.....

Morrison's presentation of East London constitutes a social indictment, a statement of failure on several counts, which spells out the crying need for adequate organization. As far as town planning is concerned, A Child of the Jago is a realistic story based on a slum clearance scheme. While the crowded, insanitary district moulds characters and shapes events, the transformation of the structure by demolition serves as a background to the crisis. Only at the end does the changed area defeat Josh Perrott who can no longer find a refuge in his flight. It is unquestionable that the destruction of rookeries cleared dangerous quarters where policing was difficult, besides providing more wholesome lodgings. But Morrison did not fail to highlight the contradictions and inadequacies of such schemes.

If the demolition of “the foul old lanes” and the “subterraneous basements where men and women had swarmed, and bred, and died, like wolves in their lairs” (CJ, p. 121), can be regarded as a positive achievement, as it also served to deter criminality in that particular area, the planning scheme which intended to “wipe out the blackest spot in the Jago” (p. 105) was a partial failure. In the novel, Morrison mocks the eager philanthropic movement which intended to “abolish poverty and sin” in that part of the East End, and points out that people were very reluctant to leave the Jago. They devised all sorts of pretexts to postpone their eviction and, when they left, preferred to rent a room in another area. Morrison ironically notes this tendency to crowd neighbouring districts.

They did not return to live in the new barrack-buildings; which was a strange thing, for the County Council was charging very little more than double the rents which the landlords of the Old Jago had charged.

(p. 165)

The only successful case presented is Kiddo Cook, whose prosperity enables him to take two rooms in the new County Council dwellings. Similarly, H. J. Dyos and D. A. Reeder point to the paradox of these urban improvements, which were

hailed as a means of clearing the slums, though they had hardly ever failed to aggravate them, for their effect always was to reduce the supply of working class housing, either absolutely or in terms of the kind of houses which those turned out of doors by their operations could afford or wish to occupy.46

The complaint was not new in the 1890s though the range of it had altered: the lowest strata of slum-dwellers were the worst hit. Moreover, in the case of the Old Nichol Area, the number of people to be rehoused was gradually reduced, as indicated in The Housing Question in London (1900). On the one hand, townplanners were concerned, as they are to-day, with problems of expenditure and rent; on the other, people shrank from living in lodgings so rationally, or impersonally, laid out—they resented any interference. What was more subjective but nonetheless real was the ineradicable habits of the destitute deplored by Octavia Hill in House of the London Poor in 1875: “Transplant them tomorrow to healthy and commodious houses, and they would pollute and destroy them”. She disbelieved in public intervention and favoured individual initiative, with good results in some cases only. Many medical officers were reluctant to act forcefully through the Sanitation Acts, because they rightly thought that expulsion meant further overcrowding. Also, though various bodies were conscious of the relation between rent-paying and wage-earning, it was not until the turn of the century that adequate solutions were realistically examined. The Public Health Act of 1875 was insufficiently enforced. Yet, on the credit side, some progress was made towards a better grasp of the social problems of overcrowding and slum-dwelling.

Even though the clearance scheme was already in progress when Morrison gathered his material in the district of the Old Nichol in Shoreditch, his novel had a definite, if tardy, influence, as testifies the reference made by the Prince of Wales in 1900 at the official opening of the new lodgings. It is no mean achievement on the author's part to have illustrated the problem so well.47 But Morrison's outlook was pessimistic. To the objection that the slums were slowly disappearing, he replied in 1900:

Are you quite sure of that? You drive the people away by pulling down their houses, but you drive them to another place—that is all. One slum goes, another comes. The lower East-End, as we know it to-day, will disappear, but it will appear farther out (…).The same evils we are seeking to destroy in Central London are growing up in the suburbs. In many of the larger suburban towns the people are being crowded together, and some day Greater London will be face to face with the slum problem as we have it in the East-End to-day.48

Starting from the observation that the load was merely transferred from one area to another, and that the movement generated from the centre, he reached the conclusion that the centrifugal shift would affect the suburbs. Fortunately the prophecy of an outgrowing housing problem was not to be realized in such terms.

Correspondingly the problem of criminality could not be solved simply by wiping out criminals' haunting places—the root causes could not be obliterated overnight. Young Dicky Perrott, as we have seen, inevitably relapses into his former habits despite the advice and protective support of a priest, which proves that moral precepts and honest living are defeated. In fact, harsh contact with daily reality has abated the ideals and the enthusiasm of both the surgeon and the missioner in the Jago. In an enlightening dialogue, the surgeon acknowledges the failure of medicine to deal with the consequence of the high birth rate, but advocates the right to curb the proliferation of children in such a dangerous environment:

Is there a child in all this place that wouldn't be better dead—still better unborn? (…)


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.

As for Father Sturt, he confesses that the situation is hopeless, while stoically insisting on the duty he has to perform (CJ, pp. 156-8).

These ideas are taken up in the Saturday Journal article where Morrison voices his private views on the impossibility of influencing the race of criminals and paupers. Because the latter frustrate any hope of improvement he proposes a strict control: “Personally I should be in favour of almost any means which would restrict the growth of such a race” in order “to eliminate danger to the community”. And he suggests segregation and transportation. If this solution, and indeed the notion of a race apart, is rather unpalatable in the 1970s, it nevertheless stems from a keen wish to protect vulnerable individuals, and, first and foremost, children—“the care of the children is really of grave importance”, he adds—, which may mitigate the brutality of the proposal.

Poverty increased certain types of criminal offence, because the Poor Law was inadequate and the workhouses were considered to be worse than prisons. They dissuaded needy people from applying for relief and were even regarded as schools for gaolbirds. As for the failure of penal measures, Morrison is more precise when he examines the problem of hooliganism. Condemning the leniency of justice, he recommends a deterrent punishment—the cat-o'-nine-tails in cases of violence. This proposition recalls two features in A Child of the Jago. When Josh Perrott weighs the pros and cons before committing his burglary, or robbery with violence, he shudders at the thought of the cat, like all the Jago toughs. Dicky Perrott, on the other hand, would rather take a whipping than go to a reformatory (CJ, p. 140, p. 154). Although Morrison's analysis is correct on the whole, the problem of urban hooliganism included elements and factors beyond his ken. His was a plea for an unsentimental, hence realistic, apprehension of the bankruptcy of religious, social and judicial measures.

Education was also inadequate in the East End. The Education Acts left loopholes in their regulations, and inspectors could not enforce the measures capable of schooling the young East Londoners. If the number of juvenile delinquents alarmed the authorities, compulsory education contributed in no negligible way to diminish the rate of criminality, if only because it kept young children from the streets where they were “learning their lessons of evil”.49 Besides, the opening of Institutes proceeded from an attempt to find an appropriate cultural and educational means of reaching working-class people, and of catering for the masses in dense urban districts. In To London Town, Johnny attends evening courses at the Institute founded by a shipbuilder, which includes a gymnasium, a cricket club and activities like boxing, also cookery and dressmaking for girls. This recalls the example of the People's Palace as a way of educating the culturally underdeveloped working-class area of Poplar in the East End. Morrison, who had quitted the post of secretary to the Beaumont Trust administering this scheme after four years of active work, later criticized the development of the institution into a polytechnic, seemingly because it had ceased to fulfil its vaster cultural and social role. Yet this venture was not lost, it paved the way for the one University in East London, Queen Mary College, an outpost of culture and advancement set in this essentially working-class district.

In his article in the Saturday Journal, he reveals his disappointment at the non-realization of cultural plans for the masses: “Such places as the People's Palace, and a hundred others—excellent institutions all of them—do not reach the people they are started for”. He also pinpoints the delusion, which affected outside visitors, of “imagining that these well-dressed people were once the dirty, ragged, vulgar people these institutions were built for”, and then condemns the misdirection of otherwise praiseworthy endeavours. His purpose is clearly to debunk his contemporaries' dangerous complacency. “Let us be honest”, he concludes, “and not pretend that we are reaching people who are quite beyond our influence”. This is a statement of failure and incompetence, stemming from a pessimistic view of the possibility of social improvements. Equally pessimistic is the description of miscarried ventures in the rookeries. Slumming led to philanthropic blunders, which are satirized in A Child of the Jago, notably in the form of the East End Elevation Mission and Pansophical Institute. Superior or paternalistic attitudes were ill-suited to the character of the East-Ender; ill-adapted too, was the sentimental approach, mocked in the novel (CJ, p. 104). Most charitable institutions fell short of their promises.

As positive evidence there remains Arthur Osborne Jay's (or Father Sturt's) example—a model of muscular approach to Christianity and to social problems. His down-to-earth principles, his iron discipline, his directness and singeing irony, seem to have had good results in his East End parish. Clubs could unite people, and boxing was a sport that suited their temperament and kept them away from street fights. But he refused to take advantage of their presence in the club to force religion into them. His was a new pedagogy, adapted to a tough milieu; it represented a breakaway from stale and sterile patronizing attitudes. Yet Jay was rather fatalistic as he noted only slight improvements in the Old Nichol area. Morrison probably inherited this pessimistic outlook on human nature. But both men wanted change. Jay wished to “wake up the authorities as to the state of the district”, as he put it in the opening pages of A Story of Shoreditch (1896), and demanded reform for those who “enter life heavily handicapped”. Morrison, too, still believed in social reform, if not in a social revolution:

There is not likely to be any great upheaval. The East-End is no revolutionist. And in the main it is much better than its reputation. But there will always be room for the social reformer, as there will be in every great city, and the most hopeful aspect of his work, I think, will be that which aims at the child.50

This is an appeal to concentrate duly on the future generation in the city.

.....

Arthur Morrison's record of East End life should be examined in relation to the sociological works of men like Booth and of social workers and reformers like Octavia Hill. Morrison is one of the few writers who wrote forcefully and convincingly of the “People of the Abyss” in the 1890s, to refer to the title of Jack London's social novel published in 1902. If Morrison's books had such an enduring impact, it is partly because his account of East London represented a shock treatment for the public, but also and essentially because his presentation supported as well as foreshadowed other descriptions and parallel images drawn by contemporary writers and social historians. His work both crystallized and perpetuated a portrayal of an East End calling for reform.

His exposure of the physical and moral degradation of the poor and working-class population in the East End implies that determinism of the environment should not prevail, and that alleviation, if not complete eradication, of hardships and handicaps, are possible by eliminating the causal errors, the blameful shortcomings of social structures. If the Jago already represented an old battle when Morrison published his fictional account, the problems raised reach beyond its contemporary, documentary value. It is exemplary of the housing question whenever society relinquishes its responsibilities and fails to cater for its needy members—especially the children whose expectancies are frustrated.

Although W. C. Frierson correctly sees the naturalistic current in A Child of the Jago, one must question his conclusion that “Morrison draws no lesson and preaches a sermon” and that “he accepts the low creature's depravity”.51 The author's quotation from Ezekiel, which heads the novel, is indicative of his intention to rouse public opinion. The message borne out by Morrison's work is the necessity for a solution to the larger issue of urban poverty and criminality—still a relevant problem to-day when unfavourable environment favours unsocial or delinquent attitudes. In Lizerunt's fate and in Dicky Perrott's tragic life, the reader may feel a desire for a truly equalitarian city, where equal opportunities should be made available to all its inhabitants, a plea for improving the material conditions and for raising the educational and moral standards of the disinherited through supporting bodies, which should be organized yet flexible. This desired urban therapy depends on a reform of social legislation, which ultimately rests on the politico-economic plane.

His social exposures paved the way for the welfare state, but there remain issues on which the battle to be waged is sure to be a long one. One can cite for example two present-day problems: the question of battered wives and the dockland redevelopment program in East London. The former is more universal in its bearing—with some reservation one is tempted to say that Lizerunt is with us still. It involves family morals as well as social legislation, whereas the second more specifically concerns town planning policy. In a pamphlet issued by the London Docklands Study Team in April 1973,52 one may read: “Some parts of the Area have interest and character, but the general impression of the physical environment is of drabness and deterioration”, and one of the first alternatives proposed is “to provide housing for families living in overcrowding conditions or in dilapidated property”. Mean streets and mean lodgings still. The East End has witnessed a radical alteration due to the closure of the docks; it is ironic that industry should now be asked to migrate to the East End to meet the labour supply of this essentially working-class community. In this period of economic crisis in Britain, redeployment has come to a head, though the long term programme will be carried to the nineties—the 1990s. As in Victorian times, there are housing problems and planning misjudgements, and social priorities are still matter for debate in East London.

Notes

  1. Abbreviations: CC (“Cockney Corners”), TMS (Tales of Mean Streets), CJ (A Child of the Jago), TLT (To London Town).

  2. The Globe, 20 October 1888, p. 7.

  3. The quotations in this paragraph are taken from the sketches entitled “London Bridge,” “London Hospital,” and “Soho”. They are part of a series called “Cockney Corners,” which provides a new and most interesting source material, as it refers to an early period in Morrison's career, six years before the publication of TMS. Chronologically the CC were published as follows in The People, always on page 2:

    “Chrisp Street, Poplar,” 28 October 1888;

    “A Patch of Clerkenwell,” 4 November 1888;

    “London Hospital,” 11 November 1888;

    “Greenwich,” 18 November 1888;

    “The Polytechnic Institution,” 25 November 1888;

    “Soho,” 2 December 1888;

    “Bridge and Borough,” 9 December 1888;

    “Epping Forest,” 16 December 1888;

    “Christmas Eve in the Street,” 23 December 1888 (reprinted in The Palace Journal, 25 December 1889);

    “Bow Street,” 30 January 1889;

    “Whitechapel,” 6 January 1889 (reprinted in The Palace Journal, 24 April 1889);

    “The People's Palace,” 13 January 1889;

    “Jacob's Island,” 20 January 1889.

    “On Blackwall Pier,” which I have not traced in The People, was published in The Palace Journal, 8 May 1889.

  4. After his death in Buckinghamshire, he was buried at Loughton.

  5. See The Bookman (London), November 1908, p. 88.

  6. “Epping Forest” (see note 2).

  7. TLT (Methuen, 1889), p. 25.

  8. Morrison seems to be more optimistic when he observes people choosing less gloomy places: “Be a town never so poor and dreary, be any district never so uniformly mean and sordidly uninteresting, there are always some among the humble inhabitants thereof, who, by an instinct they may be highly credited with, habitually resort to the least dull and ugly spot in its vicinity.” The adjectives and adverbs are sufficiently eloquent, however, of urban drabness.

  9. Vignettes (1896), p. 56.

  10. CJ, p. 159. All subsequent references are taken from the Panther edition, 1971 (reprint of MacGibbon & Kee edition with introduction and notes by P. J. Keating, 1969).

  11. The Home Magazine, 23 April 1898, p. 16.

  12. Homes of the London Poor (1875), p. 197.

  13. Quotation from “A Street.”

  14. The Hole in the Wall (1902) pp. 103-4.

  15. The Home Magazine, 11 June 1898, p. 156.

  16. See note 11.

  17. The White Slaves of England (1897), p. 34.

  18. Cornhill Magazine, March 1901, pp. 446-58.

  19. “Nobody laughs here—life is too serious a thing; nobody sings. There was one a woman who sang—a young wife from the country. But she bore children, and her voice cracked. Then her man died, and she sang no more. They took away her home, and with her children about her skirts she left this street for ever. The other women did not think much of her. She was ‘helpless.’” (TMS, pp. 17-8).

  20. Op. cit., p. 32.

  21. In Dyos, H. J. and Wolff, M., The Victorian City (1973), Ch. 6, p. 183.

  22. “Toynbee Hall,” The Home Magazine, 9 Dec. 1899, p. 239.

  23. See TLT, pp. 57-9. Because of the distance and the old man's disapproval, Johnny's grandfather does not get the “proper” funeral London would have required.

  24. See note 10.

  25. See Gertrude Himmelfarb, “The Culture of Poverty,” in Dyos, op. cit., ch. 30, p. 707.

  26. P.T.O., 7 December 1907, p. 545.

  27. See P. J. Keating's introduction to the 1969 edition of CJ.

  28. 19 September 1900, p. 24.

  29. Op. cit., p. 63.

  30. “A Transformation in Slumland,” The Temple Magazine, pp. 453-4.

  31. Crime and Industrial Society in the Nineteenth Century, Penguin Books (1972), p. 42.

  32. In Darkest England (1890), p. 24.

  33. “Training Urban Man,” in Dyos, op. cit., ch. 28, p. 677.

  34. Cited in J. J. Tobias, op. cit., p. 63.

  35. Ibid., pp. 59-62.

  36. “A Study of Arthur Morrison” in Essays and Studies, John Murray, 1952, p. 82.

  37. The Home Magazine, 11 June 1898, pp. 256-8.

  38. See CJ, end of Ch. 33 and The Hole in the Wall, Ch. 24.

  39. The Spectator, 9 March 1895, pp. 329-30 and 16 March 1895, p. 360.

  40. New Statesman and Nation, 22 January 1944, p. 61.

  41. Revue des Deux Mondes, 1897, pp. 933-45. Although he calls the novel “un Assommoir national,” and states that Morrison had “aimed at the most orthodox naturalism,” he soon stresses the social and moral aspects of this “Public Prosecutor's charge.”

  42. J. J. Tobias, op. cit., p. 286.

  43. “The New Realism,” The Fortnightly Review, 1 January 1897, pp. 65-70; “What is a Realist?”, The New Review, March 1897, pp. 326-36.

  44. See note 25.

  45. See note 27.

  46. Op. cit., p. 58.

  47. “Slums and Suburbs,” in Dyos, op. cit., ch. 15, p. 365.

  48. See CJ, pp. 118-9, 158-60, 165-6.

  49. See note 27.

  50. Octavia Hill, op. cit., p. 203.

  51. See note 27.

  52. See Frierson, W. C., L'influence du naturalisme français sur les romanciers anglais de 1885 à 1900 (Paris, 1925); The English Novel in Transition (University of Oklahoma Press, 1942).

  53. Rebuilding Dockland. What Choice for the Future?, T. Travers, p. 3.

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