Arthur Morrison

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Arthur Morrison: A Commentary with an Annotated Bibliography of Writings About Him

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SOURCE: “Arthur Morrison: A Commentary with an Annotated Bibliography of Writings About Him,” in English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, Vol. 28, No. 3, 1985, pp. 276-97.

[In the following essay, Calder briefly surveys the critical response to Morrison's work.]

In his introduction to the 1969 edition of A Child of the Jago, P. J. Keating points out that little is known of Arthur Morrison's life before the beginning of his career as an author in the early 1890s and that little is known of his years following his retirement from writing in 1911. The scant facts are that he was born in Poplar, in the East End of London, on 1 November 1863, the son of an engine fitter. In his early twenties, he was employed in the administration of the People's Palace, the charitable institution established by Walter Besant. Following a year as sub-editor of The Palace Journal, he worked for a West End evening newspaper in 1890, and then quit to become a free-lance journalist.

In 1892, Morrison married Elizabeth Adelaide, and their only son, Guy, died in 1921. Morrison retired in 1913 to High Beech, Essex, and moved to Chalfont St. Peter, Buckinghamshire, in 1930. He died in December 1945. Biographically, he remains an obscure figure, and it is unlikely that a full account of his life will ever be written.

In a similar way, little is known or acknowledged today about Morrison's literary achievements. While he became a controversial figure in the debate about realism in England in the 1890s, and although he was fairly widely reviewed, often favourably, the number of substantial critical studies of his writing is small. Since the end of his career, the only serious examinations of his work have been the few written by William C. Frierson, V. S. Pritchett, Jocelyn Bell, T. Harper Smith, Vincent Brome, and P. J. Keating. In literary surveys, if Morrison is recognised at all, it is, for example in Legouis' and Cazamian's A History of English Literature, more often than not merely in a footnote. Today, even in the academic world, he is little read or studied.

The lack of critical consideration of Morrison is regrettable, and certainly surprising when one examines his writing. In a sense, he was a writer with three distinct areas of accomplishment, each differing enough from the others to seem to be written by another person. After beginning his career by publishing stories in Macmillan's Magazine, Morrison established his reputation with books about slum life—Tales of Mean Streets (1894) and A Child of the Jago (1896)—certainly his best work. But at the same time he was producing the Martin Hewitt detective stories, and, while reviewers pointed out that they suffered by comparison with Doyle's Sherlock Holmes adventures, they praised their ingenious plots and well-wrought suspense. It has been suggested that Morrison is in fact better known today for these stories than for his slum writing. Finally, his two-volume study The Painters of Japan (1911) was widely praised as a pioneer work, and Morrison was for many years considered one of the most knowledgeable of European students of Oriental art.

Largely because of its social implications, Morrison's slum literature usually generated an ambivalent reaction in reviewers: while admitting that he demonstrated considerable technical skill, critics often found his subject matter unacceptable. Tales of Mean Streets, a collection of stories which reveal the monotony and dreariness of slum life, was on the whole well received. Athenaeum found it “absolutely convincing,” Bookman (London) called it “scrupulously truthful,” and Spectator wrote of its “great power.” But while reviews praised Morrison's characterisation and sensitive observation of ghetto life, several journals regretted that he failed to show any happiness or positive aspects in working-class life. Spectator, for example, argued that he presented the worst East End characters as representative figures and that he ultimately interpreted slum life through the eyes of a middle-class outsider.

It was A Child of the Jago, however, that earned Morrison the most notoriety. Once again his vigour, sympathy, economy of style, and vivid characterisation were praised. But, having admitted this, many reviewers went on to raise questions about the veracity of his slum pictures or the artistic justification for explicit scenes of violence and degradation—questions which reveal as much about the attitudes of the reviewers or periodicals as about Morrison. Athenaeum deplored the concentration on revolting details, descriptive passages which Bookman (London) called “orgies of physical violence” and “the useless riot of brutality.” Blackwood's argued that fiction is the wrong form for such material, and protested that a reader looking for recreation and relaxation should not be confronted by such misery. Similarly, Critic (New York), while calling it a “tract for the times,” felt that it might remain unread because of the “unrelieved wretchedness, pessimism and ugliness,” and Nation argued that the despair was so overwhelming that no sympathetic action would be initiated in the reader.

A stronger attack, and the most important critical attention given to Morrison during his career, came from H. D. Traill, in Fortnightly in 1897. Traill charged that A Child of the Jago gives the impression of extraordinary unreality, a “fairyland of horrors” no more realistic than Book IV of Gulliver's Travels. This “idealisation of ugliness” was seen as part of a general corruption of realism in English literature. The same argument was taken up several years later by Robert Blatchford in My Favorite Books (1900) and in “The Novel of Misery,” in Quarterly Review (1902). Traill's article also drew a response from the Rev. A. Osborne Jay, in which he attested to the truth of Morrison's picture of the East End, and in turn Traill countered with additional evidence when his essay was reprinted in The New Fiction (1897).

Nothing that Morrison wrote after A Child of the Jago was as good or as controversial, and later reviews expressed either relief that he moved away from harrowing slum stories or regret that he had not developed as a writer. In a summing up of Morrison's work in 1897, Academy argued, astutely it now seems, that he was at a critical stage of his career, a point where it would soon be seen whether his potential would be realised. It urged him to throw off the influence of Dickens, Kipling, Daudet, and Zola, and develop his original qualities. To some degree, The Hole in the Wall (1902) answered this challenged, and it was praised for its vivid and perceptive descriptions, careful workmanship, and sympathetically drawn characters.

The Hole in the Wall was applauded as well for its humour and lack of despair, a reaction that had also greeted To London Town (1899). Spectator argued that it refuted the idea that Morrison was filled with “conscious and incorrigible pessimism”; Bookman (London) and the Times (London) saw it as proof that he did not write only brutal stories. Green Ginger (1909) was similarly commended for its high spirits and farcical tone. Bookman (London) and the New York Times saw Morrison becoming a delightful humorist, and Athenaeum relished the mellow and kindly wit.

In his last major work, The Painters of Japan (1911), Morrison became an art historian, and with few exceptions he was given laudatory notices. Both Laurence Binyon in Saturday Review and the critic of the Times Literary Supplement called it “magnificent.” Some reviewers felt that more illustrations from wider sources would have improved the book, but Morrison was praised for his observation, enthusiasm, shrewdness, and power of deduction.

Except for several collections of short stories, The Painters of Japan was Morrison's last book, and with his retirement came a return to obscurity. With the absence of notices in the popular press and literary journals, post-World War I readers did not discover Morrison's writing, and he soon became a figure of the past or simply not known at all.

The number of studies of Morrison published since the end of his career is small. William C. Frierson, in The English Novel in Transition 1885-1940 (1940) did much to assess his place in the realistic movement of the Nineties. V. S. Pritchett, calling The Hole in the Wall “one of the minor masterpieces of the last forty years,” drew attention to Morrison in the New Statesmen and Nation in 1944; and Jocelyn Bell, in Essays and Studies for the English Association (1952), provided a perceptive survey of his writing. In 1965 Morrison was one of four English realistic novelists analysed by Vincent Brome in the British Council series of “Writers and their Work.”

The most recent criticism of Morrison, and the most important to date, is that undertaken by P. J. Keating of the University Leicester. Keating provides the most substantial biographical material yet available in his introduction to A Child of the Jago; he has written the most knowledgeable and intelligent critical commentary on Morrison in the introduction to Working Class Stories of the 1890's (1971) and especially in The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction (1971).

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