I

In the 1890s Arthur Morrison wrote three books which deal with working-class life in the East End: Tales of Mean Streets (1894), A Child of the Jago (1896) and To London Town (1899). … Morrison's work is an amalgam of Besant, who supplies a new image of the East End; Charles Booth, who clarifies the class structure of that image; and Kipling, from whom Morrison derives his objective, amoral, literary method. To these diverse influences he brings considerable personal experience of working-class life, carefully acquired skill as a reporter, and a simple but vivid prose style. More than any other author it is Arthur Morrison who establishes the tone of slum fiction in the nineties.

Very little of a personal nature is known about his early life, though it is now possible to construct a sound outline of his activities in the nineties. His birth certificate shows that he was born in Poplar, the son of an engine fitter, and from a few obviously autobiographical remarks in his published writings it seems reasonable to assume that at least some of his childhood was spent in the East End, but it is impossible to draw any definite conclusions about this period of his life. Nothing further is known of him until, at the age of twenty-three, his signature appears on a cash receipt in respect of one month's salary (September 1886) as Clerk to the Beaumont Trustees, the philanthropic foundation that administered the People's Palace. Once again he disappears from the scene until 6 March 1889 when he was appointed sub-editor of the Palace Journal, then under the control of Walter Besant, from whom it was later claimed he ‘received some hints on the technical ABC of fiction’.¹ As sub-editor of the Journal he compiled a weekly column of general information about the Palace and, more interestingly, published three signed descriptive sketches of the East End. After about nine months Morrison relinquished his post as sub-editor and six months later resigned from the Beaumont Trustees.² From this time onwards he chiefly earned his living as a free-lance journalist. In October 1891, he published an article in Macmillan's Magazine called “A Street” which, in a revised form, later became the famous introduction to Tales of Mean Streets. This article attracted the attention of W. E. Henley who invited Morrison to write a series of working-class stories for The National Observer. Apart from the Mean Streets stories he probably also contributed unsigned articles to the Observer and was usually labelled as one of ‘Henley's young men’ with, among others, Rudyard Kipling, who remained a life-long friend.

The three descriptive sketches published in the Palace Journal show Morrison striving, with little success, to develop an individual approach to the difficult problem of writing about the East End. The first of them, “Whitechapel” (24 April 1889), challenges the ‘graphically-written descriptions of Whitechapel, by people who have never seen the place.’ Morrison distinguishes between two types of description. The one:

A horrible black labyrinth … reeking from end to end with the vilest exhalations; its streets, mere kennels of horrent putrefaction; its every wall, its every object, slimy with the indigenous ooze of the place; swarming with human vermin, whose trade is robbery, and whose recreation is murder; the catacombs of London—darker, more tortuous, and more dangerous than those of Rome, and supersaturated with foul life.

This approach, as we have already seen, belongs to the Newgate-novel-Dickens-Kingsley-early-Gissing tradition, and during the late-Victorian period was still commonly used in the working-class romance. The other type of description is that of ‘outcast’ London:

Black and nasty still, a wilderness of crazy dens into which pallid wastrels crawl to die; where several families lie in each fetid room, and fathers, mothers, and children watch each other starve; where bony, blear-eyed wretches, with everything beautiful, brave, and worthy crushed out of them, and nothing of the glory and nobleness and jollity of this world within the range of their crippled senses, rasp away their puny lives in the sty of the sweater.

Morrison admits there are places in Whitechapel that fit these descriptions, but because of the size of the district and the variety of life to be found in it, neither can be said to be representative. In order to paint a fair picture of Whitechapel, he argues, one should take into account the ancient industries, colourful street traders, booksellers, and its many literary and historical associations, as well as the suffering poor and the foul slums. This is very similar to the kind of East End image that, under Besant's influence, the Palace Journal usually advanced, save at the close of Morrison's sketch a note of despair creeps in. While mocking the ‘slummers’ Morrison agrees that ‘something must be done’ about the black spots. But what?

Children must not be left in these unscoured corners. Their fathers and mothers are hopeless, and must not be allowed to rear a numerous and equally hopeless race. Light the streets better, certainly; but what use in building better houses for these poor creatures to render as foul as those that stand? The inmates may ruin the character of a house, but no house can alter the character of its inmates.

These words, written while Morrison was actually working in ‘The Palace of Delight,’ hardly represent a vote of confidence for Besant's particular brand of optimism, but at this stage of his development Morrison was obviously not sure in his own mind just what attitude he should adopt towards the East End and the working classes. The other two sketches he wrote for the Palace Journal show the same uncertainty. “On Blackwall Pier” (8 May 1889) attempts to describe the strange extremes of life to be found side by side in a working-class setting. The gay coarseness of lovers on a pier is contrasted with the half-drowned body of an attempted suicide that is dragged from the Thames. The third sketch is virtually a plagiarism of Dickens's A Christmas Carol, in which tradesmen and shoppers swop jokes amid a plethora of fruit, meat and spirits. In this East End jolly policemen fall over children's slides, gentlemen's hats fly off, bells chime, and the foulness of the slums is made picturesque by a sparkling frost.

By the time Morrison wrote “A Street” in 1891 he had rid his mind of these conflicting attitudes and had firmly established the compound of realistic observation and quiet despair that he made peculiarly his own:

There is about one hundred and fifty yards of our street, all of the same pattern. It is not a picturesque street; a dingy little brick house twenty feet high with three square holes to carry the windows and an oblong hole to carry the door is not picturesque; and two or three score of them in a row, with one front wall in common, represent either side of our street and suggests stables.

Morrison has here completely accepted Besant's view that monotony not poverty is the most serious problem of East End life, but he has rejected Besant's cultural antidote. For Morrison monotony is a quality endemic in working-class life; it is not merely a sickness to be cured by building libraries or Palaces of Delight: ‘And this is the record of a day in our street,—of any day,—of every day … Of every day excepting Sunday … This is Sunday in our street, and every Sunday is the same as every other Sunday.’³

To the social influence of Besant can be added the literary influence of Kipling, for the tone of Tales of Mean Streets owes much to ‘Badalia Herodsfoot.’ Short, simple, yet rhythmic sentences, tellingly used to create an air of authorial disinterest, is one of the techniques, coming from Kipling, that most distinctly separates the slum novelists of the nineties from their predecessors:

Nobody laughs in our street,—life is too serious a thing—nobody sings. There was a woman who sang once,—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 the woman left our street for ever. The other women did not think much of her. She was ‘helpless.’⁴

Morrison himself wrote that he intended “A Street” to convey ‘the deadly monotony and respectability of the mean streets so characteristic of the East End, for hopeless monotony is more characteristic than absolute degradation such as you find in the Jago.’⁵ And this is the theme of not merely the introduction but the majority of Mean Streets tales. This point is of some importance as Morrison's reputation for concentrating upon the violent aspects of slum life was established even before he wrote A Child of the Jago (1896).

When Tales of Mean Streets was first published, critical attention, which was on the whole very favourable, focused so exclusively on “Lizerunt,” the one really violent story in a collection of fourteen, that Morrison, who was generally shy of publicity, wrote to one periodical denying that he had ‘generalized half London as a race of Yahoos’.⁶ At this time he had already begun to write To London Town which, because of its gentleness of tone, might have been intended as a rebuke to his critics, but for some unknown reason he abandoned this work and published instead his study of East End criminal life A Child of the Jago. Once again he found himself at the centre of a debate on the extent and nature of violence in working-class life and fiction. Just as he had earlier pointed out that “Lizerunt” represented only one part of life in the East End, now he was forced to explain that A Child of the Jago dealt with a specific East End criminal ghetto, and at no time had he intended to offer it as representative of working-class life as a whole.⁷ The critics paid little attention to his disavowals, and the phrase ‘Jagodom’ (used as a synonym for hooliganism, itself a word of recent coinage) passed, with ‘mean streets,’ into common usage. In spite of the fact that the greater part of Morrison's work was not concerned with the working classes at all, and that most of his working-class fiction did not deal with violent themes, it was “Lizerunt” and A Child of the Jago that established his literary reputation in the nineties.

Even today Morrison's critics find it difficult to regard his work in a rational manner. Julian Franklyn, concentrating entirely on “Lizerunt,” claims that: ‘There could be such a monster [as Billy Chope, the hero] but in Tales of Mean Streets one gathers the impression that all Cockneys are like this. To Morrison, poverty and criminality are synonymous.’⁸ And Alan Sillitoe, himself an outstanding working-class novelist, ironically in the Morrison tradition, finds that Morrison's characters ‘lived in a zoo, and were to be regarded with fear, hostility, and derision.’⁹

Judgements such as these are extremely unfair to Morrison. While it is true that his most successful work is on the violent side of working-class life (in artistic terms To London Town is a complete failure), violence is never used for sensational reasons, but is always part of a well-defined total pattern. Furthermore Morrison's novels and stories possess considerable historical importance. When he first decided to write some short stories about the working classes he determined that ‘they must be done with austerity and frankness and there must be no sentimentalism, no glossing over.’¹⁰ Almost every working-class novelist before him had vowed the same, but, as we have already seen, in these earlier novels scenes which deal with the more debased or violent aspects of working-class life, such as wife-beating, drunkenness or hooliganism, are so handled as to indicate the author's personal disappropriation of the behaviour described. This may be done in two ways. Either some kind of terrible retribution comes to the debased character, or the way of life of other characters in the novel (either a substitute-working-class or a middle-class hero) provides a constant moral standard against which the debased scenes can be measured. Morrison, following the example of Kipling, rejected these moral middle-men. In his role of ‘realist’ he demanded absolute freedom to write on whatever subject he wished:

If the community have left horrible places and horrible lives before [the novelist's] eyes, then the fault is that of the community; and to picture these places and these lives becomes not merely his privilege, but his duty.¹¹

As Morrison's reference to the ‘duty’ of the novelist suggests, he did not believe in the total abnegation of social responsibility, but he interpreted ‘responsibility’ to mean presenting the simple, objective truth as it appeared to him. He angrily attacked those critics who demanded that in his novels he should always clearly indicate his own moral position:

It is not that these good people wish me to write ‘even weeping’: for how do they know whether I weep or not? No: their wish is not that I shall weep, but that I shall weep obscenely in the public gaze. In other words that I shall do their weeping for them, as a sort of emotional bedeman.¹²

Morrison owes his historical and literary importance to precisely this—that he refused to be an ‘emotional bedeman’ for the reading public. Like Kipling, he felt that the only justifiable way of presenting the working classes in fiction was in terms of their own attitudes and values. The East End world that he knew seemed to comprise three main qualities, monotony, respectability and violence. It is the interrelationship of these qualities that Morrison tries to express in his novels and stories.

“Lizerunt” traces the brief life of a factory girl, Elizabeth Hunt, from her courting days, through the early years of marriage and fertile motherhood, to the moment when her brutal husband throws her out of the house to earn money street-walking. Several aspects of his kind of story had already been handled by novelists. The Bank Holiday courtship which is used to contrast the rowdy horse-play of cockney love-making with the brutal violence that takes its place once the marriage ceremony is over, had been used by Gissing in The Nether World. And the theme of a feeble, terrorized wife devotedly defending her debased husband had also been superbly handled by Gissing in his portrait of Pennyloaf Candy, by Kipling in “Badalia Herodsfoot,” and by many other writers stretching back to Dickens in Sketches by Boz. The tone of “Lizerunt” owes everything to Kipling. As in “Badalia Herodsfoot,” the action centres upon several violent moments in Lizer's life, each of which is described dispassionately by the author. Moral comment is made obliquely by using incongruous metaphors and images. Thus, Lizer watching two men fighting over her is elated and ‘for almost five minutes she was Helen of Troy.’¹³ This use of the mock heroic—like pastoral, a technique favoured by many working-class novelists—serves not merely to describe but also to ridicule. The same is true of some of Morrison's observations on working-class behaviour. When Billy Chope meets Lizer in the street he ‘caught and twisted her arm, bumping her against the wall’:

‘Garn’, said Lizerunt, greatly pleased: ‘Le' go!’ For she knew that this was love.¹⁴

Morrison does not point out (as for instance Gissing does) that rough physical contact is an important part of slum courtship, but allows the incident to speak for itself. The effect, however, is immediately destroyed by the implied sneer in his next sentence.

Yet in spite of these faults “Lizerunt” is very effective. By concentrating a period of about three years into a series of graphically presented moments, Morrison captures one of the aspects of slum life that had always horrified the working-class novelist—the collapse of a slum girl's feeble prettiness into the shapeless sluttishness of the young slum mother. She is by no means an innocent victim (as are both Badalia Herodsfoot and Pennyloaf Candy), but lives by a moral code little different from that of her husband. Driven solely by mercenary motives, she plays each of her two boy friends off against the other, until the issue is resolved by Billy Chope having Sam Cardew beaten up. For a while she is smitten by something very like conscience, but soon tires of a quiet life and returns to the person responsible for Sam's beating. She is fully aware of what she is doing. The period of enjoyment she can expect from life is short, and to waste time taking oranges to a bandaged, bed-ridden hero, is to make it even shorter. Life with Sam Cardew might have been better than it offers to be with Billy Chope, but in a world where pleasure is immediate and mainly violent, a choice between the two men is, at bottom, meaningless. This, for instance, is one of the courtship scenes:

‘Ullo, Lizer! Where are y' a-comin' to? If I 'adn't laid 'old 'o ye—!’ But here Billy Chope arrived to demand what the 'ell Sam Cardew was doing with his gal. Now Sam was ever readier for a fight than Billy was; but the sum of Billy's half-pints was large: wherefore the fight began. On the skirt of an hilarious ring, Lizerunt, after some small outcry, triumphed aloud. Four days before she had no bloke; and here she stood with two, and those two fighting for her! Here in the public gaze, on the Flats! For almost five minutes she was Helen of Troy.¹⁵

If a person accepts this as pleasure, and all three participants obviously do, then there can be no complaint when the triumphant girl-friend becomes the victimized wife:

‘Two bob? Wot for?’ Lizer asked.

‘'Cos I want it. None o' yer lip.’

‘Ain't got it,’ said Lizer sulkily.

‘That's a bleed'n lie.’

‘Lie yerself.’

‘I'll break y'in'arves, ye blasted 'eifer!’ He ran at her throat and forced her back over a chair.

‘I'll pull yer face auf! If y' don't give me the money, gawblimey, I'll do for ye!’¹⁶

For Morrison it is a simple matter of logic that the first of these scenes could quite easily, although not inevitably, lead to the second. The emphasis that earlier writers had placed on the possibilities of escape from the slums disappear in Morrison. Billy Chope is by no means presented as the ordinary working man (Morrison later described him as ‘in a minority, a blackguard’)¹⁷ but the forces which control his outlook and actions, press down upon, and thus limit, the aspirations of even the most respectable members of the mean streets. When Morrison says, in the introduction, that no one sings in the street and then in the very first story shows Lizer and Billy Chope shouting and dancing with glee at the Whitsun Fair, he is not contradicting himself. He means that no one sings for long as the country girl sang; no one can bridge two separate worlds once they inhabit this street. The country girl sings of a world outside of her present environment; the simple desire she expresses is for gentle happiness, which has no relevance in the East End. Once she suffers some of the everyday tragedies she collapses—she is ‘helpless’—she cannot establish a working compromise with her physical surrounding, and anyone who cannot do that must be crushed. It is for this reason that, unlike Besant, Morrison can suffer no aristocrats living in his world, and unlike Gissing, cannot allow his characters to spend their evenings reading Greek tragedy. The slums would not allow such things to happen. If anyone should move in this direction, then, like the country girl, their voices would crack and they would sing no more.

Yet the theme of escape occurs frequently in Morrison's stories—escape from monotony or from violence, from one section of working-class life into another. More than any other author he uses as a framework for his stories the deadening desire for respectability (as passionate as in any middle-class world) that is the only viable means of escape from association with the twin evils of violence and social pity. A majority of the stories in Tales of Mean Streets deal with this theme of respectability, and it is indicative of the depth of Morrison's pessimism that all such strivings are shown as pointless or self-defeating.

In “That Brute Simmons” a farce is enacted in which an intensely house-proud woman believing herself to be a widow marries again. When her first husband reappears and tries to blackmail his successor, the two men vie with each other in trying to run away from this respectable hell. In “Behind the Shade” a mother and daughter, fallen from a higher social position, starve themselves to death rather than let their neighbours know they can no longer keep up the façade of respectability. “In Business” and “All that Messuage” have similar plots. In the former, a family dominated by a respectable mother use a small inheritance to set up a genteel shop in Bromley. In the latter, some hard-saved money is used to buy a house so that a couple can live on the rent. In both cases these plans collapse because of the inability of the working-class aspirants to understand the most elementary commercial principles. “Squire Napper” is similar but far more successful. A labourer inherits a small sum of money and immediately gives up his work, and while he wonders what to do with his new-found wealth, indulges in the only form of entertainment he knows—drinking. His money slowly disappears and with it the opportunity, of which he is never really aware, to better himself. In one scene, very reminiscent of the Boffin-Wegg relationship in Our Mutual Friend, Squire Napper hires a street-corner orator so that he can listen to revolutionary speeches in his own home. In another story “On the Stairs,” a mother, influenced by her neighbours' snobbery, determines to give her dying son a decent funeral. When a sympathetic doctor gives her some money, she saves it rather than spend it on medicine. The son dies and the mother is proud that she can afford the ultimate funereal status symbol—plumes.

These stories with their stale, hackneyed plots, do not live up to the promise offered by the introduction and “Lizerunt,” but they are saved from being excessively sentimental or pathetic by Morrison's terse style and relentless insistence that the slum is an autonomous world which forbids the miraculous character transformation so common in working-class romance. The characters are not fools—in “The Red Cow Group,” for instance, they neatly turn the tables on an anarchist seeking converts—but the environment within which they live has eaten into their souls, so that their social ambitions, humble as they may be, are utterly beyond their capabilities. In one of the best sketches—there is no plot to make it a story—“To Bow Bridge,” the narrator is one of a handful of respectable working-class people taking a bus journey late at night. When the pubs turn out, a crowd of rowdy men and women clamber on to the bus in order to cross to the other side of Bow Bridge where the drinking hours are extended to midnight. Morrison carefully and impartially describes the coarse, drunken, noisy but non-violent behaviour of the crowd until their destination is reached and they get off, leaving the respectable workers to continue their journey. This sketch epitomizes Morrison's attitude in Tales of Mean Streets. The journey that all the passengers are making is dull and dreary; for some of them it is only made bearable by hooliganism. The novelist sits by, noting behaviour patterns but passing no comparative judgement. For Morrison the working classes are neither more nor less corrupt than other social groups—at least not in a moral sense. Their behaviour, habits and customs are part of a pattern which possesses its own impetus, scale of values, class system and taboos. Above all else what interested Morrison about working-class life was the way that this predominantly dreary world could suddenly explode into physical violence. In “To Bow Bridge” he merely stated the problem; in A Child of Jago he tried to explore it fully.

Shortly after the publication of Tales of Mean Streets Morrison received a letter of appreciation from the Reverend A. Osborne Jay, vicar of the Holy Trinity, Shoreditch. Jay praised the truthfulness of Morrison's East End portrait and invited the author to visit his parish. At this time Morrison was already planning to write a full-length novel which would explore the effects of heredity and environment on a young boy, but was uncertain where exactly in the East End to set his story. The meeting with Jay helped him to make up his mind, and for a period of eighteen months he frequented Jay's parish, exploring the alleys and courts, sitting with the parishioners in their homes, drinking with them in pubs, and even for a spell letting them teach him how to make matchboxes (at this date still one of the standard occupations for the London destitute).¹⁸ The real name of this tiny area that later came to be called the Jago, was the Old Nichol. It stood on the boundaries of Shoreditch and Bethnal Green, a square block of some half-a-dozen streets containing one of the worst slums in East London.¹⁹ On Charles Booth's maps it is shaded a deep black denoting inhabitants of the ‘lowest class of occasional labourers, loafers and semi-criminals,’ as far removed from the dreary, respectable workers of Mean Streets as it was possible to be. Here Billy Chope would have been completely at home. Jay had taken charge of the parish that contained the Old Nichol in 1886 and, realizing the futility of pursuing a purely religious policy in such an area, had gradually improvised an idiosyncratic technique for dealing with his unruly flock. He opened a social club, encouraged boxing matches in which he often took part, painstakingly acquired a working knowledge of criminal language and habits, and wrote three excellent books describing his work: Life in Darkest London (1891), The Social Problem (1893) and A Story of Shoreditch (1896). In the first of these he described a street scene in the Old Nichol:

Women, sodden with drink, fighting and struggling like wild creatures; men, bruised and battered, with all the marks and none of the pleasures of vice upon them; outcasts, abject and despairing, without food or shelter; the very children, with coarse oaths and obscene jests, watching, like wild beasts, for anything, dishonest or otherwise, which might come their way.²⁰

As so much of the criticism later aimed at A Child of the Jago questioned the veracity of Morrison's portrait, it is worth mentioning that Jay, although in some ways eccentric, was no sensationalist. He always maintained that the Old Nichol was a special case: that the East End had ‘portions which are really delightful,’²¹ and he later vigorously defended Morrison against his incredulous critics.²² Neither Jay nor Morrison claimed to be writing about the ‘working classes’ as a whole. Their subject was Charles Booth's 1.2 per cent of the East End population and unlike many writers before and after they were fully aware that they were dealing with only a minority section of the working classes, albeit a minority that posed a permanent threat to the well-being of its decent neighbours.

Morrison knew that he was compiling a social document in the form of a novel, a work in which problems of character and personality would be subordinated to a sociologically exact, yet at the same time symbolic, image of the Jago. In A Child of the Jago, the Jago itself is the true hero. This seems to suggest that Morrison was writing under the direct influence of Zola's dramshop or coal mine, but the novel as it finally appeared is a curious mixture of the English social-moralizing tradition and French naturalistic objectivity. Morrison, for instance, outlining his reasons for writing the novel, sounds just like Mrs Gaskell, Kingsley or Dickens:

I resolved therefore to write theChild of Jago which should tell the story of a boy, who, but for his environment, would have become a good citizen; also, the story of the horrible Nichol; and, lastly, I wished to show that Father Jay's method is the only one that is possible in such a district.²³

And it is interesting to find repeatedly details in Morrison's novel which seem to be unashamedly borrowed from Jay's various slum memoirs.²⁴ Yet A Child of the Jago is not merely a Tendenzroman. Only at the close of the book is a moral clearly stated. Until that moment Morrison succeeds in absorbing the reader in this strange and violent world, not by pointing a social lesson but by bringing the slum vividly alive.

The long opening description of the Jago shows Morrison rejecting the ‘austere’ objectivity of Mean Streets in favour of the death, disease and hell imagery traditionally found in slum descriptions. But he now has a specific reason for doing this. Unlike Gissing's nether world or Kipling's Gunnison Street, which were representative districts of areas totally rotten, the Jago is a solitary diseased spot which threatens to contaminate the whole of the East End.

It was past the mid of a summer night in the Old Jago. The narrow street was all the blacker for the lurid sky; for there was a fire in a farther part of Shoreditch, and the welkin was an infernal coppery glare. Below, the hot, heavy air lay, a rank oppression, on the contorted forms of those who made for sleep on the pavement: and in it, and through it all, there rose from the foul earth and the grimmed walls a close, mingled stink—the odour of the Jago.²⁵

The usual inhabitants of this hell are not the suffering poor but the very dregs of London: ‘What was too vile for Kate Street, Seven Dials, and Ratcliff Highway in its worst day, what was too useless, incapable and corrupt—all that teemed in the Old Jago.’ In this world ‘cosh carrying was near to being the major industry’; ‘front doors were used merely as firewood’ (which provides as we later see not merely warmth but easy escape passages from the police); and ‘the elementary Education Act ran in the Jago no more than any other Act of Parliament.’²⁶ Law in the jago is determined by the feuding gangs of Ranns and Learys who, while usually content to fight each other, are also capable of joining forces to face a common enemy; and by Father Sturt (modelled faithfully on Jay), whose philosophy of good-neighbourliness interests few of his parishioners. The Perrott family, as newcomers to the Jago, owe allegiance to neither the gangsters nor the priest. Josh Perrott, the father, is a tradesman who, having fallen on evil days, discovers that earning a living Jago-style is more attractive than plastering. It is his son Dicky who is the ‘child’ of the Jago.

In choosing to centre his novel on a slum child Morrison was following a very conventional line, and it is possible that he deliberately did this as an implied criticism of the golden-haired child or the aristocratic changeling of working-class romance. The novel that set the tone for this romantic mid-Victorian treatment was Oliver Twist which was often seen in the later ‘realistic’ period as the father of the slum novel.²⁷ Certainly there are sufficient similarities between Oliver Twist and A Child of the Jago to suggest that Morrison had the earlier novel in mind. Aaron Weech, who battens on Dicky Perrott and cunningly trains him as a thief, recalls Fagin, while Josh Perrott's flight from the police, especially the moment when he is spotlighted in an upstairs window, is very reminiscent of Bill Sikes's death scene. Finally, Josh's trial is virtually a plagiarism of Fagin's. Where the novels differ most is in their treatment of the slum child. Dicky Perrott could never be mistaken for a lost aristocrat, nor will he escape by virtue of a superior education. At times Morrison appears to be mocking this convention, as when Beveridge offers Dicky some advice:

‘Now, Dicky Perrott, you Jago whelp, look at them—look hard. Someday, if you're clever—cleverer than anyone in the Jago now—if you're only scoundrel enough, and brazen enough, and lucky enough—one of a thousand—maybe you'll be like them: bursting with high living, drunk when you like, red and pimply. There it is—that's your aim in life—there's your pattern. Learn to read and write, learn cunning, spare nobody and stop at nothing, and perhaps—’ he waved his hand towards the Bag of Nails. ‘It's the best the world has for you, for the Jago's got you, and that's the only way out, except the gaol and the gallows.²⁸

The model life being held up for Dicky's approval is that of the High Mobsman: the alternatives, as pointed out by Beveridge, are the gallows and the gaol. Father Sturt's attempt to find Dicky a regular job is frustrated, not simply because Aaron Weech is lurking round the corner, but because the power of the slum is greater than that of the priest. In the Jago crime is attractive, respectability non-existent. There is only the East End Elevation Mission and Pansophical Institute to provide an alternative way of life and this is bitterly satirized by Morrison as a place where ‘a number of decently-dressed and mannerly young men passed many evenings … in harmless pleasures, and often with an agreeable illusion of intellectual advancement’.²⁹ The only good it does for the Jago is to provide Dicky with the opportunity to steal a watch. It is his first ‘click’ and after the sheer joy of this moment he has no chance at all. From now on he accepts as a moral guide the single rule of the Jago—‘Thou shalt not nark’—and he abides by this even when he lies dying, stabbed in a street brawl.

There is much about A Child of the Jago that is unsatisfactory. Some of the characters (Pigeony Poll the golden-hearted prostitute, and Aaron Weech the fence, in particular) are conventional and rather wooden figures, while the portrait of Dicky does have, as H. D. Traill pointed out, ‘odd touches of old-fashioned melodrama’ about it.³⁰ More seriously, the fatalistic tone is too heavy for the slight structure of the story. Even allowing for the Jago as a special case, the reader feels that the dice are too heavily loaded against the Perrott family, the options open to them unjustifiably narrow and soul-destroying.

What really impresses is Morrison's handling of violence. The gang fights evoke an atmosphere of crude reality that the English working-class novel had never seen before:

Norah Walsh, vanquished champion, now somewhat recovered, looked from a window, saw her enemy vulnerable, and ran out armed with a bottle. She stopped at the kerb to knock the bottom off the bottle, and then, with an exultant shout, seized Sally Green by the hair and stabbed her about the face with the jagged points. Blinded with blood, Sally released her hold on Mrs. Perrott, and rolled on her back, struggling fiercely; but to no end, for Norah Walsh, kneeling on her breast, stabbed and stabbed again, till pieces of the bottle broke away. Sally's yells and plunges ceased, and a man pulled Norah off. On him she turned, and he was fain to run, while certain Learys found a truck which might carry Sally to the hospital.³¹

It is not so much the actual description that is new as the assumption by the novelist that this kind of behaviour, at least in the Jago, is the norm. So infectious is the battle that everyone is caught up in it:

As for old Beveridge, the affair so grossly excited him that he neglected business (he cadged and wrote begging screeves) and stayed in the Jago, where he strode wildly about the streets, lank and rusty, stabbing the air with a carving knife, and incoherently defying ‘all the lot’ to come near him.³²

Violence of various kinds and degrees dominates the novel. Josh Perrott's boxing match with Billy Leary in Jago Court is a public festival, honoured with the attendance of the High Mobsmen who put up the stake money. Only Mrs Perrott is frightened: for everyone else the fight is a high spot of their week, the moment when Kingship (in a non-criminal sense) is firmly decided. Josh's victory in the fight brings him a larger sum of money than he had ever possessed before, and while he is fêted as a hero, news arrives that his baby has died: ‘The rumour went in the Jago that Josh Perrott was in double luck. For here was insurance money without a doubt.’³³ In this world the formula that Gissing felt typified working-class attitudes in The Nether World—‘Get by whatever means so long as with impunity’—reigns absolutely. When a later fight breaks out in a pub, the rotten floor gives way and the Jagos and Dove Laners are hurled into the cellar. They immediately forget their feud and plunder the pub. The children born and bred in the Jago naturally follow the example of their parents in forming gangs and settling private quarrels by premeditated violence.

In the Jago there is no tenderness or love—save that professionally administered by Father Sturt—for such emotions would undermine the basic Jago philosophy of social anarchism; they would encourage people to build whereas the only thing the Jagos understand is destruction. Nor, in spite of his careful attempts to recreate the speech of the Jago, does Morrison allow his characters the cockney's traditional fund of wit for fear that this would weaken the horror of his portrait. What he does neatly capture, and make good use of, is the sardonic side of cockney humour, as in the first conversational lines of the book: ‘AH-h-h-h,’ he said, ‘I wish I was dead: an' kep' a cawfy shop;’ and in the same character's immediate comment on his friends' refusal to speak to him: ‘This is a bleed'n' unsocial sort o' evenin' party, this is.’³⁴ But where Morrison is once again truly successful is in presenting working-class speech at moments of violence:

‘Won't sing yer hymn? There ain't much time!

My boy was goin' straight, an' earnin' wages:

someone got 'im chucked. A man 'as time to

think things out, in stir! Sing, ye son of

a cow! Sing! Sing!’³⁵

It is one of the main themes of the novel that those who live violently, die violently. Josh Perrott is hanged for a murder of revenge and his son is stabbed in a childish vendetta. These are the victims. But the Ranns and the Learys do not come to grief. When the County Council begins to demolish the Jago, most of the inhabitants move on, seeking a new district as much like the old as possible, for even if they could afford to live in the new flats, they would be unable to change their way of life. Kiddo Cook, now a respectable costermonger and married to Pigeony Poll, does take a council flat. He is the only ‘Jago-rat’ to escape. It is interesting to compare the end of this novel with that of The Nether World. Gissing openly stated that life in the new flats was worse than in the old slums, but this judgement did not fit easily with the working-class life we were shown. It was Gissing talking about himself rather than about his characters. Morrison quite clearly believed that the flats represent a step forward for society, but recognizes that they are not for the Ranns and Learys. This fits in perfectly with the way they have been presented in the novel. The flats would impose restrictions upon them, it would break up the clan basis of their life, it would destroy the only thing they have to enjoy—the vigorous, brutal excitement of slum violence.

In a prefatory note to To London Town (1899), Morrison wrote:

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

To London Town attempts to strike a balance between the monotony of Mean Streets and the criminal violence of A Child of the Jago. The opening scenes show the May family living on the borders of Epping Forest which the East End invades in the form of some London visitors getting drunk in a country pub. When the grand father dies the mother and her son Johnny move to the East End where he is apprenticed to an engineering firm, and she remarries. Morrison traces the adventures of Johnny and his mother to the moment when the son falls in love, and the mother's marriage breaks down.

To London Town is perhaps not so dull as this summary makes it sound, but it is certainly less successful than the other two books in the trilogy. Its comparative failure does, however, raise interesting issues regarding the narrow range of working-class experience normally presented in fiction. So long as Morrison is dealing with working-class characters in extreme situations then his fiction comes vividly alive, but the same is not true of his treatment of the more ordinary, less sensational, aspects of working-class life. We have already seen that this is true of most earlier fiction, where street characters, cartoon types, suffering poor, melodramatic villains, or a political mass, act as working-class representatives. The most important contribution made by Kipling and Morrison was to break down the old view that one code of manners could be used to cover the behaviour of different class groups. They showed that drunkenness, swearing, and even violence, could be regarded as genuine forms of expression for people who did not respond to situations in a rational, intellectual or ‘educated’ way. But this in itself was only a partial solution. If, for instance, a novelist tries to write about working-class life from a point of view other than, on the one hand, violence, and on the other, escape, then what does he place at the core of his novel? What frame of reference can he use to interrelate the various experiences he is describing? This line of thought must be returned to in the next chapter; here we can briefly see how it applies to Morrison, as in To London Town he was obviously trying to solve such a problem. Johnny May is the kind of boy Dicky Perrott might have hoped to be had he not been brought up in the Jago. Morrison takes great care when outlining Johnny's development—his apprenticeship, work at night school, membership of a social club and his falling in love—to present him as an ‘ordinary’ member of the working classes. Johnny's mother is presented in a similar manner. In Tales of Mean Streets those working-class women whose highest ambition was to run a small shop had been treated harshly by Morrison. Mrs May, however, has enough business sense to make a success of her shop by providing a much needed service to the working-class community. But when it comes to turning this observed behaviour into material for a novel Morrison's own good sense breaks down. The girl Johnny falls in love with turns out to be, after a series of mysterious disappearances, the daughter of ‘Old-Mother-Born-Drunk’, the most disreputable character in the neighbourhood; and the man Johnny's mother marries is not merely a drunkard but also a bigamist. The novel is thus a curious mixture of the new realism and the old melodrama.

By the time he came to write this novel Morrison's influence was already at work on other slum novelists of the nineties. In his two early books he had shown that, provided great care was observed, the objective use of violence was a new and fruitful way of presenting the working classes in fiction. He had also shown that working-class characters could be placed at the heart of a novel; that the substitute working-class hero common in earlier fiction was unnecessary so long as the novelist did not entertain ambitious views of presenting a cross-section of society in his work. In this he was following the example of Kipling who had concentrated on the working class as a separate cultural entity by using as his media the short story, sketch and ballad, rather than the full-scale social novel. Morrison had both limited and expanded the scope of working-class fiction, and there were many novelists who were willing to learn from him.

II

Late in life, looking back upon his long career as a novelist, Somerset Maugham wrote of his first novel Liza of Lambeth (1897):

Any merit it may have is due to the luck I had in being, by my work as a medical student, thrown into contact with a side of life that at that time had been little exploited by novelists. Arthur Morrison with his Tales of Mean Streets and A Child of the Jago had drawn the attention of the public to what were then known as the lower classes and I profited by the interest he had aroused.³⁶

Maugham owed a greater debt to Morrison than this would suggest. Apart from the change of setting from East to South London, much of Liza of Lambeth suggests Morrison's influence. The three principal qualities that Morrison believed dominated working-class life (monotony, a yearning for respectability and violence) all feature in Maugham's novel. The opening description of Vere Street with its subdued evocation of environmental monotony is typical of the Mean Streets approach:

It has forty houses on one side and forty houses on the other, and these eighty houses are very much more like one another than ever peas are like peas, or young ladies like young ladies. They are newish, three-storied buildings of dingy grey brick with slate roofs, and they are perfectly flat, without a bow-window or even a projecting cornice or window-sill to break the straightness of the line from one end of the street to the other.³⁷

The houses themselves are dead, but the street is full of life, with children playing cricket in the road, and women gossiping in doorways. Liza burst upon this scene with great vivacity and humour. She is dressed in the standard coster costume of ‘brilliant violet, with great lappets of velvet, and she had on her head an enormous black hat covered with feathers’.³⁸ Her appearance transforms the mood of the street. She sings Albert Chevalier's latest music-hall song, ‘Knocked 'em in the Old Kent Road,’ jokes with the gossips, flirts with the men, plays cricket with the children, and finally gets the whole street dancing round a barrel-organ. Like Badalia Herodsfoot and Lizerunt, these are Liza's ‘days of fatness’ and this carefree moment signifies the beginning of her tragic decline.

The most unusual feature of Liza of Lambeth is that it deals at some length with a working-class love affair. The Pennyloaf Candy/Bob Hewett and Lizerunt/Billy Chope marriages are not really ‘love’ matches at all. Gissing and Morrison both merely note what they regarded as rather curious courting habits and then moved the stories on to their violent conclusions. Maugham, however, makes the love affair central to his book, and furthermore treats it seriously and sympathetically. This is all the more unusual because Liza's love for Jim Blakeston is adulterous, and although adultery had long been a stock subject for the novelist, its fictional treatment had been limited to the middle and upper classes. There are two main reasons for this: Gissing's novels can supply one, Kipling's and Morrison's the other. As was pointed out earlier, Gissing usually allowed his working-class heroines to be sexually attractive only in proportion as they possessed upper-class qualities. This was in order that they might be worthy of their substitute working-class lovers. The three genuine working-class girls in his novels are handled in a different manner. Pennyloaf Candy is spineless and totally subservient to Bob Hewett, and is also shown to be physically anaemic. Clem Peckover is extremely sensual but she is more animal than human. Totty Nancarrow in Thyrza is much nearer in personality to Liza than Clem Peckover or Pennyloaf Candy, but, for Gissing, her ceaseless chatter and coarse manners made her sexually undesirable. In this respect it is significant that she finally marries Joe Bunce, one of the least important people in the novel. It is impossible to imagine Gissing regarding any of these women as fit subjects for a prolonged, adulterous, love affair. Kipling and Morrison did not share Gissing's snobbery in this respect, but their reason for avoiding the subject of adultery is just as strange. They blindly accepted the belief that working-class sexual amorality was a natural condition of slum life, and that therefore the term adultery possessed no meaning. Badalia Herodsfoot is shown to be sexually attractive, but when her husband leaves her, Kipling goes out of his way to stress how strange it was that she did not immediately pair off with someone else: ‘With rare fidelity she listened to no proposals for a second marriage according to the customs of Gunnison Street, which do not differ from those of the Barralong.’³⁹ Morrison, for all his claims of dealing frankly and fearlessly with life in the East End, rarely shows sex to be a part of it, but that he would have agreed with Kipling on this subject can be seen from his reference to Dicky Perrott as ‘not married, either in the simple Jago fashion or in church.’⁴⁰ In the final instance Kipling and Morrison are little different from Gissing, for like him they could not conceive of a working-class couple possessing the sensitivity or emotional depth which, as participants in an adulterous love affair, they would require.

Maugham was not so inhibited. All the normal trappings of a fictional middle- or upper-class love affair are there, simply translated into working-class terms. Liza and Jim meet in the street, on a Bank Holiday outing, in the gallery of a theatre, and in pubs. The initial seduction scene is a curious instance of Maugham interpreting the horse-play of courtship for animal violence:

He looked at her for a moment, and she, ceasing to thump his hand, looked up at him with half-opened mouth.

Suddenly he shook himself, and closing his first gave her a violent, swinging blow in the stomach.

‘Come on,’ he said.

And together they slid down into the darkness of the passage.⁴¹

Liza is not presented as a naturally immoral person. She treats Tom, her faithful working-class suitor, gently; becomes the outcast object of her neighbours' respectability, and when called a ‘prostitute’ fights the slanderer. She is also, for the sake of love, willing to shoulder her guilt, rather than act as, for instance, Kipling thought natural for one of her class. In this respect Jim Blakeston is the innocent:

‘Well, I'll marry yer. Swop me bob, I wants ter badly enough.’

‘Yer can't; yer married already.’

‘Thet don't matter! If I give the missus so much a week aht of my screw, she'll sign a piper ter give up all clime ter me, an' then we can get spliced. One of the men as I works with done thet, an' it was arright.’⁴²

Jim's innocence is a form of self-protection. In this world men determine the physical and women the moral code of behaviour. So long as Jim can respond to any situation with an immediate show of strength, he is safe. Liza cannot so easily escape retribution. Because of her adultery she has lost all chance of gaining the much-coveted badge of respectability. For the men she becomes merely an object of their semi-serious bawdry: ‘Yer might give us a chanst, Liza; you come aht with me one evenin'. You oughter give us all a turn, jist ter show there's no ill-feelin'.’⁴³ But for the women Liza is a constant threat to their own marital stability: ‘A woman's got no right ter tike someone's 'usbind from 'er. An' if she does she's bloomin' lucky if she gits off with a 'idin'—thet's wot I think.’⁴⁴ The public beating that Mrs Blakeston gives Liza is not merely personal revenge; it is a ritualistic cleansing approved by the whole female community of Lambeth. It is only at this moment that Liza, pregnant, physically beaten and rejected by the other women, ever appears to be promiscuous. Moved by Tom's faithfulness, she offers herself to him, but he refuses to understand anything except marriage. At the same time as this conversation is taking place the husbands are reasserting their supremacy. Jim Blakeston knocks his wife senseless, and when a neighbour attempts to get her own husband to intervene, he refuses:

‘But 'e's killin' 'er,’ repeated Polly, trembling with fright.

‘Garn!' rejoined the man; ‘she'll git over it; an' p'haps she deserves it, for all you know.’⁴⁵

The relationship between Liza and Jim had been tender and happy, but in this world violence ultimately decides every issue of importance. As a young girl Liza had managed to impose her personality on the neighbourhood, by singing louder, dressing flashier, being cheekier than her friends. The older women can no longer act in this way. They have already faced the brutality and violence that later must also come to Liza, and now they have replaced their early gaiety with a staid, and largely hypocritical, cover of respectability. This is their protection against the physical superiority of the men. So long as Liza strictly acts out the part allotted to her then the older women approve her actions, but once she steps into their domain, they temporarily adopt the masculine form of dealing with trouble and then retreat once again into respectability.

This behaviour pattern is presented directly in Mrs Blakeston's thrashing of Liza, and is also worked out in a more subdued tone through the presentation of Liza's mother. Mrs Kemp has only two aims in life—to be drunk whenever she can, and to be regarded as eminently respectable by her neighbours. She alone of the Lambeth women knows nothing of Liza's affair. When she learns that her daughter has had a miscarriage she can only say, ‘Well, you surprise me … I didn't known as Liza was thet way. She never told me nothin' abaht it.’⁴⁶ She exhibits no emotion on hearing that Liza is dying, but just sits with the nurse discussing the ‘respectable’ funerals the district has known, and swopping tales about the ‘respectability’ of their late husbands. Only when Jim Blakeston, huge and bearded, comes to sit by the death bed does Mrs Kemp show any interest: ‘Fancy it bein' 'im!… Strike me lucky, ain't 'e a sight!’⁴⁷

Maugham's treatment of working-class life is thus very similar to Morrison's. The natural condition of the slums is bleak monotony, and life is only made bearable by adopting rowdiness, violence or respectability as a means of expression. Each of these is self-defeating. They produce a narrow, enclosed, vicious society that will tolerate no deviation from what it regards as normal or everyday. Jim Blakeston's proposed solution of running away to another district is not countenanced by Liza. To do this would be to surrender her individuality. Elsewhere, living with Jim as man and wife she would be obliged to conform to the very hypocrisy she condemns in Lambeth.

If Maugham relies heavily on Morrison for his literary method and philosophy of working-class life, he does instill into Liza of Lambeth that genuine sense of working-class humanity so lacking in Morrison's work. Liza's love affair is an obvious example of this, but there is also the greater emphasis that is placed on working-class speech. Maugham captures just as well as Morrison the grim jesting and the free-flowing abuse of the sardonic or the angry cockney, but he also manages to convey raucous humour:

‘Na, I can't,’ she said, trying to disengage herself. ‘I've got the dinner ter cook.’

‘Dinner ter cook?' shouted one small boy. ‘Why, they always cook the cats' meat at the shop.’⁴⁸

The humour in Liza of Lambeth is the true humour of a realist—it conveys a joke which is funny to the characters rather than to the reader. It also attempts to express briefly but forcefully the truth about their life without passing judgement upon it:

‘Them's not yer ribs,’ shouted a candid friend—‘Them's yer whale-bones yer afraid of breakin'.’

‘Garn!’

‘'Ave yer got whale-bones?’ said Tom, with affected simplicity, putting his arm round her waist to feel.

‘Na then,’ she said, ‘Keep off the grass!’

‘Well, I only wanted ter know if you'd got any.’

‘Garn; yer don't git round me like thet.’ He still kept as he was.

‘Na then,’ she repeated, ‘tike yer 'and away. If yer touch me there you'll 'ave t'er marry me.’⁴⁹

It is by successfully relating moments such as this to the wider framework provided by the monotony-violence-respectability philosophy that Maugham manages to expand, if only slightly, the narrow cultural world of Morrison. One scene in Liza of Lambeth shows Maugham falling short of the austere standard set by Morrison in Jago and reverting to one of the weaknesses of “Lizerunt.” The Bank Holiday outing, from which the above extract comes, is at one point sub-titled ‘The Idyll of Corydon and Phyllis.’ For a few inexplicable pages Liza becomes a ‘shepherdess’ and Tom her ‘swain.’ With incongruous irony Corydon and Phyllis are shown swilling beer from a pint pot and when it is finished holding a spitting contest. For all their successful presentation of certain aspects of working-class life, neither Morrison nor Maugham could completely escape the lingering influence of pastoral.

III

The popular success of Kipling's and Morrison's work inspired many writers to try to produce novels and short stories in the same vein, but, apart from Somerset Maugham, they possessed little talent and added nothing new to working-class fiction. Lacking Kipling's profound personal involvement with working-class culture or Morrison's sociological common sense, they were unable to make any worthwhile use of the lessons offered them by ‘Badalia Herodsfoot’, Mean Streets and A Child of the Jago. Certain important aspects of these three books—the new system of phonetics to indicate working-class speech, a changing image of the East End, violence as a means of slum expression and the doctrine of authorial objectivity—are widely used by later novelists. But so ignorant do they seem of the real issues involved, so careless are they with the exact social and literary qualifications made by Kipling and Morrison, that instead of further expanding the scope of working-class fiction, they actually pervert their models' original intentions. This process can be understood most clearly by looking at the influence of Morrison on first the working-class romance, and secondly, the later ‘realists.’

In the nineties the romance retained its faith in a plot based upon change of identity or individual philanthropy and thus an overall tone of cheerful optimism. It also continued to concentrate on the problems of middle- or upper-class characters acted out against a working-class backcloth, but changed the model for its working-class scenes from the ‘Newgate’ novel or Dickens to a mixture of Besant and Morrison, with an occasional dash—for the more serious-minded reader—of Mrs Humphry Ward. Some examples of these ‘realistic’ romances are: Joseph Hocking's All Men are Liars (1895) and The Madness of David Baring (1900); Harry Lander's Lucky Bargee (1898); Richard Whiteing's No. 5 John Street (1899); John A. Stewart's Wine on the Lees (1899); Robert Blatchford's Julie (1900); and Morley Roberts's Maurice Quain (1897), which has a special interest in that the middle-class hero living in the slums is almost certainly a portrait of George Gissing. We can see the influence of Morrison by looking at just two of these novels. Wine on the Lees tells the story of an aristocratic brewer's conversion to the cause of temperance and in most respects is no different from many such novels written earlier, but there are certain scenes in it that belong only to the nineties. Jenny Goodman, a gentle working-class wife, explains to the woman who once employed her as a maid, why she doesn't want to return to London:

‘Oh my Lady!’ she cried, the tears coming afresh, ‘you can never understand what it is to be poor and live in the East End of London. My Lady, you say it is horrible—it's worse, it's worse.’⁵⁰

But she does go back to London and is soon resigned to her fate:

It no longer paralysed her to come upon groups of muscular sluts whooping and clawing each other's faces, tearing rags from grimy shoulders and dancing jigs on them in the gutter. Marks of death on stairs and pavement ceased to make her sick. Even when in great orgies wives tucked and bled over their fallen men she did not swoon or feel faint.⁵¹

Here the slum dwellers are no longer the suffering poor, the drearily respectable people of Mean Streets, or the ghetto criminals of the Jago—they are the ordinary inhabitants of the East End. Charles Booth's 1.2 per cent has become the whole population, and Morrison's careful attempt to show that slum violence was either a reaction against the bleak monotony of the East End or the normal behaviour of certain kinds of criminal, has been transformed into widespread working-class animalism. Furthermore, in contradiction to the central social philosophy of the realistic romance, there frequently appears a sneering and condescending attitude towards organized philanthropy: ‘Missionaries, indeed, there were whose wry, reproachful faces and tactless ways made redemption sour and excited resentment and ridicule.’⁵² Here, without any attempt to relate it to a total pattern, is one of the standard ironic devices employed by Kipling and Morrison. Their social criticism is turned into a meaningless platitude.

No. 5 John Street is not so crude a novel as Wine on the Lees but it differs in degree rather than kind. An extremely popular novel in its day, it provides a perfect example of the old-fashioned romance that has had elements of the new ‘realism’ grafted uneasily on to it. Whiteing was an old man when he suddenly attained his first commercial success. Over thirty years earlier he had written Mr. Sprouts: His Opinions (1867), a lively if superficial satire on working-class manners, and in 1888 he had published The Island, a satirical examination of English society in the year of the Jubilee. Whiteing had thus been interested in the working classes for many years, but there is nothing in No. 5 John Street to suggest that his latest novel was a natural product of artistic development. Like Wine on the Lees it has a hackneyed plot. A wealthy young man determines to find out for himself how the working classes live. His first thought is to join a settlement in the East End but ‘it proved to be a mere peep-hole into the life I wanted to see, with the Peeping Tom still a little too much on the safe side’.⁵³ As this implies he is obviously on the look-out for violence and he goes to live in a West End slum, hoping to find the real workers there. On his first night in the slums he hears a scream and tries to draw it to the attention of Low Covey, his working-class friend:

‘Did you hear that fearful cry?’

‘Ah!, I 'eerd somethink.’

‘There's murder going on—a woman, I think.’

‘Dessay; it's Sat'd'y night.’

‘I'm going to see.’

‘S'pose so; you're fresh to the place.’⁵⁴

The meaning of this scene is perfectly clear. The working man accepts murder as a natural condition of his life, or at least of his Saturday nights, and the fact that the victim appears to be a woman does not disturb him in the least. In Kipling, Morrison or Maugham, there is always a reason specified as to why a working man might, in a given situation, remain indifferent to a scene of violence. Whiteing feels there is no need for an explanation of Low Covey's curious behaviour. In all other respects he is shown to be gentle and friendly, but by clumsily following what had come to be a stale literary convention, Whiteing unconsciously shows Low Covey, in this instance at least, to be morally corrupt. When the two men do stir themselves they find an ‘Amazon’ towering over a sailor who has been knocked to the ground:

Her gown torn open in the scuffle, exposes the heaving breast. Her black hair streams over her shoulders. Her sleeves are turned up to the elbows for battle. One stout fist is streaked with the blood of the man with the knife. The lips are parted with her quick breathing; the flashing eyes outshine the moonlight.⁵⁵

No working-class romance of this time would have been complete without one scene describing a half-naked working-class woman fighting in the streets, and once again this example shows how hollow the convention had become. Clem Peckover, Pennyloaf Candy, Lizerunt, Badalia Herodsfoot, and Liza Kemp, in their different ways, had all been the victims of slum violence. They had suffered and had ultimately been destroyed by either accepting the code of violence or by being unable to avoid it. In No. 5 John Street the genuine pathos of these earlier working-class heroines becomes merely a lifeless, romantic posture.

Wine on the Lees and No. 5 John Street demonstrate how the working-class romance, in trying to inject itself with new life drawn from Morrison's studies of slum violence, only succeeded in establishing a new set of stale attitudes and conventions. The same is even more true of the writers who produced plagiarisms of Tales of Mean Streets. W. J. Dawson's London Idylls (1895), Arthur St John Adcock's East End Idylls (1897), Edith Ostlere's From Seven Dials (1898), J. Dodsworth Brayshaw's Slum Silhouettes (1898) and K. Douglas King's The Child who will Never Grow Old (1898), attempt to re-create not isolated scenes from Morrison's work but the overall tone of dispassionately described monotony and violence. The stories in these collections exhibit a bizarre mixture of pastoral (strikingly epitomized by the recurrent, ironic use of the word ‘Idyll’) and objective realism. As with working-class romance the result is a crude perversion of Morrison's original intentions. A closer look at two of these stories will be sufficient to demonstrate this.

Katherine Douglas King's ‘Lil: an Idyll of the Borough’ tells the story of a slum girl who has the chance to escape from her environment by going to live in ‘pagan unconventionality’ as the mistress of a wealthy aesthete. Lil's moral dilemma is made acute by the presence of her working-class boy friend, Jim, and her two sisters, Liz, and Louie, a four-year-old cripple. The basic plot is, of course, ages old. Lil's beauty is of ‘a restless, passion-swayed, unangelic nature’ even though she is only a ‘starving seamstress,’ and her beauty alone gives her the opportunity to escape from slum life. But the trappings of this feeble plot are so brutal, the attitudes that come through to the reader so tasteless, that it could have been written at no earlier period. While trying to decide what to do Lil wonders what her life will be like if she stays in the Borough:

She knew … that a lamp flung by a drunken husband into her face; a kick of his nailed boots on her prostrate body; his fists in her eyes; and a chair-back on her breasts, do not improve a woman's looks, nor compensate for the bearing of many sickly babies.

This will happen to her not because Jim is exceptionally violent but because most of the women in her street have already suffered the same fate. In this story the only kind of response permitted to the working-class characters, in any situation, is violence, if not upon someone else then upon themselves. When Lil's scandalous behaviour is made public, her sister's boy friend takes this opportunity to run away:

A little quiver passed over Liz's strained stunted features, when Dick's footsteps had died away. Her teeth met on her tongue until her mouth was full of blood … When she had washed out her mouth she set about getting tea for Louie.

In the Borough this kind of behaviour represents the norm. In one scene Jim comes to the house to try to discover Lil's new address. At first he attempts to bribe the cripple with sweets and ‘custid tarts’ but when the four-year-old child bites him in anger, he gives her a ‘blow on the ear that half-killed her.’ Finally Lil leaves to join her pagan lover and is pursued down the street by Jim swearing he will beat her up while ‘his new girl’ is waiting for him round the corner.⁵⁶

With stories such as this (and if not always quite so crudely employed, the same elements constantly recur) the portrayal of working-class violence and amorality reaches its lowest point. What makes this story so horrifying is the author's belief that she should not pass any kind of moral or social judgement on the actions of her characters. In Kipling and Morrison objectivity was necessary if they were to show that in certain circumstances slum violence could be exciting for some if not all of the participants. In ‘Lil’ the treatment of slum violence is blatantly vicarious. Katherine King's characters behave as they do for no other reason than that they are working class.

In its approach to working-class life Edith Ostlere's ‘Any Fla-ars or Po-t Ferns’ is just as insensitive as ‘Lil’ but it shows Morrison's influence working in a slightly different manner. Nell, a local beauty (not idealized like Lil) and flower-seller, is courted by two costers—Bill Gubbins who is ugly but kind hearted, and Jack Standing, who is handsome and rakish. Much to Bill Gubbins's surprise Nell chooses him. The scene then switches to the marriage night:

A thrill of passion swept over him. His heart felt bursting.

‘Nell,’ he whispered hoarsely, ‘there ain't nobody lookin', give us a kiss.’

‘Lor', Bill, giv' hover, yer fat-'eaded sawney, yer! I ain't a-goin' to do nothink of the sort!’

All the same she did.

Then one evening he returns from work to find that Nell is missing. She has left a note reading, in part: ‘i am goin ome to mother's for a week abart dont kum arter me wen I kum ome Praps i shall ave Sumthink 2 Sho yew.’⁵⁷ Neighbouring gossips persuade Bill that his wife has run off with Jack Standing and when ten days later she knocks on the door Jim curses her and drives her away. The next day he meets Jack and the two men fight. Bill is beaten and then learns that Jack has had nothing to do with Nell's disappearance. A year passes while Bill searches for his wife, until one day he sees a street accident involving a woman and a child. They are, of course, his wife and child. Nell dies in agony but not before she has told Bill that she left him to have the baby ‘nice an' easy like, an' I'd be no trouble to yer, nor cost yer nothink neither, an' I meant ter bring it back to yer as a s'prise like.’ Nell then dies and Bill is left with the baby.⁵⁸

It is impossible to imagine a story like this, completely serious as it is, being written about people of any other class. Unlike the writer of a temperance novel who is able to justify his grotesque treatment of the working classes in moral terms, or the ‘Condition-of-England’ reformer who can defend his shock tactics on social grounds, Edith Ostlere has no excuse for writing as she does. From Morrison she has learnt the lesson that because of the corrupting effect of the slums upon the working classes they cannot be held responsible for their actions. Therefore, she reasons, one pattern of behaviour is just as plausible as any other. So long as the author does not interfere, the working classes cannot be presented as too degraded or ignorant.

These working-class romances and stories written during the closing years of the nineteenth century are bizarre travesties of Morrison's carefully observed, deeply felt and sociologically qualified work. Although limited, in both artistic and social terms, his novels and short stories were genuinely experimental. More than any other working-class novelist of the late-Victorian period he had broken with past conventions; attacking, though not destroying, the pastoral myth, and claiming the right of the urban working classes to a place in serious fiction. Unfortunately Morrison did not continue to write working-class fiction, and Somerset Maugham, the only important writer of the nineties with a talent similar to Morrison's and a far greater potential as a novelist, also turned to other subjects. With no one to provide a lead, popular novelists seized upon isolated aspects of Morrison's work and by employing them with a crude lack of imagination, crushed all meaning from them. The nineteenth century passed on to the twentieth two distinct images of the working man, both of which were popular corruptions taken from experimental fiction of the nineties. The first, a working man, violent, debased and lacking any decent or humane qualities, came from Morrison; the second, which must be examined in more detail now, came from the Cockney School.

Notes

1. ‘Arthur Morrison,’ The Bookman VII (January 1895), 107.

2. For Morrison's early years and his association with the People's Palace, see P. J. Keating, ‘Arthur Morrison: A Biographical Study,’ introduction to A Child of the Jago (1969).

3. ‘A Street,’ Macmillan's Magazine LXIV (October 1891), 460-3 passim. By the time this article was republished as the introduction to Tales of Mean Streets, Morrison's style had grown even more terse. The quotations given here are from the original. In the Mean Streets introduction Morrison also significantly omitted a paragraph containing the sentence: ‘A Palace of Delight was once set in the midst of this street, but Commissioners brandished their pens over it and it became a Polytechnic Institution.’

4. Ibid., 462.

5. Interview with Morrison, Daily News, 12 December 1896.

6. Spectator LXXIV (16 March 1895), 360.

7. ‘What is a Realist?’, New Review XVI (March 1897), 326-36.

8. The Cockney (1953), 39.

9. Introduction to Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (Panther Books, 1965), 8.

10. Daily News interview.

11. ‘What is a Realist?’, 328.

12. Ibid., 330.

13. Tales of Mean Streets, 37.

14. Ibid., 32.

15. Ibid., 36-7.

16. Ibid., 45-6.

17. Spectator letter.

18. See the Daily News interview, and ‘The Methods of Mr. Morrison,’ Academy L (12 December 1896), 531.

19. See T. Harper Smith, ‘A Child of the Jago,’ East London Papers II, (April 1959), No. 1.

20. Life in Darkest London (1891), 14.

21. A Story of Shoreditch (1896), 98-9.

22. In a letter to the Fortnightly Review LXVII (February 1897), 324.

23. Daily News interview.

24. Cf. Jay's methods of dealing with his criminal parishioners with those of Father Sturt: Life in Darkest London, 35-43, A Child of the Jago, Ch. XIV. Also Jay's and Morrison's treatment of gang feuds: A Story of Shoreditch, Ch. VI, and A Child of the Jago, Ch. IV.

25. A Child of the Jago (1896), 1.

26. Ibid., 2, 5, 9, 78.

27. See Jane Findlater, ‘The Slum Movement in Fiction,’ Stones from a Glass House, 67-73: Robert Blatchford, ‘On Realism,’ My Favourite Books (1901), 222-53 passim.

28. A Child of the Jago, 112.

29. Ibid., 20.

30. The New Fiction and Other Essays (1897), 13. It was the title essay of this collection, challenging the ‘realism’ of Morrison's Jago portrait, that forced him to publish his defensive article ‘What is a Realist?’.

31. A Child of the Jago, 51-2.

32. Ibid., 47.

33. Ibid., 141.

34. Ibid., 4.

35. Ibid., 313.

36. The Summing Up (1938), 166.

37. Liza of Lambeth, Collected Edition of Maugham's Works (1934), 1. All page references are to this edition.

38. Ibid., 5.

39. “Badalia Herodsfoot,” Many Inventions, 296.

40. A Child of the Jago, 281. A similar phrase had been used earlier by Jay: ‘only married, not churched’ (Life in Darkest London, 110).

41. Liza of Lambeth, 89.

42. Ibid., 114.

43. Ibid., 109.

44. Ibid., 134.

45. Ibid., 145-6.

46. Ibid., 160.

47. Ibid., 168.

48. Ibid., 30.

49. Ibid., 42-3.

50. Wine on the Lees (1899), 58.

51. Ibid., 65.

52. Ibid., 101.

53. No. 5 John Street (1899), 11.

54. Ibid., 28-9.

55. Ibid., 31.

56. K. Douglas King, ‘Lil: an Idyll of the Borough,’ The Child who will Never Grow Old (1898), 143-56 passim.

57. The extreme crudity of Nell's spelling is a further example of Edith Ostlere misunderstanding an important aspect of the slum novels. The use of phonetics to indicate illiteracy rather than the sound of a voice has a long ancestry in fiction, though the late-Victorian novelists in the main rarely used phonetics for this purpose. Gissing's explanation why he does not faithfully reproduce the letter that Carrie Mitchell sends to Arthur Golding, is particularly relevant: ‘The handwriting was extremely bad, so bad in places as to be almost undecipherable, and the orthographical errors were abundant. I have chosen to correct the latter fault, lest the letter should excite amusement’ (Workers in the Dawn, II, 285-6).

58. Edith Ostlere, ‘Any Fla-ars or Po-t Ferns,’ From Seven Dials (1898), 1-33 passim.