I.

Finally, in the early 1890s, the urban poor acquire a voice. Not the ventriloquized voice of Henry Mayhew, but the voice of one who was born in the East End of lower working-class parents, grew up there, worked there, and chose it as his subject. Arthur Morrison was born in Poplar in 1863, the son of an engine fitter who worked on the docks. His father died of consumption when Arthur was a boy, and his mother raised the three children by running a haberdasher's shop in Grundy Street. Arthur himself took a job early as office boy in the architect's department of the School Board of London at a weekly salary of seven shillings, and moved up to junior and then “third class” clerk in 1886, when he left to become secretary of the Beaumont Trust, which administered Besant's People's Palace. There he started a Dickensian kind of journalistic ascent, publishing pieces on the East End in the Palace Journal, honing his journalistic skills at the evening Globe, and finally attracting attention, like Boz, with the publication in Macmillan's Magazine (October 1891) of his sketch of “A Street” in the East End.¹

As his brief biography might suggest, Morrison underwent an embourgeoisement that took him beyond his East End roots. The dialogue that his writings create is with a middle-class reading audience. But he saw himself as an authentic voice of the urban slum experience, and his early works provided such a strikingly different version of the East End that they immediately created a small critical sensation. They were unlike the representations of the poor that had dominated the literature for half a century. Thus Morrison rejects the sentimental and the melodramatic for a laconic, unmodulated prose that rarely rises to a dramatic climax. He portrays of world of gratuitous violence or enervating degradation which offers up no meaning to the middle-class reader; it cannot be integrated into the systems of value, psychology, or material relations of the middle class. Morrison's world seems to be of a different order altogether.

The bourgeois feminine sensibility, … [once] the site of affective connection between the middle class and the urban underclass, … no longer provides a focal point around which to construct even the effect of subjectivity. In “Lizerunt,” the most famous story in Morrison's first book, Tales of Mean Streets (1894), the protagonist Elizabeth Hunt differs significantly from the pure and “unexpressive” young women who became the channels for middle-class ethical projection. As the corruption of her name to “Lizerunt” signifies, she has scarcely any chance to assert her own integrity and separate identity. Her time as a saucy young flirt, playing off the boys against each other, proves to be short; she attaches herself to Billy Chope in spite of his viciousness, and descends quickly into a life of steadily increasing degradation, in which she gradually becomes coarsened. Morrison graphically renders the relationships of East End existence that had been missing from the earlier journalistic and sociological accounts. They are not uplifting.

… Billy, rising at ten with a bad mouth, resolved to stand no nonsense, and demanded two shillings.

“Two bob? Wot for?” Lizer asked.

“Cos I want it. Non 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, gawblimy, I'll do for you!”

Lizer strained and squalled. “Le’ go! You'll kill me an' the kid too!” she grunted hoarsely. Billy's mother ran in and threw her arms about him, dragging him away. “Don't Billy,” she said, in terror. “Don't Billy—not now! You'll get in trouble. Come away! She might go auf, an' you'd get in trouble!”

Billy Chope flung his wife over and turned to his mother. “Take yer 'ands auf me,” he said: “go on, or I'll gi' ye somethin' for yerself.” And he punched her in the breast by way of illustration.²

Billy later tries to abuse Lizer within hours after she has given birth to their unwanted baby and has to be thrown out of the house by the attending medical student, who is then roundly attacked by both Lizer and Billy's mother for interfering. He is an outsider who clearly does not understand the codes of East End life, which follows its own brutal logic. When Billy's mother dies from overwork, too poor for a decent burial because he has stolen all her savings, Lizer then feels the full brunt of his meanness. And the story ends with him forcing her into prostitution.

“Lizerunt” follows Rudyard Kipling's remarkable story, “The Record of Badalia Herodsfoot,”³ in detailing the “creed and law” that governs slum life. Badalia is recruited into service by the local curate to help distribute alms because she is streetwise enough to spot a fraudulent claim and because she is not above smashing the face of any woman who tries to steal food or money meant for those in need. The story tells of her struggle between maintaining the trust that has been placed in her and her adherence to the slum code of womanhood that says she will be faithful to her drunken husband to the end. The struggle proves fatal; her husband beats her mercilessly in an attempt to get the almsmoney out of her. Yet even on her deathbed she refused to accuse him—thus keeping both “trusts.”

Morrison and Kipling sketch out an East End that is more complexly—and fatalistically—coded than that of earlier accounts. It is no longer a land of shadows cast by the projections of middle-class subjectivity, no longer a terra incognita to be read in line with the dominant class anxieties and desires. It constitutes its own social order: a subsystem of gender relations that exert a power within their own domain that cannot be interpolated into bourgeois categories of self-agency. The slums of Morrison and Kipling acquire a density of customs and personal patterns that had rarely been observed in earlier accounts, as if, in Morrison's case especially, there were an effort to say that the East End is not simply an object of upper-class anxiety or domination, but an entity in and of itself. At the same time that he asserts this, Morrison also insists upon the enclosed, immobilizing fatality of that world: its immersion in violence, its deadened submission to poverty, its constricting social containment. The vicious circularity of the poor is symptomized by the frequent set pieces of Amazonian brawls between women, such as this one from a later Morrison work:

Down the middle of Old Jago Street came Sally Green: red-faced, stripped to the waist, dancing, hoarse and triumphant. Nail-scores wide as the finger striped her back, her face, and her throat, and she had a black eye; but in one great hand she dangled a long bunch of clotted hair, as she whooped in defiance to the Jago. It was a trophy newly rent from the scalp of Norah Walsh, champion of the Rann womenkind, who had crawled away to hide her blighted head, and be restored with gin.⁴

For all the efforts of social services to confirm the woman as the ethical center of lower-class life, she turns out, in many of these stories, to be as uncontrollable as the men, at her worst, or too passive to resist her own victimization, at her best. …

The conditions of Morrison's East End not only diminish the capacity of women to act as an ethical force in family and neighborhood; the economic isolation of the slums also eliminates them as figures of commodity desire. Ironically, the objectifying in the upper classes of women into fetishes of style, beauty, even spiritual worth, transposes them into symbols of social and economic status and advancement. Clearly this is a form of dehumanization, but it has the effect of masking or finessing whatever subjection of the women is occurring. In a subsociety such as Morrison's urban slums, in which women cannot be conceived as icons of aesthetic or ethical value because there is no role for such values in the social order—no possibilities for women to be the means of financial or social improvement, no function for them to fulfill as the conservers of money and ideals—their status will be severely reduced. Their subjection will be all the more evident.

Correspondingly, the diminishment of women refigures the literary form, for the heroine as the register of morality, and as the focal point at which aesthetic and social ideals were brought together, had been essential to the English novel itself. The great experiment in the naturalist novel of the lower classes—Emile Zola's L'Assomoir, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt's Germinie Lacerteux, and George Moore's Esther Waters—had been to dramatize the moral and emotional issues of poverty and struggle through women whose victimization, and in some cases, personal weaknesses, stripped them of much of the auratic power of the conventional heroine. Moore, in particular, compensated by sentimentalizing his heroine, and it is telling that the prominent English example relies on the bourgeois ethos of feeling to sustain a measure of attraction to his protagonist. Morrison will have none of that, and, as a consequence, his writing in Mean Streets has different rhetorical rhythms; it resembles in many respects the uninflected, neutral style of Margaret Harkness's A City Girl.⁵

The circumstances of life in the slums affect the possibilities for writing a traditional masculine text as well. The wave of optimism that prevailed at the beginning of the Victorian period, and which allowed the writers of Mayhew's generation to balance all their misgivings about the rapaciousness of the new competitive order and the loss of scope for mythicized action in men's lives against the excitement of change and social mobility … has disappeared from the scene of lower-class London. The dynamism that converts the somewhat puerile fantasy of masculine adventure and power into a vibrant, if often bizarre, scene of small entrepreneurialism and vivid sensory impression is gone. In its place is misogyny. The lower classes had always been depicted as misogynist, and we are quite aware how poverty leads to abuse and the self-hatred that goes with it, but the East End of Morrison's and Kipling's streets is the logical deterioration of the propensities of the illusory, gender-fixed compensations of the 1840s and '50s representations of an alternative underworld. … The misogynist social texts that we get of the slums thus … undermine any attempt to construct a generative male subjectivity. Morrison's male protagonists are to a man unfulfilled, fated to frustration. Economic and social conditions force this upon them, but the inchoate natures of all the characters indicate that a full, mutually interdependent code of subject construction is absent. A system such as that of the middle class, in which a female ethical subject balances and validates the agency that is granted to the male, is missing in the nether world.

This is, after all, the primary reason that the myth of a realm of primarily male adventure and “freedom” cannot be represented except in the hermetic form of the boys' adventure story, in which the protagonist never has to come of age. There is something of the same limitation in Morrison's novels about the slums, all of which focus on boyhood and young adolescence. It is only natural, in a way, that Morrison should turn to some form of the Bildungsroman for his accounts of life in the East End, since the likely course that the slum culture would take would be to imitate the middle class in its effort to establish for itself a masculine-based, if not patriarchal, order. The Bildungsroman is the form that epitomizes that effort, and we can surmise that Arthur Morrison had in mind, as a kind of model, the century's best known book about poverty, Dickens's Oliver Twist. Morrison's most famous and most compelling book on East End life, The Child of the Jago (1896), and his later novels touching on the urban slums, To London Town (1899) and The Hole in the Wall (1902), focus, therefore, on the issue of the formation of the male in the slums: the classic patriarchal story. Tellingly enough, the protagonist in each of these novels is a boy, as if to indicate that mature or “full” subjectivity is never attained in lower urban existence.

Morrison selected as his setting for A Child of the Jago one of the most anarchic and violent quarters of the East End, the Old Nichol area in Bethanl Green, a nest of streets just to the east of what is now Shoreditch High Street (about ten blocks north of Liverpool Station). The Old Nichol (which Morrison calls “The Jago”), was known as the warren of some of the most impoverished and depraved wretches in London, a pocket of narrow streets and courts that was on the verge of being demolished by the London County Council in the 1890s. Morrison spent eighteen months there, gathering impressions under the tutelage of the Reverend Arthur Osborne Jay, a well regarded and intrepid slum minister. In a later interview with The Daily News, Morrison contended that the “majority of the Jago people are semi-criminal, and an ordinary respectable working man would quickly be hounded out. …”⁶ Morrison's Jago denizens eke out an existence in robbery, burglary, picking pockets, or “coshing” unwary strangers (a “cosh” is an iron bar); the women survive making match boxes or through other marginal activities. The men and women entertain themselves with massive and bloody brawls between rival gangs, and A Child of the Jago has several unforgettable accounts of the pitched battles between the Ranns and the Learys, which rage back and forth throughout the novel. There is no quarter given to delicate Victorian sensibilities in Jago, and the popularity of the novel was matched only by the critical outrage over its alleged grossness. Yet the violence is so spectacular, and so emblematic of the ferocity that comes out of lives of depravity and idleness, that the pathology becomes symbolic. The opening chapter establishes an atmosphere in which the specific details—of the restlessness in the Jago on a typical night, as a victim is coshed and robbed—are transposed into a symbolic setting: “Old Jago Street lay black and close under the quivering red sky: and slinking forms, as of great rats, followed one another quickly between the posts in the gut by the High Street, and scattered over the Jago” (45). Even the violated human body auratically conveys a social pathology:

Out in the Jago the pale dawn brought a cooler air and the chance of sleep. From the paving of Old Jago Street sad grey faces, open-mouthed, looked upward as from the Valley of Dry Bones. Down by Jago Row the coshed subject, with the blood dry on his face, felt the colder air, and moved a leg.

(52)

The ostensible protagonist of the story is the Child of the Jago, Dickie Perrott, who roams its streets, participating in its random violence, its crime, and its occasional play. He is a lad of strong familial instincts, attached to his younger brother and sister, but he shares some of the community's meanness, especially toward a crippled boy, Bobby Roper, who becomes Dickie's nemesis and stands for the perverse crippling of Dickie's own conscience. Under the influence of Father Sturt (modeled after Arthur Osborne Jay), Dickie makes one effort to go straight, and work his way out of the Jago, but it is condemned to failure. Indeed, any effort to get out of the Jago, by virtuous work or by crime, is doomed, and the “moral” of the story is intoned by old Beveridge, regarded … as a trifle ‘balmy’, though anything but a fool,” who points to a gathering of the super-criminals, the High Mobsmen, and tells Dickie,

“Now, Dickie Perrott, you Jago whelp, look at them—look hard. Some day, 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 you aim in life—there's your pattern. Learn to read and write, learn all you can, learn cunning, spare nobody and stop at nothing, and perhaps—It's the best the world has for you, for the Jago's got you, and that's the only way out, except gaol and the gallows. So do your devilmost, or God help you, Dickie Perrott—though He won't: for the Jago's got you!”

(95-96)

If the only way out of the Jago is to emulate the High Mobsmen, it is a route through a parodic Jago-vision of the “better world” of money and power. “Those of the High Mob were the flourishing practitioners of burglar, the mag, the mace, and the broads, with an outer fringe of such dippers—such pickpockets—as could dress well, welshers, and snidesmen. These, the grandees of rascality, lived in places far from the Jago, and some drove in gigs and pony traps” (95). The Mobsmen and their circle mimic and exaggerate upper-class clothing and upper-class airs—those with their gigs and pony traps—and parade before their inferiors a bizarre parody of privilege and grand manners. Their affectations transmit the felt presence of upper-class power—they play out a crude image of another realm of life—but they have the upper-class codes all wrong. … Swept up in the centrifugal vortex of its ignorance and self-violence, the Jago denizen cannot conceive of the alternative world in a way that would allow him or her psychological access to it (at least in any terms that are “real”). It is as if the two spheres—the urban slums and the social world above it—are sealed off from each other. …

A social formation so detached from the prevalent order can, however, be conceived symbolically. This was, as it turned out, the very thing that Morrison's middle-class reviewers refused to allow him to do. The minute they read the disquieting book, they called it a “realistic” novel. And by “realism” they meant the English literary establishment's conception of “naturalism,” a literature that dealt with lower social orders, with distasteful and debasing material, and that was characterized by graphic detail, violence, and physicality.⁷

II.

The late nineteenth-century English debate over realism and naturalism, then, involves much more than literary taste and style: it embodies the effort by the cultural establishment to assure that all depiction and expression of lower-class life will be kept within the power of the middle class to assimilate it and represent it. One of the major pitched battles occurred between Morrison and the prominent literary critic H. D. Traill and it is worth pursuing briefly because it focuses the issues at stake. Remarkably enough, Traill perceives at some level that Jago is a symbolic text, and it makes him so uneasy that he rushes to dismiss the possibility. He acknowledges that what “has most astonished” him “is the impression of extraordinary unreality which, taken as a whole, [the novel] leaves behind it. To a critic opposed to the theories and methods of so-called realism, this is naturally rather disconcerting.” Girded to show that the realism of Jago has sacrificed art for a false and exaggerated naturalism, Traill “comes out from the Jago with the feelings, not, as he had expected, of a man who has just paid a visit to the actual district under the protection of the police, but of one who has just awakened from the dream of a prolonged sojourn in some fairyland of horror. This, to be sure, may be the effect which Mr. Morrison desired to produce: it is certainly not difficult, I think, to show that his methods are distinctly calculated to produce it; but then those methods cannot be exactly the methods which the realist professes to employ, nor that effect at which he is commonly supposed to aim.”⁸ Traill insists that Morrison's work be treated as realism, that it be measured by a truth-factor and be shown to be untrue to actuality. “But I will make bold to say that as described by Mr. Morrison—described, that is to say, as a place of which, with [a] half-dozen exceptions … every single inhabitant out of ‘swarming thousands’ is either a thief, or a harlot, or a ‘cosher’ or a decoy, or a ‘fence,’ or a professional mendicant—it never did and never could exist.… If it is not what you would have actually found in exploring the Jago, it is no doubt what you might have found if all London had happened to pour its manifold streams of corruption into that particular sentina.”⁹

Several things bother Traill here. First, he rejects Morrison's premise that the urban slums constitute a fully fleshed-out subsociety, with its own set of codes so antithetical to bourgeois norms for the lower classes. Second, he recoils from the notion that there might be a place where people live who cannot be reached and redeemed by either sentiment or economic “logic.” Realism for Traill (and others of his time) means that characters will always stand in for human subjects, and by this he means figures whose sensibility are registered on terms readily associated with middle-class values: who desire what we desire. And finally, Traill's determination to categorize Morrison as a “realist” will assure that Morrison's vision will always be grounded in material terms. …

Morrison's Jago is not accessible to that scheme. The physical details in his novel attest, paradoxically, to the estrangement of the lower classes. Amy Kaplan has noted this in American realist works, saying that they “often assume a world which lacks solidity, and the weightiness of descriptive detail—one of the most common characteristics of the realistic text—often appears in inverse proportion to a sense of insubstantiality, as though description could pin down the objects of an unfamiliar world to make it real.”¹⁰ The spareness of Morrison's prose, its starkness—held in place only by a half-Dickensian ironic narrative commentary—constitutes not realism, at least as the English and French middle-class literary culture knew it, but a symbolic text. So disturbing is his version of slum existence, so alien, so intractable is it to middle-class representation and hegemonizing, that he has to be content with the charges that what he describes isn't there.

Consequently, an almost absurd exchange took place between Morrison and his supporters and Traill and his. The publication of Traill's essay on Morrison in his book The New Fiction was accompanied by a letter from a Mr. Woodland Erlebach, “who speaks from a thirty years' acquaintance with the district (Mr. Morrison's Jago),” and who writes, “I boldly say that the district, though bad enough, was not even thirty years ago so hopelessly bad and vile as this book paints it.” Traill then appends the names and addresses of eight other people who had written letters protesting Morrison's picture of the East End.¹¹ Morrison, for his part, rallied Arthur Osborne Jay to his defense, and argued his bona fides in Daily News interview. In a separate article titled “What Is a Realist?” in the New Review, he summed up all the strategies used against him:

There is a story current in the East End of London, of a distracted lady who, assailed with a request for the loan of a sauce pan, defended herself in these words:—“Tell yer mother I can't lend 'er the saucepan, consekince o' 'avin lent it to Mrs. Brown, besides which I'm a-usin' of it meself, an' moreover it's gone to be mended, and what's more I ain't got one.” In a like spirit of lavish objection it has been proclaimed in a breath that I transgress:—because in the first place I should not have written about the Jago in its nakedness; next, that my description is not in the least like; moreover, that it is exaggerated; further, that though it may be true, it was quite unnecessary, because the Jago was already quite familiar, and everybody knew all about it; beyond this, that the Jago houses have been pulled down; and finally that there never was any such place as the Jago.¹²

When the journalist Clarence Rook tried to follow in the line of Arthur Morrison in his book The Hooligan Nights (1899), a reputedly first-hand account of the life of a young criminal named Alf from the slums of South London, he seemed prepared for some of the same objections to his “realism.” Thus in the Preface, he stresses that [he has written] “neither a novel, nor in any sense a work of imagination. Whatever value or interest the following chapters possess must come from the fact that their hero has a real existence. …” Rook goes on, however, to paint a picture of a slum career with a romance to it that is a long way from Dickie Perrot's existence:

When the Daily Chronicle published portions of the history of young Alf early in the year the editor received numerous complaints from well-meaning people who protested that I had painted the life of a criminal in alluring colours. They forgot, I presume, that young Alf was [a] study in reality, and that in real life the villain does not invariably come to grief before he has come of age. Poetic justice demands that young Alf should be very unhappy; as a matter of fact, he is nothing of the sort. And when you come to think of it, he has had a livelier time than the average clerk on a limited number of shillings a week. He does not know what it is to be bored. Every day has its interests, and every day has its possibility of the unexpected, which is just what the steady honest worker misses.¹³

Young Alf is something of an original: he was trained as a boy by an acrobat to be able to creep about in absolutely complete silence; he modeled himself after South London's Patrick Hooligan, with whom, “as with the lives of Buddha and of Mahomet, legend has been at work” (14); and he apprenticed himself to the celebrated Billy the Snide, the most accomplished passer of false coin of his time. He lives a life along the undersides of society that often approaches, in Peter Keating's term, the “pastoral” in its freedom from moral self-doubt and in its removal from the harsh realities of the economic system. Alf glides in and out of Rook's view at times like a phantom, losing himself in back alleys, stairways, and the crowded stalls of the South London slums. He insinuates himself upon victims through his charm, and eludes capture by the same means; in one bold house burglary he saves a baby from choking to death on its night-dress and is toasted with wine by its grateful parents, the burglary victims. The Artful Dodger lives again.

A similar romanticism creeps into another Morrison-inspired novel, W. Somerset Maugham's early work Lisa of Lambeth.¹⁴ Liza, though a product of the margins of the slums and the lower working classes, charms the reader in ways that no denizen of the urban depths had done before her:

It was a young girl of about eighteen, with dark eyes, and an enormous fringe, puffed-out and curled and frizzed, covering her whole forehead from side to side, and coming down to meet her eyebrows. She was dressed in brilliant violet, with great lappets of velvet, and she had on her head an enormous black hat covered with feathers. …

Liza had been so intent on her new dress and the comment it was exciting that she had not noticed the organ.

“Oo, I say, let's ‘ave some dancin',” she said as soon as she saw it. “Come on, Sally,” she added, to one of the girls, “you an' me'll dance togither. Grind away, old cock!”¹⁵

Spirited, genial, fun-loving, engagingly flamboyant in dress and gesture, Liza is perhaps the most affecting figure in late nineteenth-century representations of the poor. Yet the dark futility of the slums quickly casts its shadow upon her. She proves vulnerable to the charms of a married man who will not leave his family to marry her, and she is turned into a pariah among the Lambeth lower working class. Caught up in an awful determinism, she slips into social ruin, finally beaten so severely by her lover's wife, in one of those celebrated fights among women which seemed to have become staples of the novel of the lower classes after Zola and Morrison, that she miscarries the child she is carrying, and dies of its complications. The paradigm is similar to that of a Mean Streets story, but the difference is that a winsome, vital figure emerges briefly in the portrait of Liza. A personality is created and possibilities for self-definition are suggested, as if in an effort to open up a space for a gentler, happier experience among the lowest of the working classes and the urban poor. Liza has time to dream, to fall in love, to play cricket in the streets with the neighborhood children, to go off with her boyfriend on a lively, pleasurable bank holiday excursion. Maugham, who observed many of the conditions of Lambeth poverty during his years there as a medical student and clerk to physicians, shared some of Morrison's pessimism about the bridging of social spheres—and Liza's death symbolizes the futility of it—yet the tenor of Liza of Lambeth differs greatly from that of “Lizerunt”. A new element has been infused into the line of slum novels so dramatically begun by Morrison. Just as Alf's joie de vivre absolves us from the depressing fatality of poverty and petty criminality, so we can find solace in Liza's sharing of the same desires that any lower middle-class girl might. Her instinctive good-heartedness can pass for a lower-class version of ethics; she is potentially redeemable, transformable within the system. The fact that she cannot rise above her blighted circumstances may make her, in an odd way, more comforting to the reader, for she enacts the myth that says that the lower class share bourgeois English traits and are resigned to exercise them in even the most unpromising of circumstances.

Rook's and Maugham's novels belong to the line of late nineteenth-century literature that Peter Keating categorizes as the Cockney School of novel. These novels generally dealt with the urban lower working class, and only occasionally with the hard-core poor, but they proved to have a greater influence on the nature of the fiction of the lower class than Morrison's graphic accounts, largely because they provide a means of appropriating the lower classes into formulas recognizable to the upper strata. The writers of the “cockney school” such as Henry Nevinson and Edwin Pugh created an individual subject that could be brought within the hegemonizing of middle-class English culture. “Because of [the cockney's] determination to remain free,” Keating writes, “he has developed the ability to take whatever life has to offer without complaint; take it wittily, cheerfully or philosophically. Such a man is of inestimable use to a democratic society. So long as his wit, drunkenness, violence, sentimentality and love of freedom are expressed in individual terms, he is socially harmless; so long as these qualities are viewed from a distance he is even attractive and picturesque.”¹⁶ He epitomizes, in Regenia Gagnier's words, the optimistic liberal view that the lower class individual is “an apparently autonomous and universal human spirit.”¹⁷ The cockney is typecast as the English “common man” individualistic, spirited, jingoistic, hard-playing, blunt, beef-eating, beer-drinking, and for all that, ultimately law-abiding. Certainly the portrait has its truth value—all the visitors to the working-class areas in the East End attest to its vital popular culture and to the remarkable resilience of the people—but one is reminded of the critique by the Frankfurt School that mass culture transforms originally realistic accounts into representations that one can read as repetitive diversions which present no danger to the dominant system.¹⁸

The separation of depictions of the lower orders of London that we noted before thus takes place. On the one hand, the Cockney Novel reiterates the redeemable nature of the working class; it can be hegemonized through its own yeoman image. While the culturalistic programs of Besant and the settlement house workers sought to absorb working-class popular culture into a more refined expression, the Cockney Novel makes use of the more raw versions of that culture to achieve the same ideological objectives. On the other hand, Morrison's Jago and Mean Streets … and George Gissing's The Nether World confront the reader with an essentially alienated domain.

III.

George Gissing's powerful novel of the London slums, The Nether World (1889), directly confronts the insidious integration of the London poor into the social discourses of popular culture, and like Morrison's work, it resists the easy representation of slum life that facilitates such an appropriation. Indeed, as we shall see, Gissing resists the absorption of the “experience” of the East End into any of the forms of culture—high or low—that we have seen to have been the social strategy of the 1880s. Gissing himself came to the slums from a lower middle-class background, driven into poverty by a dishonorable act and by his tortured fidelity to Nell Harrison, a prostitute and an alcoholic, whom he married in order to save, and who added to the misery of years of a dreary existence in wretched rented rooms in lower-class London neighborhoods. The Nether World is the greatest of a set of four novels Gissing wrote about the working classes and the slums, and it appears to confirm Morrison's abiding sense of the futility of the struggles of the underprivileged to rise out of their circumstances. The protagonist of the novel, Sidney Kirkwood, marries a woman who has been ruined in looks and spirit, and who burdens him with her near suicidal despair and her spiteful selfishness. The young woman he should have married, Jane Snowden, resigns herself to celibacy and poverty, and when they come together in a scene at the close of the book, the narrator can find hope only in their courage and determination: “Sorrow certainly awaited them, perchance defeat in even the humble aims that they had set themselves; but at least their lives would remain a protest against those brute forces of society which fill with wretchedness the abysses of the nether world.”¹⁹

Long before then, however, the reader has learned that there is no passage from the nether world to the spheres above it. To move across it in a train is to travel “over the pest-stricken regions of East London, sweltering in sunshine which served only to reveal the intimacies of abomination; across miles of a city of the damned, such as thought never conceived before this age of ours; above streets swarming with a nameless populace, cruelly exposed by the unwonted light of heaven. …” (164). A place called Shooter's Gardens epitomizes the heart of the nether world, and the narrator snarls that it is “needless to burden description with further detail; the slum was like any other slum; filth, rottenness, evil odours, possessed these dens of superfluous mankind and made them gruesome to the peering imagination. The inhabitants of course felt nothing … here was … the liberty to be as vile as they pleased. How they came to love vileness, well that is quite another matter, and shall not for the present concern us” (74). Charity cannot redeem such creatures: “of all forms of insolence there is none more flagrant than that of the degraded poor receiving charity which they have come to regard as a right” (253). Indeed, none of the apparatuses of the social order have any effectiveness in this dismal land. The novel seems for awhile to turn upon the device of charity, for Jane Snowdon's grandfather, having come into wealth, and haunted with guilt for his past omissions, concocts a scheme to turn Jane into an angel of mercy; since she grew up as a poor, abused servant girl in the slums she would be, he thinks, the ideal figure to administer a charitable project. This would be no visiting lady from the upper classes come to pass out alms, but a woman who knows the true contours of need. Unfortunately, the scheme is as impracticable as any of the others, and it is thwarted in the plot of the novel, as if Gissing were bent on exposing the fecklessness of the entire concept of such wish-fulfilling, guilt-dispelling interventions. …

Yet in The Nether World, the isolation of the lower classes seems to provide for an integrity of experience that Gissing values. In his rejection of all the efforts of philanthropy, social intervention, and acculturation of the poor and marginal workers, Gissing asserts—albeit ambivalently—the authenticity of the qualities of suffering, struggle, and anger that he has discovered among the disenfranchised. This integrity of experience is embodied in Jane Snowden and Clara Hewitt, the two women whom Sidney Kirkwood loves.

We first encounter Jane when she is an abused servant girl: pale, thin, constitutionally weak, intimidated by her cruel employers, slavishly attached to Sidney, the only man who is kind to her. Her grandfather liberates her, and gradually we see her develop into a quiet figure of determined compassion, with a muted but solid sense of social justice. As she comes upon the poor, “With wide, pitiful eyes, Jane looked at each group she passed. Three years ago she would have seen nothing but the ordinary and the inevitable in such spectacles, but since then her moral and intellectual being had grown on rare nourishment; there was indignation as well as heartache in the feeling with which she had learnt to regard the world of her familiarity” (130).

But for all the philosophy Jane imbibes, and all the strength of character she acquires, she is still indelibly marked by her earlier suffering:

Two effects of the time of her bondage were, however, clearly to be distinguished. Though nature had endowed her with a good intelligence, she could only with extreme labour acquire that elementary book-knowledge which vulgar children get easily enough; it seemed as if the bodily overstrain at a critical period of life had affected her memory, and her power of mental application generally. … The second point in which she had suffered harm was of more serious nature. She was subject to fits of hysteria, preceded and followed by the most painful collapse of that buoyant courage which was her supreme charm and the source of her influence. Without warning, an inexplicable terror would fall upon her; like the weakest child, she craved protection from a dread inspired solely by her imagination and solace from an anguish of wretchedness to which she could give no form in words.

(135-36)

As we shall see again, the body, as a site of material being, asserts itself to complicate the ideological solutions of the text. In Jane, it recalls the fear of past wretchedness, the inexplicable terror of abuse, and it disfigures the rational consciousness indelibly. Jane signifies the real suffering, the psychic injury of poverty, the humbling that precludes rebellion. Hers has been an experience that provides its own probity, which depends in large part upon her being a witness to the social injustices of the nether world. And it assures that, for all her improvement in learning and manners, she will never be assimilable into a higher culture of the middle and upper classes. She cannot be appropriated into her grandfather's charitable project—her mind and body rebel against it whenever he demands it of her. She cannot be philanthropized. Although in many respects she is the idealized, cheerful, industrious little worker among the poor that brighten many popular cultural accounts of life in the lower classes, she cannot be commodified. She is damaged goods. In almost perverse terms, she maintains the integrity of the nether world's message of social inequality and political failure.

Sidney Kirkwood recognizes this significance in her. When he is deeply attracted to her, the narrator recounts, “of a sudden he experienced a kind of shame, the result of comparison between himself and the simple girl who stood before him; she was so young, and the memory of passions from which he had suffered years ago affected him with a sense of unworthiness, almost of impurity” (168). While the specific, conscious impulses of his sense of shame are the comparisons of his own worldly desires with her innocence, he unconsciously associates Jane with the social suffering of the nether world, for the text has so deeply implicated her in the conditions of her class that she has come to represent the essentiality of that experience to her being—and to those whose lives she represents. For him to love Jane, and to be a party to elevating her out of the slums, would be in some way to break faith with his mission (really Gissing's mission), which is to assert the integrity of the message of that suffering. The logic of the book, as well as the logic of the social conditions it depicts, dictate that Jane will remain as the troubled victim and consciousness of the nether world.

While Gissing respects the endurance of the lower classes, he is scarcely an unqualified admirer of the life that they live. He can be as unsparing as Morrison in sketching the meanness, the wanton brutality, and the shiftlessness of slum dwellers and the lower working classes. His account of the leisure activities of such people seethes with contempt. Several of the characters take a bank holiday excursion to the Crystal Palace, the emblem of popular diversions:

How they gape, what listless eyes most of them have! The stoop in the shoulders so universal among them merely means over-toil in the workroom. Not one in a thousand shows the elements of taste in dress; vulgarity and worse glares in all but every costume. … Mark the men in their turn; four in every six have visages so deformed by ill-health that they excite disgust; their hair is cut down to within half an inch of the scalp; their legs are twisted out of shape by evil conditions of life from birth upwards.

(109)

Gissing is no more disposed toward the Cockney Novel hegemonizing of the lower orders than Morrison is. Although he perceives the growing separation of the classes in London that was taking place late in the century, he is conscious that they are mediated through the discourse of consumerism, leisure, and nationalism that is subsumed under popular culture, and he deplores the kind of identity that is being constructed among the lower working classes. Furthermore, long years of semi-obscurity scribbling for little recompense had hardened Gissing against the mercenary nature of writing in a popular vein for a mass audience.²⁰ Not only is the popular culture vision of the working classes and poor untrue to their conditions, but it is actively implicated in the propagation of a mindless, animalistic hedonism symbolized in the Crystal Palace itself.

Gissing's antagonism to the consumerist aspects of both popular culture and the literary marketplace explains as well the particular nature of his own relationship to culture, a relationship that in a sense governs Kirkwood's characterization in The Nether World and the animus that book contains toward the programs of acculturation of the lower classes taking place in England. Clearly the confluence of the Arnoldian “high culture” movement and the rise of consumerism produced among Gissing's generation a certain amount of uneasiness. Since the very notion of higher culture was to establish a body of thought, art works, and activities that was uncontaminated by commercialism, a conscious effort was made to reconceive culture as a discourse that was outside the marketplace. Culture was made to reside in the realm of the sumptuary, outside use and exchange value (even if that ran the danger of fetishizing the work of art). Needless to say, this realm is one that has been traditionally occupied by the upper reaches of the middle class and by the aristocracy, for it requires a certain degree of immunity from the exigencies of a market economy in order to assign arbitrary worth to objects of art and to a cultured style of living. Gissing confirms this in his own writing and thinking, for the realm of art for him was explicitly associated with a higher class, all the more intensely because of his resignation to the fact that he would never inhabit that world (although he frequently visited it). This defines him in his concept of himself as an exile, as a man who is of the “unclassed.”…

Fredric Jameson suggests that what we have here is a sign or trace of the ideologeme of Nietzschean ressentiment, where, among victimized groups (and those who think themselves victimized), the only way of reaction—that of deeds—is unavailable, so it is replaced by an imaginary vengeance. The primary effect is the revolutionary activity of the underclasses, but a secondary effect is seen in those dissatisfied intellectuals who foment imaginary violence as well, but now against the putative revolutionaries rather than against established power.²¹ Gissing thus appreciates the antagonism of the lower classes toward their social conditions—even shares at some level their resentment of the arrogance and indifference of privilege—and yet believes that the poor and lower working classes must keep in their place. While an “exile” from the comforts and assurances of upper-class society, Gissing nonetheless disavows any sympathetic identification with the underclasses. We can now supplement Jameson's insight by factoring in the specific social configuration in which this all takes place: the culturalism of the late century, and Gissing's own particular relation to it.²²

Indeed, just as Gissing could not comfortably be a part of the acculturation process of his time and class, he also presents (as does Morrison) an image of the nether world that seems to remove it from the discourse of the cultural altogether. To understand this image, we need to examine the “affect” of a novel such as The Nether World and also focus for a moment on the other major female character, Clara Hewitt. The affect of the novel is particularly vexing because it consists both of a deadening, despondent fatalism and of surges of intense melodrama. Sidney Kirkwood epitomizes the former, for at every stage he seems to repress both his desire and his anger. We are told that he originally aspired to be an artist, and showed some talent at it, but unfortunately his father suffered severe economic reverses and, troubled by Sidney's lack of direction, apprenticed him to a jeweler. The narrator ironically remarks that this saved Sidney from sowing his wild oats, and as the novel progresses, we watch him ossify into a kind of stoic, acting out of a severe personal morality, a man “reckless of the pain he gave to others so long as his own self-torture was made sufficiently acute” (235). Circumstances, but also something in his own nature, make Kirkwood into a figure of deflected desire, whose passion for Clara, then for Jane, is kept in check—the presence of the male body always obscured.

Clara Hewitt, on the other hand, unleashes desire with melodramatic force. Born into poverty, but born stunningly beautiful and quick of mind, “many a time had she sobbed out to herself, ‘I wish I could neither read nor write! I wish I had never been told that there is anything better than to work with one's hands and earn daily bread!’” (82). She has no friends, except for Sidney, whose love she disdains, largely from her determination to spite herself and others in every way. She burns—and, as we shall see, the feverish language carries special connotations—with desire to rise above the nether world, and she risks everything to do so by becoming an actress: one of the last honorable of careers for a woman but the one that fits creatures who can be no better than impostors in the world above their own:

Self-assertion; to be no longer an unregarded atom in the mass of those who are born only to labour for others; to find play for the strength and the passion which, by no choice of her own, distinguished her from the tame slave. Sometimes in the silence of night she suffered from a dreadful need of crying aloud, of uttering her anguish in a scream like that of insanity.

(86)

For Gissing, then, Clara Hewitt constitutes a site of class desire, of political resistance to the injustices of society. As often as the narrator describes Clara's self-ruinous, haughty, spiteful nature—her essential selfishness—in melodramatic expositions, he attempts to lay the blame for it upon the “social forces” that have condemned her to poverty. “Suppose she'd been the daughter of a rich man, then everything we now call a fault in her would either have been of no account or actually a virtue” (102). Her rejection of Sidney's apparently disinterested love is described as a “fierce, unscrupulous rebellion” (86). “The access of self-pity” in her “was followed, as always, by persistent sense of intolerable wrong, and that again by a fierce desire to plunge herself into ruin, as though by such an act she could satiate her instincts of defiance. It is a phase of exasperated egotism common enough in original natures frustrated by circumstance—never so pronounced as in those who suffer from the social disease” (94).

The correlation between “social disease” and the passionate destructive urges of Clara has to be taken on faith. Withheld from the story of Clara Hewitt is the description of the process through which she became so alienated—the indignities and sufferings of growing up poor and of being intelligent and sensitive enough to perceive them—and absent, also, are accounts of the workings of the larger social order (the economic and political constructions) that create such circumstances. For Gissing the causes of Clara's misery almost have to be extrapolated:

Natures such as hers are as little to be judged by that which is conventionally the highest standard as by that which is the lowest. The tendencies which we agree to call good and bad became in her merely directions of a native force which was at all times in revolt against circumstance. Character thus moulded may go far in achievement, but can never pass beyond the bounds of suffering. … As often as our conventions give us the opportunity, we crush them out of being; they are noxious, they threaten the frame of society. Oftenest the crushing is done in such a way that the hapless creatures seem to have brought about their own destruction.

(295)

Such ruminations expose as much as they seem to dissemble, for such a passage reveals some of the uneasiness with which the observing consciousness confronts this site of rebellion—a site so melodramatically cast as female sexuality. Once again in the Victorian period the sexually vital woman has been crosscoded with class desire; not, as in Dickens, with the middle-class male's ambivalence toward competitiveness, but now with the bitterness and potential dangerousness of the underclasses. …

In Gissing's novel, Clara joins a traveling acting troupe as an understudy, and when the female star walks out on the show, she is invited to fill in as the lead in a melodrama. The episode is sexually charged, for it is clear that the manager of the company wants Clara as a mistress. On the night when Clara is to act in her first great part, however, a jealous fellow actress dashes vitriol into her face, scarring her horribly. What follows is one of the most melodramatic meetings in all of literature. When Sidney visits Clara after the incident, she wears a veil to prevent him from seeing her. Not only is she faceless—and thus unrepresentable—but she has almost lost the power of speech: “yet it was with difficulty that she commanded utterance … her voice failed again … her faltering voice sank lower and lower. …” (283-84). Almost at the point of erasure, Clara makes a final effort to assert herself, in an uncanny scene:

There came a marvellous change—a change such as it needed either exquisite feeling or the genius of simulation to express by means so simple. Unable to show him by a smile, by a light in her eyes, what mood had come upon her … by her mere movement as she stepped lightly towards him, by the carriage of her head … she prepared him for what she was about to say. … He knew that she smiled, though nothing of her face was visible; he knew that her look was one of diffident, half-blushing pleasure.

(287)

At one level, this passage attempts to reassert the primacy of the male observer: for Clara can only be read and articulated by Sidney. The dangers that Clara represents—of sexuality, resentment, and of social resistance—are subordinated to the interpretive male gaze. Yet the passage also tells of Clara's ability to communicate through the movements of her body. Later, in fact, the text will insist on the continued allure of her graceful, willowy frame and the felt presence of this faceless, almost inarticulate body. In addition, the narrative persistently refers to the feverish state in which she is often gripped: “the fever that then sustained her was much the same as she used to know before she had thoroughly accustomed herself to appearing in front of an audience. … With burning temples, with feverish lips, she moved about her little room like an animal in a cage” (291-92, 293). …

Fever, of course, is a symptom of real bodily illness. It is more than an impression; it is a pathological characteristic. Some quality beyond the representation of emotion thus intrudes itself into Gissing's text; the body makes its presence felt. On the symbolic level, Gissing negates the rebellion of the lower orders—signified in Clara's female sexuality—by making its face unrecognizable, unrepresentable, and yet allows it to manifest itself, as the body is manifested by fever. Lower-class resentment acquires palpability and intensity.

The condition of the nether world in Gissing (and in Morrison) codes itself as pathology—not a cultural phenomenon but a condition represented through symptoms of the body. As The Nether World says, there is something called “a social disease.” This is less a medicalization of the social vision than an effort to convey, in a physiological metaphor, a particular sensation of social experience. It is ironic that the effort is made in The Nether World to read those symptoms through the female body (as you recall, Jane, too, was at the mercy of the almost autonomous rebellions of her body), for the male body cannot be made the register. It is still able to suppress the fever; it is still inviolate in some way, as rigorous as Sidney Kirkwood is in self-repression. Yet the slums and the world of the underclasses had entered the Victorian discourse as a sphere for the registering of male energies and fantasies. And it is clear from a reading of Morrison's slum novel that it is male experience that has gone awry. The intensification of misogynistic brutality illustrates an inability to establish any coherence to masculine desires and rebellions. The frustration and anger manifests itself, in its clinically repressed form, all the way up from the Jago through Sidney Kirkwood to George Gissing and those who think like him—frustration and anger over social inequality, the futility of revolution, the diminution of passion, the sterility of cultural experience. And it is all the more tightly bound because the male body cannot be allowed to register the symptoms. Having become, through the pathology of the representation of the lower orders in the 1880s and '90s, the emblem of this malaise, the body, and especially the male body, must seek new forms in which it is able to express that ill.

Notes

1. I am indebted for the biographical material to Peter Keating's “Biographical Study,” in A Child of the Jago (Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1969), 11-36, and to Michel Krzak's “Preface” to Tales of Mean Streets (Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1983), 7-10.

2. Tales of Mean Streets, 37-38. References hereafter will appear in parentheses in the text.

3. Many Inventions, 1893 (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1941), 355-85.

4. A Child of the Jago, 64. References hereafter will appear in parentheses in the text.

5. While I recognize that Mean Streets is a collection of short stories, and shares with the late nineteenth-century short story in general its Chekhovian and Maupassantian restraint and relative absence of dramatic modulation, nonetheless, I would argue that the subject matter of many of the late nineteenth-century English short stories affects the form. For another instance in which the refusal to treat the heroine as an auratic object of commodity desire dictates the style, I would point to Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage.

6. “The Children of the Jago,” Daily News (Saturday, December 12, 1896): 6.

7. For a particularly lurid critique of naturalism, see Arthur Symons's essay, “A Note on Zola's Method,” collected in his The Symbolist Movement in Literature (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1919), 154-64. See also Henry James, “Nana,” 1880, in The Future of the Novel: Essays on the Art of Fiction (New York: Vintage, 1956), 84-96.

8. H. D. Traill, “The New Fiction,” in The New Fiction and Other Essays on Literary Subjects (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1897), 9-10.

9. Ibid, 13-14.

10. The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 9.

11. Traill, 25-26.

12. New Review 16, 94 (March 1897): 329.

13. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), xxi-xxii.

14. For accounts of Morrison's influence, see Ted Morgan, Maugham (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980), and Edward Garnett's reader's report on “A Lambeth Idyll” (its first title) for T. Fisher Unwin, reprinted in Anthony Curtis and John Whitehead, eds., W. Somerset Maugham: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), 22.

15. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 8, 9.

16. Keating, Working Classes, 221.

17. Gagnier, 124. See Gagnier's wonderful description of Henry Nevinson's short stories, 124-31.

18. See “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming, 1944 (New York: Continuum, 1990).

19. The Nether World (London: The Harvester Press, 1974), 392. References hereafter will appear in parentheses in the text.

20. In Pierre Coustillas, ed., George Gissing: Essays and Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1970), 96, 95.

21. Jameson, 201-02.

22. This helps account for the particular style, the dead classicism, that Jameson says characterizes Gissing's writing, for it is in itself a symptom of the particular culturalism of the alienated late nineteenth-century intellectual, Linda Dowling.