Critical Essays on Arthur Morrison and the East End

Description

In 1896, author Arthur Morrison gained notoriety for his bleak and violent A Child of the Jago, a slum novel that captured the desperate struggle to survive among London’s poorest. When a reviewer accused Morrison of exaggerating the depravity of the neighborhood on which the Jago was based, he incited the era’s most contentious public debate about the purpose of realism and the responsibilities of the novelist. In his self-defense and in his wider body of work, Morrison demonstrated not only his investments as a formal artist, but also his awareness of social questions. As the first critical essay collection on Arthur Morrison and the East End, this book assesses Morrison’s contributions to late-Victorian culture, especially discourses around English working-class life. Chapters evaluate Morrison in the context of Victorian criminality, child welfare, disability, housing, professionalism, and slum photography. Morrison’s works are also reexamined in the light of writings by Sir Walter Besant, Clementina Black, Charles Booth, Charles Dickens, George Gissing, and Margaret Harkness. This volume features an introduction and 11 chapters by preeminent and emerging scholars of the East End. They employ a variety of critical methodologies, drawing on their respective expertise in literature, history, art history, sociology, and geography. Critical Essays on Arthur Morrison and the East End throws fresh new light on this innovative novelist of poverty and urban life. Cover Half Title Series Information Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents Figures Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction Morrison’s Early Life and Writings A Child of the Jago The Reception of Jago and Morrison’s Artistic Choices Japanese Art Detective Fiction Returning to the East End Imaginary Morrison’s Moves and the Importance of Essex Last Years The Advent of Morrison Studies The Focus of This Essay Collection The Structure of the Essay Collection Notes Part I Vulnerable Bodies 1 Classed Childhood in Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago and Victorian Slum Fiction Victorian Narratives of Classed Childhood The Problem of Childhood in the Slums Conclusion Notes 2 Visual Disability and Criminality in Morrison’s The Hole in the Wall “Cunning With a Life’s Blindness”: Portraits of Blindness Common Cause: Lime, Injury, and Industry Visual Acuity and Moral Worth Notes 3 Photographic Realism and the “Ragged Boy” in Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago (1896), To London Town (1899), … Introduction The Form of the Ragged Boy Five Feet Two, Solemnity Great: Dicky Perrott Conclusion Notes Part II Social Investigation 4 Erasing Women’s Labor: Neglecting Female Reformers in the Slum Fiction of Besant, Harkness, and Morrison Introduction “Like a Tamer Among Beasts”: The Iron Discipline of Father Sturt in A Child of the Jago “I Do Not Expect to Do Better Than Men […] It Will Be Enough If I Do as Well”: Mythologizing Male Genius in All Sorts and ... Protecting the Slum Sister in In Darkest London Conclusion Notes 5 “Not What It Was Made Out”: Hygiene, Health, and Moral Welfare in the Old Nichol, 1880–1900 “Metropolitan Degradation”: Linking Poverty With Dirt Keeping Clean in Adversity Conclusion: Reputations Acknowledgments Notes 6 “Enterprising Realists”: Tracing the Influence of Charles Booth’s Life and Labour On A Child of the Jago and Other Slum Fictions “That Gift of the Imagination Which Is Called ‘Realistic’.” Classes C to E: “Respectable Poverty” in Booth and Morrison Two Important Novelists, Gissing and Morrison, in Jay’s Orbit The Knock at the Door: Compiling the Curate’s Notebook Riven With (The Same) Contradictions: Booth, Jay, and Morrison Morrison’s First-Hand Experience and Booth’s Best Guesses Checking Up On Morrison’s “Facts” “Chronicles of the Sordid”: Popular Fiction Takes a Sociological Turn—Harkness, Rook, and Whiteing Booth’s Eight London Class Categories Notes Part III Crime and Money 7 Afterlives of A Child of the Jago A Child of the Nichol: Arthur Harding’s “My Apprenticeship to Crime” The Shadow of the Jago: Alexander Baron’s King Dido Conclusion Acknowledgments Notes 8 Morrison’s Camorra: Organized Crime in Transcultural Context Defining Organized Crime Morrison and the Hooligan After 1900 Camorra Culture The Camorra in the English-Language Periodical Press Stories of Naples and the Camorra Proximity and Distance Among Morrison’s Criminals The Movement to Corporate Crime Conclusion: Dorrington’s Perfection of Systems: Moving Things and Using People Acknowledgments Notes 9 Investment and Housing in Gissing’s The Unclassed and Morrison’s “All That Messuage” Abraham Gets His Due in The Unclassed The Capitalist as Victim in “All That Messuage” Postscript Acknowledgments Notes Part IV Resituating Morrison 10 Disconnecting and Reconnecting Morrison: Professional and Specialist Authorship Life and Work: Apprentice Years at the People’s Palace Market Writing: Slums, Zoos, Private Detectives Discovering Japan Professionalism and the Question of Specialization Notes 11 Essex and the Metropolitan Periphery in To London Town, Cunning Murrell, and “A Wizard of Yesterday” The City, the Slums, and the River: Morrison’s Imaginative Places and Existing Views of Him Morrison and London’s Outer Rings To London Town and the Birth of Greater London More Urban Than at First Sight: Cunning Murrell and “A Wizard of Yesterday” Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index