Arthur Morrison and the East End

The Legacy of Slum Fictions

Eliza Cubitt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367188238
• eBook ISBN: 9780429582080
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

This, the first critical biography of Arthur Morrison (1863-1945), presents his East End writing as the counter-myth to the cultural production of the East End in late-Victorian realism. Morrison's works, particularly Tales of Mean Streets (1894) and A Child of the Jago (1896), are often discussed as epitomes of slum fictions of the 1890s as well as prime examples of nineteenth-century realism, but their complex contemporary reception reveals the intricate paradoxes involved in representing the turn-of-the-century city.

Arthur Morrison and the East End examines how an understanding of the East End in the Victorian cultural imagination operates in Morrison's own writing. Engaging with the contemporary vogue for slum fiction, Morrison redressed accounts written by outsiders, positioning himself as uniquely knowledgeable about a place considered unknowable. His work provides a vigorous challenge to the fictionalised East End created by his predecessors, whilst also paying homage to Charles Dickens, George Gissing, Walter Besant and Guy de Maupassant. Examining the London sites which Morrison lived in and wrote about, this book is an excursion not into the Victorian East End, but into the fictions constructed around it.

1 Poplar and Ratcliff

Arthur Morrison: ‘Another Coming Man’¹

In 1901, Arthur Morrison, aged 38 and the published author of several works, was invited to submit a passage on his life and writing for the book Twentieth Century Authors. This he did, coming out of a ‘long, self-imposed silence’ to record his birth in Kent to a father born at Blackheath.² In obliging the editors, Morrison created one of the greatest fictions of his life: as Vincent Brome later discovered, Morrison was not born in Kent, but in Poplar, East London, as was his father.³ Poplar, together with the parishes of Stepney, Wapping, Bethnal Green, Limehouse, Mile End and Bow, was one of the Tower Hamlets. The borough was named, in 1832, for their provision of yeomen to become Tower of London guards. It contained the docks and therefore had a vital part in the history of the city, but it was also, and remains, one of the poorest areas of London.⁴

Throughout his early life, Morrison not only witnessed but also was deeply involved in numerous schemes designed for the elevation of working-class East Enders like himself. Morrison’s Wesleyan Day School was part of the Methodist Mission to the East End.⁵ He witnessed pioneering metropolitan improvements to housing and sanitation, which transformed his favourite dockland streets. His clerkships were at the School Board for London and The Beaumont Trustees, which administered the philanthropic institution, the People’s Palace at Mile End. His first subeditor role was for the Palace’s periodical, The Palace Journal. The redevelopment of the notorious Nichol slum in Bethnal Green by the nascent London County Council provided contextual apparatus for the plot of his most famous novel, A Child of the Jago (1896); a later novel, Cunning Murrell (1900), described Hadleigh, Essex, before it became a Salvation Army colony. As a young, talented working-class man, he would have been the intended recipient of (and may well have witnessed and made use of) the philanthropic programmes of ‘missionary aestheticism’, which brought art to the East End poor.⁶

Achieving literary renown through his writings about the East End, and eventually becoming an expert and dealer in Japanese art, which he exhibited at Whitechapel Gallery in the 1900s, Morrison became not only the subject of these reforms but also the bearer. He remained, however, deeply distrustful of the potential of any of these schemes to effect widespread change. In this chapter, I introduce a man who was born in a place already famed through its literary representations, in whose life and work the othering of the East End and East Enders becomes complicated.

In 1985, Robert Lorin Calder wrote of Morrison that ‘it is unlikely that a full account of his life will ever be written’.⁷ The biographical study of a man who was surrounded by ‘a cloud of self-induced obscurity’ is certainly a challenge.⁸ Morrison requested that after his death, his papers and notebooks should be burned.⁹ Unpublished letters suggest that several efforts were made, during his lifetime, to write or invite him to write his recollections, but he either demurred or these were not completed before he died and had his papers destroyed.¹⁰ Morrison’s reticence, his marginality from the canon and the loss of his papers have meant that the picture of Morrison hitherto has been one of isolation. Despite his secrecy and his reluctance to be interviewed, the digitisation of archives and recent work by other scholars has made it possible to gain a greater understanding of his life and personality. Through letters that have survived and the reminiscences of his friends, a picture emerges of a man who was fully involved in the literary and artistic life of London throughout his early adulthood: a kind, diffident, curious man; and a humorous, ironic writer who was both proud of his self-made success and ambiguous about the value of his work.

Morrison has been frequently described in the literary memoirs of other writers, usually in passing and often inaccurately.¹¹ Falsehoods and suppositions have flourished: Martin Priestman has called him the ‘socialist Arthur Morrison’; however, he had a troubled attitude towards reform and was deeply conservative.¹² He wished to succeed in society on its existing terms, even as he understood the innovations he would utilise in order to do so. During his lifetime, fabrications about his personal history were encouraged by Morrison and furthered because, as Seth Koven notes, in his fiction Morrison constructed a ‘complex web of authorial poses […] to complicate his relationship to his own working-class origins’.¹³ Pamela Fox has also argued that Morrison trod a careful line between using his intimate knowledge of the East End and disguising his actual origins.¹⁴

A 1901 article on the phenomenon of ‘Hooliganism’, youth street crime, exhibits this negotiation. The editor notes that Morrison ‘is an expert in “Hooligans.” He lived amongst the Hooligans to write “Tales of Mean Streets” and “A Child of the Jago”’.¹⁵ Morrison asks that the reader will pardon him if, in order to elucidate his expertise on Hooliganism, ‘I say a little more of myself than might otherwise seem becoming’.¹⁶ He proceeds to say nothing truly personal, but recalls the furore surrounding the publication of Jago, whereby:

many excellent persons, who had never seen these things, hastened publicly to assure me, who had, that it was all a mere impossibility. I was held up for a defamer of the poor, not to say an extravagant liar. What was I talking of?

In this piece, he mocks the social panic that Hooligans had arisen because of efforts to uplift the working classes – it was no more likely that ‘Board Schools, or Evening Classes’ had caused Hooliganism than ‘the South African War, or […] the Indian Famine’.¹⁷ Yet he also takes the problem of the Hooligan seriously, noting that if, as a child, the Hooligan ‘had been […] lifted out from the evil influences about him, he might have grown into a man of credit’.¹⁸ He also reveals his conservatism, stating that Hooligans have been given rights without understanding their corresponding social duties.

This article exemplifies Morrison’s complex navigation of literary and cultural space. Allowing for a comparison between the moral panic over ‘this growing brutality of the lower classes’ and literary realism, Morrison notes sarcastically in parentheses, ‘they called me brutal once, bless them!’ That the realism of the 1890s was ‘brutal’ in its subjects and in its ‘excess of frankness’ was a concern expressed by many critics.¹⁹ Morrison’s Jago had disquieted critics who saw it as a ‘brutal’ representation of brutal themes.²⁰ That such literature could then cause brutality in its readers was a concern which gave rise to the National Vigilance Association, established in 1888, who were gravely anxious that realism and naturalism ‘corroded the human character’.²¹ In ‘Hooliganism’, Morrison concomitantly asserts knowledge and hides how his knowledge was ascertained; he allows the editor to make claims about his expertise while expressing nothing about himself except his diffidence. Fox has argued that Morrison’s reluctance to declare his origins was due to his shame at his working-class background, but in ‘Hooliganism’, this concealment becomes complicated by pride. Morrison’s opinion was both sought after and distrusted; therefore, even as he declares that he will reveal his knowledge, he hides it by reflexively calling upon criticism of his own work. The editor’s conceit of the East End as peopled entirely by hooligans is the very judgement which informs the ambivalent statement by Morrison that it was not his work that was called brutal, but himself.

To have done other than to strive to distance himself from his birthplace and the notoriety it evoked, therefore, would have exposed Morrison to personal inquiry and perhaps professional ruin – it would have been an act of ‘self-immolation’.²² As Maltz notes, by the time Morrison’s origins would have been useful as confirmation of his knowledge of the East End, he had already succeeded in entering the middle class and had a family who were reliant on his social and professional position.²³ The social difference between Poplar and the Nichol, noted by Maltz and Simon Joyce in their understanding of Morrison’s origins, would not have prevented his becoming a curiosity on this basis.²⁴

In Morrison’s writings, we have a rare glimpse of the Victorian East End defined by one of its own. His writing demonstrates an affective response to urban transformation. Despite having falsified his place of birth, when his representation of the East End was criticised following the publication of Jago, Morrison stated that to dispute his view would be to ‘strive after a war in [his] own country’.²⁵ The quite literal meaning of this has been overlooked since the time of publication – the East End was his own country. His upbringing in Poplar rendered his literary response to these districts ambiguous: an affected detachment vies with nostalgia for what is lost in an effort towards a measured interpretation.

Morrison rendered the turn-of-the-century city with ruthless lucidity: he related truths about East End life – the horror and hypocrisy of respectability, the thrill of the workaday docks, the austere isolation of the most ordinary streets – which had proved incomprehensible to other writers working in the same vein. Yet his writing style, one of irony, bleak comedy and extreme authorial self-effacement, meant that in writing of the East End, he never revealed himself. None of his East End characters ventriloquise Morrison, and although we can see his greater sympathy for some – in particular the boy protagonists who were, like Morrison, orphaned – it is rarely possible to state where Morrison himself is situated within a given text. This is one of his great skills as a writer and one of the qualities of his work that most intrigued and troubled contemporary readers.

The variety of his output adds a further complication to unravelling who Morrison was through his writing. He was a prolific journalist who contributed diverse articles to a wide range of periodicals; he wrote detective fiction, historical romances, experimental short stories, plays and well-regarded art criticism, as well as one of the most imp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Poplar and Ratcliff
• 2 Whitechapel
• 3 Mile End
• 4 Limehouse and Stratford
• 5 Shoreditch, Bethnal Green and the ‘Jago’
• 6 Blackwall and the Docks
• 7 Return to the East End
• Conclusion
• Index