Arthur George Morrison, born in 1863 as a native East Ender, is a comparatively less known figure in British literary history.6 However, as an authentic East Ender with first-hand experience living among London’smost poverty-stricken people, he offers the possibility of reexamining the representations of East End London in the late Victorian period. His experiences both as a native East Ender and a fervent charity worker provided him with the greatest ability to share slum life with the largely oblivious general public.7 His research in the Old Nichol, reputedly the worst slum in East London, and his ability to write in the tone or dialect of the slum,
brought him fame as a serious writer. The stories told by Morrison are generally acknowledged as a genuine slum voice.
Morrison began his career with the book Tales of Mean Street.8 It was also with this book that he started to focus on the poverty of the East End slum, which he then continued to write about throughout his career. Although this book was more like a collection of features of local characters in the East End, this collection of fourteen stories had the spatial construction of the city slum in common. Morrisson’sstories
6 As Anita Miller claims, “Arthur Morrison’s East End fiction is stark and powerful; it has fallen into undeserved obscurity”(“Introduction”9). Morrison was famous in his time; however, little about him is known to modern readers. The intention of editing Morrison’s works for today’s readers is the hope that his unique voice will be heard again.
7 Anita Miller states in the introduction to Tales of Mean Street that for a long time, Arthur Morrison worked as a clerk for an East End charity called the People’s Palace. He later became an editor for the Palace Journal and soon concentrated on a writing career after his resignation from the charity.
With his background as a native East Ender and a true laborer’s offspring, his father being an engine fitter (Miller 7–8), Morrison was regarded as a genuine and realist author of East End London, as he claimed that “it was my experience to learn the ways of this place, to know its inhabitants, to talk with them, eat, drink, and work with them”(Morrison, Jago xi).
8 Arthur Morrison was first known to his contemporaries with his collection of fourteen short stories that appeared in the National Observer in 1893 and was later published in book form in late 1894 under the title Tales of Mean Street (Miller,“Introduction”8). This book soon created a considerable stir and went into several printings. The success of this book brought him a reputation as a serious writer. It was also with Tales of Mean Street that Morrison established his style as a realist writer.
expressed concern for the miserable inhabitants of a thoroughly contaminated
environment. The filthy environment was not only a background for his characters; it was characterization itself.
For instance, in “Behind the Shade,”Morrison presents a mother and a daughter recently moved to the East End. The woman, Mrs. Perkins, is the focus of attention in the beginning. Becoming a widow and moving into this area with her
thirty-year-old daughter brings some spice to her tedious life. The unique
architectural features of their environment contribute to the miserable lives of the two characters in this story. A vivid contrast is suggested from the house they rent to highlight their differences with the local population:
Now, when people keep a house to themselves, and keep it clean; when they neither stand at the doors nor gossip across back-fences; when, moreover, they have a well-dusted shade of fruit in the front window; and, especially, when they are two women who tell nobody their business; they are known at once for well-to-do, and are regarded with the admixture of spite and respect that is proper to the circumstances. They are also watched. (Tales 62)
They are outsiders to this city slum because they never gossip or stand at the door idling. They stand out from local residents merely because they try to keep themselves clean.
Their bizarre profession as piano teachers, a unique walk of life rarely seen in their neighborhood, ultimately leads to their downfall. With few people willing to spend money on learning such an unpractical skill, the mother and daughter receive little income and die from inanition. When their neighbors discover their deaths, they continue to highlight their difference as being cleanness: “The room was bare and empty, and their steps and voices resounded as those people in an unfurnished house.
The wash-house was vacant, but it was clean”(Tales 67). By the end of the story, readers understand that despite giving a higher-class service like piano lessons, they never had enough income to sustain their lives. They were as poor as local residents.
But no one in their neighborhood judged them equals in poverty, simply because they were too clean to be poor. The underlying logic is that poverty is usually evaluated on the basis of sanitation; one who is regarded as poor is one accustomed to a filthy environment.
Encouraged by the success of Tales of Mean Streets, Morrison resolved to write intensively about the East End slum and its people. In 1896, Morrison published his highly acclaimed novel, A Child of the Jago. As the subtitle of this novel, “A Novel Set in the London Slums in the 1890s”suggests, the plot is closely intertwined with its setting in the sense that “every member of the community”was responsible for the crime and sin generated in this place (Jago xi). In Morrison’s words, he was sharing
“the conditions of this place within the apprehension of others”with the city citizens (Jago xi).
Other than the emotional impact of the wretched lives of the poorest on Jago Street, this work is bursting with an awareness of the individual-environmental relationship, not just in terms of self-realization but also the deprivation that leads to inner corruption. The novel begins with a detailed description of rich geographical features:
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 grimed walls a close, mingled stink—the odour of the
Jago. … A square of two hundred and fifty yards or less—that was all there was of the Jago. But in that square the human population swarmed in thousands. (Jago 1)
The opening passage of this novel associates the living environment with the
community members living in it. This passage reveals a Pasteurian awareness of the unseen threats in the living environment. The odour of the Jago is invisible to the naked eye; however, its fetid existence is something tangible. What is worse, the menace of the odour does not only come from the living environment but also from the individual body. Here is how Morrison describes his main character Dicky Perrot,
As to washing, he was never especially fond of it, and in any case there were fifty excellent excuses for neglect. The only water was from the little tap in the back yard. The little tap was usually out of order, or had been stolen bodily by a tenant; and if it were not, there was no basin there, nor any soap nor towel; and anything savouring of moderate cleanliness was resented in the Jago as an assumption of superiority. (Jago 19)
At this level of narration, the public and the private are aligned in the notion of hygiene. The filth of the environment and the sloppiness of individuals worsen health conditions. Moreover, in terms of the insidious threat to residents’safety, the “close and mingled stink”is integral to the then-widespread influence of Pasteurian theories and experiments. The miasma is invisible, yet its existence is certain to impact late-nineteenth century readers. The observation of the narrator that the“human population swarmed in thousands”in this overcrowded, putrifying and ill-ventilated area suggests both the fermentation theory of Pasteur and the theory of infection through airborne viruses and bacteria proven during this period. It is also from this medically conceived knowledge that a shock effect is evident, when one character cries, “My God, there can be no hell after this!”(Jago 2)
This novel does not indicate an exceptional situation in society. What Morrison achieves in this work is a successful alleviation at the personal level of the collective fate: he writes not only of an imaginary character but of a feature common to the public consciousness. At this level of narration, the wretched conditions of the living environment seem to forecast the fate of the characters. People who choose to sleep on the pavement to avoid the summer heat are subject to transmission of the most vicious and unknown of diseases:
For in this place none ever slept without a light, because of three kinds of vermin that light in some sort keeps at bay: vermin which added to
existence here a terror not to be guessed by the unaffiliated: who object to being told of it. For on them that lay writhen and gasping on the pavement;
on them that sat among them; on them that rolled and blasphemed in the lighted rooms; on every moving creature in this, the Old Jago, day and night, sleeping and waking, the third plague of Egypt, and more, lay unceasing.
(Jago 2)
The Pasteurian awareness of contagions in a filthy living environment is
suggested by the sanitationist assumptions throughout the novel. Connections between medical knowledge and political practices as they relate to housing and public health projects become more prevalent at this level of narration. Here, Morrison suggests promoting the national interest by improving the health conditions of a diseased population, a conspicuous notion since the collective memory of cholera was still fresh in readers’minds. The collective fate of the population under the shadow of threats of massive epidemic brings the sense of community back to the slum representation, as Morrison describes:
Most had been convinced, by what they had been told, by what they had read in charity appeals, and perhaps by what they had seen in the
police-court and inquest reports, that the whole East End was a wilderness of slums: slums packed with starving human organisms without minds and without morals, preying on each other alive. (Jago 10)
Here a common recognition of the economic and social costs of preventing disease is rearticulated to inspire support for public health policies. At this level of interaction between medical knowledge, public health policy, and personal hygiene, we witness the birth of a medical discourse in the Foucauldian sense that encompasses different fields of medicine, law, health, hygiene, housing, and governmentality. Worries over contagious diseases and threats to personal health and hygiene were no longer personal concerns, but national interests.
What Foucault called the medical gaze was at work: here in the description of a living environment, filth was no longer simply a matter for private disgust; it was raised to the status of important public enemy. Morrison writes, “Here lies the Jago, a nest of rats, breeding, breeding, as only rats can”(Jago 127). The background of the novel provides not just a setting for plots and characters, but also a target for social and health policy. The miserable living conditions of the Jago, the lack of education of its population, the insufficient public facilities and hygiene, all contribute to the hopelessness of the character Dick Perrot. In a Chadwickian manner, the setting of this novel represents the perfect target for promoting public health, reducing social cost, and maximizing national interests. All interrelations are left unsaid, just as Morrison’s writing hardly reveals the sentimental tone we are familiar with from Dickens’portrayal of the East End slum. Yet all is sensed, smelled and felt.