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Arthur Morrison and the East End Arthur Morrison and the East End This, the first critical biography of Arthur Morrison (1863–1945), presents his East End writing as the counter-myth to the cultural pro- duction of the East End in late-Victorian realism. Morrison’s works, par- ticularly 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 contempo- rary reception reveals the intricate paradoxes involved in representing the turn-of-the-century city. Arthur Morrison and the East End examines how an understand- ing 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 unknow- able. His work provides a vigorous challenge to the fictionalised East End created by his predecessors, while also paying homage to Charles Dickens, George Gissing, Walter Besant and Guy de Maupassant. Ex- amining 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. Eliza Cubitt received her BA and MA from King’s College London and was awarded a PhD from University College London (UCL) in 2016. She has published work on Morrison, W. Somerset Maugham and Mar garet Harkness. She has taught at UCL and at Universität Tübingen, Germany. Since 2014, she has been a committee member of the Literary London Society. Routledge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature Sensational Deviance Disability in Nineteenth-Century Sensation Fiction Heidi Logan Gothic Peregrinations The Unexplored and Re-explored Gothic Territories Edited by Agnieszka Łowczanin, Katarzyna Małecka A Critical Reappraisal of the Writings of Francis Sylvester Mahony Fergus Dunne George Eliot’s Moral Aesthetic Compelling Contradictions Constance M. Fulmer Women’s Emancipation Writing at the Fin de Siècle Edited by Elena V. Shabliy, Dmitry Kurochkin, and Karen O’Donnell Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby and the Dance of Death Jeremy Tambling G. W. M. Reynolds and His Fiction The Man Who Outsold Dickens Stephen Knight Arthur Morrison and the East End The Legacy of Slum Fictions Eliza Cubitt For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com Arthur Morrison and the East End The Legacy of Slum Fictions Eliza Cubitt First published 2019 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of Eliza Cubitt to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cubitt, Eliza, author. Title: Arthur Morrison and the East End: the legacy of slum fictions / Eliza Cubitt. Description: New York: Routledge, 2019. | Series: Routledge studies in nineteenth-century literature | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2019001178 (print) | LCCN 2019004882 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Morrison, Arthur, 1863–1945. | Authors, English—19th century—Biography. | East End (London, England)—In literature. Classification: LCC PR5089.M7 (ebook) | LCC PR5089.M7 Z63 2019 (print) | DDC 823/.8 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019001178 ISBN: 978-0-367-18823-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-19851-9 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra To Marlowe and Joe Contents List of Figures ix Acknowledgements xi Introduction 1 Arthur Morrison (1863–1945): An East End Writer 1 ‘The Pure Fame of the Place’: The Unreal Victorian Slum 3 ‘Who Knows Arthur Morrison?’ 5 The Problem of Realism: Whose Reality Is It Anyway? 8 The Legacy of Slum Fictions 14 1 Poplar and Ratcliff 24 Arthur Morrison: ‘Another Coming Man’ 24 ‘The Scenes of His Wondering Childhood’: 1863–1887 28 On Being Ministered to: ‘A Grateful People’ 30 In Darkest Dockland and the Way Out 32 2 Whitechapel 44 Writing the Victorian East End 44 ‘Cockney Corners’: Sketches of the East End 45 Sketches of Whitechapel, 1872–1889 51 3 Mile End 68 The People’s Palace: A ‘Possibility, a Certainty and a Fact’ 68 At the Palace, Looking West 71 From Mile End to The Strand 75 ‘Henley’s Regatta’ 78 The Pursuit of Happiness 81 4 Limehouse and Stratford 92 ‘A Street’ and the Reappraisal of the Slum 92 Behind the Doors: Dangerous Domesticity 95 viii Contents ‘Behind the Shade’: Gossip and the Silenced 101 Regions of Strange Order 104 Becoming ‘Them’: The Reception of Tales 106 5 Shoreditch, Bethnal Green and the ‘Jago’ 114 Father Jay and the Nichol Slum in Fiction 114 Creative Reconstruction: Morrison’s ‘Jago’ and the Boundary Street Scheme 126 6 Blackwall and the Docks 141 Repenting for Realism 141 Landscapes of the Mind: Epping and Blackwall in To London Town (1899) 142 ‘Romance and Squalor’: The Hole in the Wall (1902) 152 7 Return to the East End 164 ‘I Foresaw a Story’: The Bathos of the Journalist-Narrator in Divers Vanities (1905) 164 Heads and Tales: London and Elsewhere 171 ‘I Knew the Place, Indeed’: Return to the Mean Streets 173 The Inescapable Jago: Literary Hauntings 175 ‘The Story That I Am to Tell Again’: Folk Realism 177 Conclusion 186 ‘My Own Country’: Rewriting the East End 186 The Duty of the Respectable: The Self-Made Man of Letters 186 ‘Another Way Out’: ‘The Farthest East’ 189 Afterwords: ‘To Correct Your Recollections…’ 191 ‘Well now, Arthur Morrison, How to Put into Words?’ 194 Index 201 List of Figures 2.1 Gustave Doré: ‘Whitechapel – A Shady Place’, 1872 53 2.2 Gustave Doré, ‘The Bull’s Eye’, 1872 54 2.3 Gustave Doré, ‘Opium Smoking: The Lascar’s Room in “Edwin Drood”’, 1872 54 2.4 John Thomson, ‘London Nomades’, 1877 57 2.5 John Thomson, ‘“Hookey Alf,” of Whitechapel’, 1877 57 5.1 Reverend Jay’s boxing ring and lodgings 116 7.1 Cunning Murrell’s Horoscope 181 8.1 Morrison at the Trial of John Jasper, 7 January 1914 192 8.2 Arthur Morrison in his seventies, with thanks to Mr and Mrs Best 194 Acknowledgements I owe thanks to many people who have helped in various ways to allow me to complete this project. I am very grateful to Matthew Beaumont and Juliette Atkinson for their supervision of my PhD at UCL, and to my examiners Greg Dart and Nadia Valman. You have read my work patiently and thoughtfully, and your support has meant a great deal. I am also thankful to my excellent tutors at King’s College, London. For sources, I owe thanks to Noboru Koyama, Mr and Mrs Best, George Lensing, Lyn Rees, Peggy Jay, Chris Bischof, Charlotte Mitchell, Mary Shannon, Richard Dennis, Tony Williams of The Dickensian, Owen Roberts, Simon Joyce, Laura Wright, and staff at Rare Books in the British Library, staff at UCL Libraries, Cambridge University Library, Hull History Centre, Richmond Central Library, Brotherton Library Special Collections, the University of Reading Special Collec- tions, Lilly Library Indiana and Tower Hamlets Local History Library. I am grateful for years of interesting conversations with my colleagues in the Literary London Society – particularly Peter Jones, Jenny Bavidge, Martin Dines, Flore Janssen and Lisa C. Robertson. The field of ‘Arthur Morrison studies’ is a small one, but characterised by excellent scholarship – I am particularly grateful for the diligent and inspiring work of Peter Keating, Peter Miles, Sarah Wise, Stan Newens and Diana Maltz. This book would not have been possible without the patient and generous help and support of James Newton, Rebecca Hahn, Kate Phillips, Lubna Rahman (for the playlist and much more), Rahul Rana, Katy Cook, Peter Jones, Lisa C. Robertson and Diana Maltz (again) – sounding boards, proof readers, friends: I’m not sure how people who don’t know you manage to do anything at all. My wonderful family – Cubitts, Todds, Simpsons and Robinsons. Camilli and Stu – thank you for looking after C.R. Jane, Malc, Mark and Lani – thank you for the loan of a room (or various rooms) of my own. And T.F.M. – with love and thanks for decades of support and friendship. Marlowe. You were absolutely no help at all. I couldn’t have done it without you. As ever, my grateful thanks are due to Joe Simpson. Introduction Arthur Morrison (1863–1945): An East End Writer Describing the East End in 1773, topographer John Noorthouck wrote that ‘these parishes […] in general close and ill- built […] afford little wor- thy of observation’.1 For nineteenth- century journalists, reformers and slum fiction writers, however, it was precisely the close, ill- built houses and the struggle for life in these overcrowded places that fascinated and entranced. The Victorians transformed the idea of the East End: West End writers and their readers sought excitement and horror in the East, characterised in fiction and non- fiction by murder, squalor, slums, des- peration and vice. Writing and rewriting, visiting and exhorting others to visit that other district at the periphery of the city, Victorians created in literature the legendary place of the East End.
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