Arthur Morrison, the 'Jago', and the Realist
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ARTHUR MORRISON, THE ‘JAGO’, AND THE REALIST REPRESENTATION OF PLACE Submitted in Fulfillment for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy UCL Department of English Language and Literature Eliza Cubitt 2015 ABSTRACT In vitriolic exchanges with the critic H.D. Traill, Arthur Morrison (1863-1945) argued that the term ‘realist’ was impossible to define and must be innately subjective. Traill asserted that Morrison’s A Child of the Jago (1896) was a failure of realism, conjuring a place that ‘never did and never could exist.’ And yet, by 1900, the East End slum fictionalised in Morrison’s novel had been supplanted by the realist mythology of his account: ‘Jago’ had become, and remains, an accepted term to describe the real historical slum, the Nichol. This thesis examines Morrison’s contribution to the late-Victorian realist representation of the urban place. It responds to recent renewed interest about realism in literary studies, and to revived debates surrounding marginal writers of urban literature. Opening with a biographical study, I investigate Morrison’s fraught but intimate lifelong relationship with the East End. Morrison’s unadorned prose represents the late-Victorian East End as a site of absolute ordinariness rather than absolute poverty. Eschewing the views of outsiders, Morrison re- placed the East End. Since the formation of The Arthur Morrison Society in 2007, Morrison has increasingly been the subject of critical examination. Studies have so frequently focused on evaluating the reality behind Morrison’s fiction that his significance to late-nineteenth century “New Realism” and the debates surrounding it has been overlooked. This thesis redresses this gap, and states that Morrison’s work signifies an artistic and temporal boundary of realism. Asserting that his most well-known novel, A Child of the Jago, is the apotheosis of his personal realist style, I examine it in the context of his prior and succeeding work, both fiction and non-fiction, as well as the slum fictions of his predecessors and contemporaries. I explore how Morrison’s work troubled the boundaries of reality and challenged the limits of representation. i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My sincere and grateful thanks are owed to my examiners, Gregory Dart and Nadia Valman. I am very grateful to Matthew Beaumont and Juliette Atkinson for their supervision. For sources I thank Noboru Koyama, Mr and Mrs Best, Professor George Lensing, Lyn Rees at the British Museum Central Archive, Pauline Jay Chris Bischof, Charlotte Mitchell and Richard Dennis and staff at the Ohio, Arizona, Lilly and University California Santa Barbara Libraries; staff at Rare Books in the British Library and staff at UCL Libraries. For reading and commenting on earlier work I thank James Emmott and Nicolette Jones. Thanks to my friends/proof-readers/book suppliers/sounding boards especially Katy Cook, James Newton, Kate Phillips, Lisa C. Robertson, Sarah Shin, Katie Gonzalez-Bell and Rebecca Hahn. Thanks to my family - Cubitts, Todds, Simpsons and Robinsons. Finally and crucially, thank you to Joe Simpson. ii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure Page 1. Section of Reynolds’ New Map of London and Environs, 1882. 35 2. Sir Walter Raleigh’s house, Blackwall, 1890. 39 3. Morrison’s signature, British Museum Reader’s Register, 26th May 1888. 43 4. Reverend Jay’s boxing ring. 59 5. John Constable, ‘Hadleigh Castle. The mouth of the Thames – morning, after a stormy night’, 1829. 70 6. Copy of a Cunning Murrell Horoscope by Morrison, The Strand 71 7. Caricature of Morrison by Stuart Boyd in The Bookman, July 1905. 78 8. ‘Minamoto No Yoshiye warned by the flight of wild geese’ from a Kakemono by Kikuchi Yosai, The Arthur Morrison Collection. 82 9. Shimomura Kanzan, Galloping Horse 1903-1905, ink on silk. Bequeathed to The British Museum (1946). 87 10. Morrison at home, 1913. 87 11. The Trial of John Jasper, 7th January 1914. 89 12 and 13. The last known pictures of Morrison in his (?) seventies. 94 14. Gustave Doré: ‘Over London – By Rail’, London: A Pilgrimage, 1872. 111 15. Doré, ‘The Bull’s Eye’, London: A Pilgrimage, 1872. 112 16. ‘Bluegate Fields’ London: A Pilgrimage, 1872. 113 17. The Lascar’s Room in “Edwin Drood”’, London: A Pilgrimage, 1872. 113 18. ‘London Nomades’, John Thomson, 1877. 116 19. ‘“Hookey Alf,” of Whitechapel’, John Thomson, 1877. 117 20. Section from Ordnance Survey Map of Shoreditch, 1893. 177 21. ‘Sketch Plan’ of the Old Jago, 1896. 177 22. Thirteenth century map of London showing Roman roads, (detail) by Matthew Paris c. 1252. 181 iii 23. Joseph Gandy, aerial view of the Bank of England, 1830. 182 24. Tudor map of London showing Shoreditch, (detail) c. 1553-1559. 182 25. Mayhew’s map showing incidences of ‘Disorderly Houses’ in the UK, c. 1862. 184 26. Map of the Irk area of Manchester drawn by Friedrich Engels, from The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). 185 27. City Colony/Farm Colony: from William Booth In Darkest England (1890). 187 28. Charles Booth’s map of the Nichol area, 1889. 188 29. Section from Reynold’s Shilling Map of London, 1895. 194 30. Section from Stanford’s Map of Central London, 1897. 195 31. The Boundary Street Scheme Plan No. 27. 198 32. Boundary Street before and after redevelopment. 199 33. The Panopticon Penitentiary, 1791. 199 34. Ebenezer Howard’s ‘Garden City’ design, 1898. 200 35. Section from Charles Booth’s map, 1898-99 showing Jacob’s Island area. 211 36. The Building of the Boundary Street Estate. c. 1895, London Metropolitan Archives. 227 iv I, Eliza Cubitt confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. Eliza Cubitt 15th September 2015 v CONTENTS Abstract i Acknowledgements ii List of illustrations iii Declaration v Introduction 1 1. The Life of Arthur Morrison (1863-1945) 33 I. Early Life (1863-1881) II. At the Palace, looking West (1881-1887) III. From the Palace to the Club (1888-1899) III.i. Father Jay and the Jago (1894-1896) IV. Nostalgia at the Turn of the Century (1900-1911) V. ‘The Farthest East’ (1911-1924) V.i. 1914 and War VI. Modesty and Secrecy in the life of a self-made man (1924-1945) 2. Rewriting the East End 96 I. Writing the Victorian Slum II. Sketches of Whitechapel, 1872-1889 III. Tales of Mean Streets (1894) and the reappraisal of the Slum IV. A Child of the Jago (1896) and the Nichol Slum in Fiction V. The Apocalyptic Everyday VII. The ‘Strangely Familiar’ Slum 3. Mapping the Late-Victorian Slum 177 I. ‘Real’ Maps II. Unstable Toponymies: Mapping the Unmappable Nichol III. The Mappable Jago IV. Clearance: The Boundary Street Scheme V. Going Straight 4. Authors, Critics, Readers 229 I. Reception II. H.D. Traill III. Readers IV. ‘Reading Nothing and Considering Nothing’: Futile Literacy in the Mean Streets V. Reading and Romance in To London Town (1899) VI. The Writing Subject in The Hole in the Wall (1902) VII. The return of the author in ‘Cross Coves’ (1905) Conclusion: ‘Another Way Out’ 284 Bibliography 290 INTRODUCTION Describing the East End in 1773, topographer John Noorthouck wrote that ‘these parishes […] in general close and ill-built […] afford little worthy 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 as too-ordinary: West End writers and their readers sought excitement and horror in the East, characterised in fiction and non-fiction by murder, squalor, slums, desperation 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. By the late 1880s, when native East Ender Arthur Morrison began publishing his urban writings, the literary marketplace had already been saturated with depictions of the East End, and particularly the problem of its slums. The East End had been deeply mythologised in both fiction and non-fiction. Despite decades of journalistic and fictional examination, late- Victorian accounts of the East End portrayed it as a new problem, perpetuating the tenet that the place was unknown and unknowable. As historians and literary critics have explicated in recent years, the late-Victorian East End had visions both dystopian and fantastic imposed upon it.2 It was not only seen as a city apart, as described by Sir Walter Besant in East London (1901) but as a nation apart.3 As Jack London later described, it was ‘the “East End” of all England’ – a vast abyss in which the mysterious poor struggled and suffered.4 The efforts of Morrison to resist this picture have not been fully investigated. Morrison spent his writing career revising the view of the East End written by these 1 John Noorthouck, A New History of London, (London: 1773), p. 769. Available at British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/new-history-london/pp769-772 accessed 21st August 2015 2 See for example Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004); Judith K. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late- Victorian London (London: Virago Press, 1992). 3 Throughout East London (London: Chatto and Windus, 1901), Besant describes the East End as a city in and of itself. 4 Jack London, The People of the Abyss, (London: Macmillan, 1903), p. 141. 1 outsiders. Raising the rhetorical question, in 1891, ‘who knows the East End?’ he made it clear that he intended to confront the speculative and sensational representations of the area.