Arthur Morrison (1863-1945) is the author of A Child of the Jago and Tales of Mean Streets. Morrison gave conflicting information about his background, and when he died his wife, on his instructions, burned all of his notebooks and papers.
This novel, first published in 1896, is the story of Dick Perrot, born and bred in the Jago; but it is also a brilliant portrait of the community. The Jago is a London slum where crime and violence are the only way of life, and from which there is no escape for the inhabitants. Only the characters themselves are fictional: Morrison's descriptions of the fearful physical conditions are based directly on what he saw. He conjures up an extraordinarily vivid picture of a world which, even as he wrote, was about to vanish in one of the first of the slum clearance schemes.
These stories are a brilliant evocatin of a narrow, close-knit community—that of the streets of London's East End in the 1890s. Having lived and worked there, he knew that his East Enders were not a race apart, but ordinary men and women, scraping by perhaps, but neither criminals nor paupers. He chronicled their adventures and misadventures, their wooings and their funerals, with sympathy, humor and a sense of both the tragedies and comedies to be found in the "mean streets, " from Lizerunt's disastrous marriage to Scuddy Lond's plausible but imperfect conversion and "Squire" Napper's quickly dispersed fortune.
