Reproduction of the original: Tales of Mean Streets by Arthur Morrison

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.

Reproduction of the original: A Child of the Jago by Arthur Morrison

Classic detective fiction by one of the earliest rivals of Sherlock Holmes. This book contains seven exciting stories featuring Martin Hewitt.

A Child of the Jago is an 1896 novel by Arthur Morrison.A bestseller in its time,it recounts the brief life of Dicky Perrott, a child growing up in the "Old Jago", a fictionalisation of the Old Nichol,a slum located between Shoreditch High Street and Bethnal Green Road in the East End of London. The late nineteenth century English novelist George Gissing, who read the novel on Christmas Day 1896, felt that it was "poor stuff".