arthur morrison, the 'jago'

336 Pages·2016·3.65 MB·English

by  Eliza Cubitt

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.
Engaging with the contemporary vogue for slum fiction, Morrison redressed accounts written
by outsiders, positioning himself as uniquely knowledgeable about a place considered
unknowable.
Throughout his oeuvre Morrison attempted to provide a corrective to the image of the
East End perpetuated by his forebears. Morrison neither overtly sympathised with nor
elevated the poor in a form of fantastical positive discrimination. Many other commentators
had represented ‘the poor as erotic objects of elite spectatorship.’5 Morrison’s purpose in
writing of the East End was twofold. Firstly, he disregarded the accepted view of the East
End as a single, extensive slum. Secondly, rather than suggesting ways that it might be
improved, he attempted to account for its lasting presence. Where other writers treated the
East End metonymically to describe the abject poverty of Victorian cities, Morrison required
in his fiction that the East End simply represented itself. Further, while his predecessors had
hoped to inspire change by tackling the problem of housing in their writings and presenting
the moral case for interventions, Morrison’s detached narrative voice allots no moral
judgment. He perceived change as always insufficient; indeed, problematic.
In his non-fiction sketches and particularly in his 1894 collection Tales of Mean
Streets, Morrison located the sinister in the ordinary rather than in the extreme.6 Tales
suggests that the place was governed by forces of concord which made very little of the
fantastic or dramatic possible there. For Morrison, the East End was a site of everyday
horrors: a place where poverty caused quiet desperation and silent suffering. Yet in his 1896
novel A Child of the Jago, Morrison unwittingly created a realist myth of the East End which
has persisted in the cultural imagination, assisting in the perpetuation of a sense of the area as

5 Koven, Slumming, p. 283.
6 All future references will be as Tales and references will appear in the text; taken from Tales of Mean Streets
(London: Faber, 2008).
2