Critical Essays on Arthur Morrison and the East End

271 Pages·2022·40.398 MB·English

by  Diana Maltz

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Critical Essays on Arthur Morrison
and the East End
In 1896, author Arthur Morrison gained notoriety for his bleak and vio-
lent A Child of the Jago, a slum novel that captured the desperate struggle
to survive among London’s poorest. When a reviewer accused Morrison
of exaggerating the depravity of the neighborhood on which the Jago was
based, he incited the era’s most contentious public debate about the pur-
pose of realism and the responsibilities of the novelist. In his self- defense
and in his wider body of work, Morrison demonstrated not only his
investments as a formal artist, but also his awareness of social questions.
As the first critical essay collection on Arthur Morrison and the East End,
this book assesses Morrison’s contributions to late- Victorian culture,
especially discourses around English working- class life. Chapters evaluate
Morrison in the context of Victorian criminality, child welfare, disability,
housing, professionalism, and slum photography. Morrison’s works are
also reexamined in the light of writings by Sir Walter Besant, Clementina
Black, Charles Booth, Charles Dickens, George Gissing, and Margaret
Harkness. This volume features an introduction and 11 chapters by pre-
eminent and emerging scholars of the East End. They employ a variety of
critical methodologies, drawing on their respective expertise in literature,
history, art history, sociology, and geography. Critical Essays on Arthur
Morrison and the East End throws fresh new light on this innovative nov-
elist of poverty and urban life.
Diana Maltz is Professor of English at Southern Oregon University.
She earned her PhD in English Literature at Stanford University. She
is the author of British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes,
1870– 1900: Beauty for the People (2006) and the editor of Arthur
Morrison’s A Child of the Jago (2013) and W. Somerset Maugham’s Liza
of Lambeth (2022). She has received fellowships from the Ahmanson-
Getty Foundation, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the
NEH Summer Seminar Program, and the Fulbright Commission. She is
Past President of the Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association of
the Western United States.
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Among the Victorians and Modernists
Edited by Dennis Denisoff
This series publishes monographs and essay collections on literature,
art, and culture in the context of the diverse aesthetic, political, social,
technological, and scientific innovations that arose among the Victorians
and Modernists. Viable topics include, but are not limited to, artistic and
cultural debates and movements; influential figures and communities; and
agitations and developments regarding subjects such as animals, com-
modification, decadence, degeneracy, democracy, desire, ecology, gender,
nationalism, the paranormal, performance, public art, sex, socialism,
spiritualities, transnationalism, and the urban. Studies that address con-
tinuities between the Victorians and Modernists are welcome. Work on
recent responses to the periods such as Neo-V ictorian novels, graphic
novels, and film will also be considered.
Illegitimate Freedom
Informality in Modernist Literature, 1900– 1940
Gaurav Majumdar
Byronism, Napoleonism and Nineteenth- Century Realism
Heroes of Their Own Lives?
Tristan Donal Burke
Strange Gods
Love and Idolatry in the Victorian Novel
Timothy L. Carens
Re- Reading the Age of Innovation
Victorians, Moderns, and Literary Newness, 1830– 1950
Edited by Louise Kane
Critical Essays on Arthur Morrison and the East End
Edited by Diana Maltz
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.
com/ Among- the- Victorians- and- Modernists/ book- series/ ASHSER4035
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Critical Essays on Arthur
Morrison and the East End
Edited by Diana Maltz
iv
First published 2022
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 selection and editorial matter, Diana Maltz; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Diana Maltz to be identified as the author of the editorial material,
and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted 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
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978- 0- 367- 86022- 6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978- 1- 032- 27676- 2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978- 1- 003- 01648- 9 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/ 9781003016489
Typeset in Sabon
by Newgen Publishing UK
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Contents
List of Figures vii
List of Contributors viii
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
DIANA MALTZ
PART I
Vulnerable Bodies 19
1 Classed Childhood in Arthur Morrison’s A Child of
the Jago and Victorian Slum Fiction 21
S. BROOKE CAMERON
2 Visual Disability and Criminality in Morrison’s
The Hole in the Wall 39
VANESSA WARNE
3 Photographic Realism and the “Ragged Boy” in
Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago (1896),
To London Town (1899), and The Hole in
the Wall (1902) 56
ELIZA CUBITT
PART II
Social Investigation 75
4 Erasing Women’s Labor: Neglecting Female Reformers
in the Slum Fiction of Besant, Harkness, and Morrison 77
MATTHEW DUNLEAVY
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vi Contents
5 “Not What It Was Made Out”: Hygiene, Health, and
Moral Welfare in the Old Nichol, 1880– 1900 97
FLORE JANSSEN
6 “Enterprising Realists”: Tracing the Influence of
Charles Booth’s Life and Labour on A Child of the
Jago and Other Slum Fictions 116
SARAH WISE
PART III
Crime and Money 135
7 Afterlives of A Child of the Jago 137
NADIA VALMAN
8 Morrison’s Camorra: Organized Crime in
Transcultural Context 157
DIANA MALTZ
9 Investment and Housing in Gissing’s The Unclassed
and Morrison’s “All That Messuage” 176
TOM UE
PART IV
Resituating Morrison 195
10 Disconnecting and Reconnecting Morrison:
Professional and Specialist Authorship 197
SIMON JOYCE
11 Essex and the Metropolitan Periphery in To London
Town, Cunning Murrell, and “A Wizard of Yesterday” 220
JASON FINCH
Bibliography 243
Index 252
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Figures
3.1 Oscar Gustave Rejlander, “Homeless” or “A Night on
the Town” (1860) 59
3.2 Oscar Gustave Rejlander, “Poor Jo” (1864) 60
3.3 John Thomson and Adolphe Smith, “The Cheap Fish of
St Giles’s,” Street Life in London (1877) 65
4.1 Frederick Barnard, “I am— the— the Dressmaker” (1882) 85
4.2 Frederick Barnard, “ ‘She loves him herself,’ Angela Was
Thinking…” (1882) 86
5.1 W. Hatherell, “A Match- Box Maker at Work” (1892) 108
10.1 Frederick G. Hodsoll, “Arthur Morrison” (1902) 206
10.2 Utagawa Hiroshige III, Two Views of Mt. Fuji from the
Sumida River 211
10.3 Tsukioka Settei, Geisha with a Shamisen 212
10.4 Hosoda Eishi, The Chinese Beauty Yang Guifei 213
11.1 Jason Finch, “Semidetached Pair of Villas at The Drive,
Chingford, London E4” 225
11.2 Jason Finch, “Churchyard of Holy Innocents Church,
High Beach, Epping Forest, Essex” 226
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Contributors
S. Brooke Cameron is Associate Professor in the English Department at
Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. She has published several
articles on gender, class, and economic themes in Victorian literature
and culture, as well as a recent book, Critical Alliances: Economics
and Feminism in English Women’s Writing, 1880– 1938 (University of
Toronto, 2020). Her chapter on “Classed Childhood” is inspired by
her ongoing project on working- class and poor child migrants.
Eliza Cubitt teaches at the University of Tübingen, Germany. She received
her PhD from University College London. Her monograph, Arthur
Morrison and the East End, was published in 2019.
Matthew Dunleavy is an SSHRC Doctoral Fellow in Victorian Literature
at York University. His pandemic-d elayed dissertation examines the
writings of philanthropists and reformers in the slums of late- Victorian
East- End London, with a specific focus on the ways Clementina Black
and Margaret Harkness used popular genres to articulate new messages
about women’s relationship with poverty and philanthropy. In add-
ition to an SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship, his work has been supported
by the SSHRC Joseph- Armand Bombardier Canadian Graduate
Scholarship, St. George Society of Toronto Endowments, and Ontario
Graduate Scholarships.
Jason Finch is Associate Professor in the department of English Language
and Literature at Åbo Akademi University, Finland. He has authored
or edited books including Deep Locational Criticism (John Benjamins,
2016), Literary Second Cities (coeditor; Palgrave, 2017), Literatures
of Urban Possibility (coeditor; Palgrave, 2021), and, most recently,
Literary Urban Studies and How to Practice It (Routledge, 2022).
Jason works on Anglophone literatures of the nineteenth and twen-
tieth century using space and place-b ased approaches with a special
focus on cities. His research foci include representations of housing
(including the “slum”) and transport; place, neighborhood, and
locality; London; UK– US comparisons; urban poetry and drama.
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List of Contributors ix
Flore Janssen is Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Utrecht University.
Her PhD (Birkbeck, University of London, 2018) focused on
Clementina Black and Margaret Harkness and how their writing
careers intersected with their social and political activism. Her sub-
sequent postdoctoral work has been supported by the Wellcome
Institutional Strategic Support Fund Fellowship, Birkbeck and the
Institute of English Studies, University of London. Flore is also a quali-
fied archivist and has worked as Digital Humanities Project Officer at
the Salvation Army International Heritage Centre.
Simon Joyce is the Sara and Jess Cloud Professor of English at the College
of William and Mary. He has written on Morrison twice before, in
Capital Offenses: Class and Crime in Victorian London (Virginia
University Press, 2003) and “Maps and Metaphors: Topographical
Representation and the Sense of Place in Late-V ictorian Fiction,”
which appeared in Richard Maxwell, ed., The Victorian Illustrated
Book (University Press of Virginia, 2002). He is also the author of The
Victorians in the Rearview Mirror (Ohio University Press, 2007) and
Modernism and Naturalism in British and Irish Fiction, 1880– 1930
(Cambridge University Press, 2014) as well as LGBT Victorians
(Oxford University Press, 2022).
Diana Maltz is Professor of English at Southern Oregon University. She
is the author of British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes,
1870–1900: Beauty for the People (Palgrave, 2006) and the editor
of Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago (Broadview, 2013) and
W. Somerset Maugham’s Liza of Lambeth (Broadview, 2022). One
of her newest articles, “Robert Sherard: The Cosmopolitan Journalist
and the Slum Exposé,” appeared in Nineteenth Century Studies in
2020. Dr. Maltz is Past President of the Victorian Interdisciplinary
Studies Association of the Western United States.
Tom Ue is Assistant Professor in Literature and Science at Dalhousie
University. His research, teaching, and public engagement develop
his overarching program: a reconsideration of the global nineteenth
century that reveals the close correspondence between canonical and
less canonical writers, foregrounds the commonalities and differences
in their thinking, and illustrates the persistence of their concerns in
our own times. Ue is the author of Gissing, Shakespeare, and the Life
of Writing (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming) and George
Gissing (Liverpool University Press, forthcoming); the editor of George
Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (Edinburgh University
Press, forthcoming); and an editor of the journal Global Nineteenth-
Century Studies (Liverpool University Press, 2022–p resent). Ue has
held the prestigious Frederick Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship and he
is an Honorary Research Associate at University College London.