Arthur Morrison and the East End: the legacy of slum fictions

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 19th-century realism, but their complex contemporary reception reveals the intricate paradoxes involved in representing the turn-of-the-century city.

This work 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.