Arthur Morrison, the Floating World and the Pictorial Method in A Child of the Jago: Painters of the East

uki, passing, floating; yo, the world, in the sense of "vanity fair," or alternatively, the age, the times; and yé, picture or pictures. The original meaning of the term is thus seen to be "pictures of the passing world and time," and the nearest European equivalent sense is conveyed by the word genre.… The Ukiyoé school of painters commonly used subjects drawn from the daily life of the Japanese people, and they only occasionally painted scenes of history, landscapes, birds and flowers such as had provided most of their motives to painters of the older schools.¹

Arthur Morrison offended sensibilities in his graphic portrayal of life in the East End of London in A Child of the Jago (1896). Commenting on the novel, the Athenaeum, for example, complained: "Many pages are devoted to elaborate accounts of free fights.… What is the object of it all?"² Blackwood's, too, questioned the rationale of such a work: "It is strange to think upon what rule it is that pictures like these please the imagination, and are received by so many in the character of an entertainment, a portion of the relaxation of life. It may well be that we should see how another part of the world lives.… But … what are they for? To make us all a kind of missionaries, impelled by disgust and horror, if by no better motive?"³ H. D. Traill, in turn, in 1897 professed to emerging from a reading of the text "with the feelings, not as he had expected, of a man who has just paid a visit to the actual district under the protection of the police, but of one who has just awakened from the dream of a prolonged sojourn in some fairyland of horror."⁴ In addressing these critical questions—"what is it for?" and in what sense a "fairyland of horror"?—this essay sets out to consider the importance of appropriations of the East in Morrison's A Child of the Jago, a novel of social exposé and urban investigation which can be related to other nonfiction works of social exploration such as Jack London's The People of the Abyss (1903). Dominant rhetorical devices often relied upon are metaphors of descent, pollution, contamination and reversion. Correspondingly, such texts often invoke an enlightened and civilized West against which is counterposed a primitive, savage and impenetrable East. Hence, philanthropic missions in the East End of London are applauded by sympathisers, Morrison notes in his setting of the scene, who know "less of that part than of Asia Minor,"⁵ just as Jack London a few years later was to draw attention to the socially selective view of the affluent classes: "O Cook, O Thomas Cook and Son, pathfinders and trail-clearers, living signposts to all the world … with ease and celerity, could you send me to Darkest Africa or Innermost Thibet, but to the East End of London, barely a stone's throw distant from Ludgate Circus, you know not the way!"⁶ Elsewhere in The People of the Abyss, London presents a naturalised city, reverted to wilderness, which contains a "new species, a breed of city savages." He continues: "As valley and mountain are to the natural savage, street and building are valley and mountain to them. The slum is their jungle, and they live and prey in the jungle."⁷ The importance of such rhetorical devices, which insist on the tribalism of this underclass, has, though, been established in a number of studies.⁸ The aim here is to establish some variant appropriations of the "alien" within, or the dangerous imperium in imperio that urban slums might present, and to provide a context in which Morrison's own enthusiasm for Eastern aesthetics, and more precisely Japanese art, is of significance. As early as 1890, Morrison's friend Harold Parlett, who was later to advise the writer in his acquisition of paintings, visited Japan, and from 1895, the same year in which Morrison visited the area of Shoreditch that was to provide the inspiration for...