In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Ethnography in the East End: Native Customs and Colonial Solutions in A Child of the Jago John L. Kijinski Idaho State University ONE SIGN OF THE ANXIETY that many British citizens felt at the end of the nineteenth century about England's future position as an imperial power was the widely shared concern over how poverty and urban living conditions were debilitating the working classes. Recruiting problems during the Boer War had been unnerving: an alarmingly large number of working-class recruits were found to be unfit for service.1 In 1904, an Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration was established to investigate this problem. The question had to be asked: had conditions in urban England created a generation of men unfit to protect the interests of the overseas empire? Worse than this, the homeland itself was placed in jeopardy; it appeared that within the very heart of the British Empire an alien and almost invisible group of "sub-standard" urban dwellers was coming into existence by a reverse process of evolution. As Harold Perkin comments, the presence of this group posed "a covert and insidious threat from poverty itself to the physical, intellectual and moral fitness of the nation."2 One of the most important novels that allowed the middle-class public to envision these aliens within their midst was Arthur Morrison's A Child of the Jago (1896). The novel presented an examination of inhabitants of a particularly poor section of London's East End. Morrison, who had already gained a reputation as a chronicler of East End life with his Tales of Mean Streets (1894), had first-hand experience—both personal and professional—of life in the less-fashionable parts of London. Bom and raised in the East End, he worked first as an office boy and then as a third-class clerk for the architect's department of the School Board of 490 KIJINSKI : MORRISON London. In 1886 he was selected to be the secretary to the Beaumont Trust, which funded the People's Palace. Putting into concrete form Walter Besant's ideas about educating the poor, the People's Palace offered opportunities for recreation and self-improvement to residents of the East End. Under Besant, Morrison became sub-editor of the Palace's publication, the Palace Journal, which featured news and information about the cultural activities offered by this institution.3 Morrison's Child of the Jago is a fictional counterpart of such factual reports on London's poor as Andrew Mearns's The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (1883), WilUam Booth's In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890), and A. Osbourne Jay's Life in Darkest London (1891)—all written by men with a religious mission to the poor. Morrison, in fact, wrote his novel in response to a suggestion from Jay. Jay urged Morrison to use his talents as a literary artist to give the public a picture of the Old Nichol, a particularly poor and violent East End neighborhood where Jay worked as a pastor. The Old Jago is the name that Morrison would give to this area.4 As the titles OfJaV7S and Booth's books indicate, these investigations of life among Britain's poor build upon contemporary interest in African exploration and colonization, as does Morrison's novel. The value of the African/British comparison is suggested by Booth, who notes that ethnographic accounts of "degraded" African people had won the attention of British readers: "This summer the attention of the civilised world has been arrested by the story which Mr. Stanley has told of Oarkest Africa' and his journeyings across the heart of the Lost Continent."5 Booth suggests, however, that this interest in a "native other" could be focused on populations much closer to home: But while brooding over the awful presentation of life as it exists in the vast African forest, it seemed to me only too vivid a picture of many parts of our own land. As there is a darkest Africa is there not also a darkest England? Civilization, which can breed its own barbarians, does it not also breed its own pygmies? May we not find a parallel at our own doors, and...

pdf

Share