Arthur Morrison and the East End: The Legacy of Slum Fictions by Eliza Cubitt (review)

In Arthur Morrison and the East End: The Legacy of Slum Fictions, Eliza Cubitt argues that, in his stories and novels set in London slums, Arthur Morrison endeavors to "resist" the predominant Victorian perceptions of the East End as threatening, as "unknown and unknowable" (2). By contextualizing Morrison's work (fiction and nonfiction) in terms of his biography and of the literary and social culture of the time, Cubitt sets out to present a complex analysis. To this end, Cubitt presents arresting details about Morrison's life, especially his early life as a child of the East End with seemingly limited prospects, as well as details about his efforts in later life to improve conditions in Victorian slums, and his sometimes contradictory attitudes toward these efforts. Although Morrison obscured the details of his origins after raising his social and economic status in adulthood, his intimate understanding of life in the East End enabled him to depict slum life with stark realism.

Cubitt's discussion of the literary influences on Morrison is less effective. "Throughout his oeuvre," she argues, "Morrison attempted to provide a corrective to the image of the East End perpetuated by his forebears," but Cubitt's selection and discussion of forebears are decidedly odd (2). G. W. M. Reynolds's The Mysteries of London (1844–45) gets a passing reference, as does Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist (1837–39), but only to acknowledge that Dickens insisted that Jacob's Island did in fact exist. Oddly, Guy de Maupassant also gets a nod, although admittedly only as a model of restrained style. There are more detailed and insightful discussions of Gustave Doré and Blanchard Jerrold's London: A Pilgrimage (1872) and Adolphe Smith and John Thomson's Street Life in London (1876–77), with the analysis focused on Doré's engravings and Thomson's photographs. Walter Besant's perspectives on the poor, and especially the idea of a People's Palace as promulgated in his All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882), also receive extensive treatment.

Cubitt bases much of her argument about Morrison's reimaging of the slum on close readings of his stories and novels. She sometimes adds, as points of contrast, equally careful readings of stories by some of Morrison's contemporaries. The obscurity of some of these texts prompts Cubitt to provide detailed and not always relevant plot summary, which has the effect of obfuscating rather than reinforcing the thread of the argument. And again Cubitt's choice of comparison texts for extended analysis is curious: Rudyard Kipling's "The Record of Badalia Herodsfoot" (1890), Hall Caine's The Christian (1897), and L. T. Meade's A Princess of the Gutter (1895). The rationale for the latter two novels is their representations of the Old Nichol, the same neighborhood depicted in Morrison's A Child of the Jago (1896), but the relevance of their treatments of the slum gets lost in immaterial details of plot or action.

As Cubitt repeatedly emphasizes, Morrison strove to develop a writing style that was spare and unsentimental, especially in his treatments of the slum. She demonstrates his effective use of this style capably in the chapter covering the stories in Tales of Mean Streets (1894), a chapter that comprises some of her most astute textual explications. Even here, however, there is very limited rhetorical analysis, despite otherwise detailed readings. If, as Cubitt argues, Morrison's "clipped language and frequent use of monosyllables" were an essential part of his compelling representation of the slums, it is curious that she restricts her comparisons with other slum novels and stories to plot, incidence, and character, with no specific analysis of rhetorical technique (92). It is also curious that the works of George Gissing, a realist author also esteemed for his gritty representations of the late-Victorian slum, barely get a mention. A comparison with his use of language in The Nether World (1889...