Arthur Morrison was born in Kent, England, in 1863. After some experience as a clerk in the civil service, as the secretary of a charity trust in the East End of London, and as a journalist on the editorial staff of an evening paper, he settled down definitely to his career as novelist and writer on oriental art. He is best known as a journalist, however, and his familiarity with the East End has largely contributed to his success in depicting the sordid life of London’s “mean streets,” as the “remorseless realism” of his pictures testify. Mr. Morrison’s literary work was in the nature of prose and verse panegyrizing bicycles and bicycling. His principal works, apart from several plays and magazine contributions, are Tales of Mean Streets; the several Martin Hewitt (detective) books; A Child of the Jago; To London Town; The Hole in the Wall; The Red Triangle; The Green Eye of Goona (published in America as The Green Diamond); and The Painters of Japan.
Mr. Morrison’s best fiction is not large in bulk, for his detective stories are surpassed both in merit and in popular appeal by more than one writer on similar themes; but in his Tales of Mean Streets, which contains the appended study, “On the Stairs,” he has attained a compressed power equalled only by the French realists and scarcely surpassed even by them. He has brought the art of suggestion to a high pass, his swiftness and firmness of delineation are equally effective, and though his subjects are sordid and often depressing they live before us as real folk.
The introduction to Tales of Mean Streets appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine in October, 1891, where it was called simply, “A Street.” This sketch attracted the attention of Mr. W. E. Henley, who gave the young writer the benefit of his own knowledge and criticism; and it is to Henley and to Walter Besant that Mr. Morrison makes special acknowledgment for help in the technicalities and mechanism of his tales. Most of these Tales of Mean Streets appeared in the National Observer (while Henley was the editor), and a few in the Pall Mall Budget.—Book Buyer (London), vol. 12.
If the modern novel about the slums, such as novels of Mr. Arthur Morrison, or the exceedingly able novels of Mr. Somerset Maugham, are intended to be sensational, I can only say that that is a noble and reasonable object, and that they attain it.... It may be ... it is necessary to have in our fiction the image of the horrible and hairy East-ender, merely to keep alive in us a fearful and childlike wonder at external peculiarities.... To summarize, our slum fiction is quite defensible as æsthetic fiction; it is not defensible as spiritual fact.—Gilbert K. Chesterton, Heretics.
Ever seeking the clean-cut, picturesque phrase and the vivid word, he produced a very striking picture of the East End. But, nevertheless, it was not quite satisfactory and convincing. Human nature does not alter so much with conditions as he seems to think. A little less or a little more morality does not affect its elements.... Mr. Morrison’s strongest gift in writing is a cynicism that is almost brutal. With it he elaborates the features of all his characters till the impression is produced that one savage, hideous, ugly coster and one gaudy-feathered, bedizened “Jonah” have acted as models for all his studies of Jagodom. Moreover, his success has been achieved in pictures of the brutal.—Academy (London), vol. 52.
The “mean streets” are streets in London.... [They] have found in Arthur Morrison an interpreter who lifts them out of their meanness upon the plane of a just claim to human sympathy. He lets us see the relief. Bill Napper, the drunken kerb-whacker, come into property and defending it against the rascally labor agitator, Scuddy Lond, mixing religious fervor and till-tapping with entire sincerity, Simmons and Ford, victims of their joint wife’s “jore” and mania for trouser-making, even the Anarchists of the Red Cow group, appeal to us with a sense almost of kinship because we feel that the figures are real. They are capital character-studies besides. Dickens never made a finer than the thief Scuddy Lond, or than Billy Chope.... The art of these stories seems flawless. Mr. Morrison’s gift amounts to genius.—Jacob Riis, Romances of “The Other Half,” The Book Buyer, vol. 12.
FURTHER REFERENCES FOR READING ON MORRISON
Methods of Arthur Morrison, Academy, vol. 50, 531; His Work, Academy, vol. 52, 493; Blackwood’s Magazine, vol. 163, 734; How to Write a Short Story, Bookman, vol. 5, 45; Morrison as a Realist, H. D. Traill, Fortnightly, vol. 67, 65; Reply, A. Morrison, New Review, vol. 16, 326; Child of the Jago: True to Facts, A. O. Jay, Fortnightly, vol. 67, 324.
FOR ANALYSIS