During the 1890s the last vestiges of Victorianism were giving way grudgingly to a new morality and a more experimental, daring cultural milieu. The literary battles over what constituted realism and naturalism were being waged, and Dickensian sentimentality toward the poor was losing ground to more "objective" depictions of urban decay and slum life. Thomas Hardy and George Gissing were establishing themselves as leading novelists, while Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, and Rudyard Kipling were bursting upon the literary scene. This was also the decade in which Arthur Morrison reached the peak of his talent as a writer of short stories and short novels with the publication of Tales of Mean Streets (1894), A Child of the Jago (1896), and the various Martin Hewitt stories. Although literary history has judged Morrison to have been a greater craftsman than he was an artist, he is still praised for his...