SOURCE: "Morrison, Gissing, and the Stark Reality," in Novel, Vol. 25, No. 3, Spring, 1992, pp. 302-20.

In the following essay, Henkle discusses Morrison's portrayal of the urban poor in the context of the late nineteenth-century debate over realism and naturalism.

I.

Finally, in the early 1890s, the urban poor acquire a voice. Not the ventriloquized voice of Henry Mayhew, but the voice of one who was born in the East End of lower working-class parents, grew up there, worked there, and chose it as his subject. Arthur Morrison was born in Poplar in 1863, the son of an engine fitter who worked on the docks. His father died of consumption when Arthur was a boy, and his mother raised the three children by running a haberdasher's shop in Grundy Street. Arthur himself took a job early as office boy in the architect's department of the School Board of London at a...