SOURCE : "Arthur Morrison," in Four Realist Novelists, Longmans, Green & Co., 1965, pp. 7-20.

In the following essay, Brome discusses the realism of Morrison's novels that depict the lives of London's poor.

A cloud of self-induced obscurity surrounds the life of Arthur Morrison, that small master among the group of English novelists who concentrated their attention on the working classes in their East End milieu during the late nineteenth century. The Times obituary about him is a bewildered piece of writing. A few lines giving the barest bones of his life are overwhelmed by a laboured examination of his work. According to Morrison himself, he was born in Kent in 1863, but his birth certificate places him immutably in the East End of London. His father he described as an engineer, but he was in fact an engine fitter. Professionally, he identified himself, later in life, as a civil servant and...