SOURCE: “Arthur Morrison and the Tone of Violence,” in The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971, pp. 167-98.

In the following essay, Keating provides a thematic and stylistic analysis of Morrison's fiction dealing with working-class life in the East End of London.

I

In the 1890s Arthur Morrison wrote three books which deal with working-class life in the East End: Tales of Mean Streets (1894), A Child of the Jago (1896) and To London Town (1899). … Morrison's work is an amalgam of Besant, who supplies a new image of the East End; Charles Booth, who clarifies the class structure of that image; and Kipling, from whom Morrison derives his objective, amoral, literary method. To these diverse influences he brings considerable personal experience of working-class life, carefully acquired skill as a reporter, and a simple but vivid prose style. More than any other author it is Arthur Morrison who establishes...