Bookmasters S.
3 total works
In his acclaimed and final East End novel, Arthur Morrison returns to a slightly earlier period than that of Tales of Mean Streets and A Child of the Jago, the 1860s and 1870s.
Morrison's descriptions of the fearful physical conditions are based directly on what he saw. He conjures up an extraordinarily vivid picture of a world which, even as he wrote, was about to vanish in one of the first of the slum clearance schemes.
A brilliant evocation of a narrow, closeknit communitythat of the streets of London's East End in the 1890s. Morrison knew that his East Enders were not a race apart, but ordinary men and women, scraping by perhaps, but neither criminals nor paupers. He chronicled their adventures and misadventures, their wooings and their funerals, with sympathy, humor and a sense of both the tragedies and comedies to be found in the "mean streets," from Lizerunt's disastrous marriage to Scuddy Lond's plausible but imperfect conversion and "Squire" Napper's quickly dispersed fortune.