Morrison was born into the skilled working class – his father was an engine fitter – in Poplar on the Isle of Dogs.
His family was a couple of notches above the penniless, unemployed, illiterate class of violent thieves which he portrayed in his most famous book, A Child of The Jago. His parents were responsible enough to secure young Arthur an education, which he used to get a job as a clerk, aged 17. He began writing sketches of East End life, which were picked up by local and then national papers, the first one appearing in 1891.
He expanded the sketches into short stories which he sold to some of the quality magazines which proliferated in the 1880s and 1890s, such as The National Observer, Macmillan’s Magazine, and The Pall Mall Budget. The editor of the The National Observer, W.E. Henley, took Morrison under his wing and provided help and guidance. When Morrison gathered the best of these early stories into this collection, published in 1894, he dedicated the volume to Henley. The stories are:
- Introduction: A Street
- Lizerunt –
- Lizer’s Wooing
- Lizer’s First
- A Change of Circumstances
- Without Visible Means
- To Bow Bridge
- That Brute Simmons
- Behind the Shade
- Three Rounds
- In Business
- The Red Cow Group
- On the Stairs
- Squire Napper
- ‘A Poor Stick’
- A Conversion
- ‘All that Messuage’
Lizerunt
Elizabeth Hunt, facetiously referred to as Lizerunt, is 17 and works in a pickle factory. On Wanstead Flats at the Whitsun Fair, she is fought over by Billy Chope and Sam Cardew. For five minutes she feels like Helen of Troy.
17 is a bit late for girls to get wed in her circles, so she hurries up and marries Billy. Since her dad is dead and her mother is serving a month in prison for drunk and disorderly, it is a small wedding party – the groom drinks himself unconscious by noon and his mum gets trolleyed on gin. Billy’s only source of income had been extorting money from his mother, who makes a pittance mangling wet washing. Now he takes all Lizer’s wages, too.
Soon Billy beats Lizer. She gets pregnant. A zealous local vicar gives Billy half a crown on hearing about the baby, but Billy avoids him like the plague after the vicar tries to offer him a job. Not bloomin’ likely, mate. Billy demands more money from Lizer, even after she’s stopped working due to being heavily pregnant. One particular morning he demands money and, when she says she’s saving it for the baby, kicks her, and kicks her again.
He storms out, loiters around a protest by unemployed workers hoping to cadge some money, before going to get drunk at a pub, then returning to demand his dinner at 3pm. Instead he finds Lizer in bed, very weak, having given birth to a feeble baby which is bruised down one side from where Billy kicked her.
When she says dinner isn’t ready, Billy begins dragging her out of bed at which point the medical student who delivered the baby returns from washing his hands in the kitchen, sizes up the scene, drags Billy to the street door and kicks him out. Returning to the bedroom, the student finds… Lizer and Billy’s mum yelling abuse at him. But… but… he just protected Lizer! That means nothing to working class solidarity. The women hound him out of the flat, leaving Billy free to come back home later and take his violent revenge.
You can see very clearly why Morrison thinks there is no helping these people. They literally reject all attempts at help. All values are inverted so that anyone who dresses well, keeps clean, has rooms full of furniture, is considered uppity. Anyone who can read is suspect. Any man not on the scrounge is suspicious, probably a sneak. And all the women rally round their menfolk no matter how much they beat them up.
By age 21 Lizer has had her third child, lost the job at the pickle factory, ekes an uncertain income from charring, and gives all her money to Billy, who still gives her a regular beating. One day Billy comes across the money his mum had been saving for her funeral hidden away in the base of the mangle. He rants and raves and confiscates it. A few days later his mum dies of heart disease. Unable to face the body which, as per working class tradition, is kept in the coffin in the front room for days, Billy avoids the house till the coroner comes to fetch the corpse.
Billy tries to wangle some sympathy money from the coroner’s jury at the inquest, but they’re wise to people like him. The mangling work which local folk had given to the old lady now dries up, redistributed to other older women, thus reducing Billy’s income. So one rainy night he bullies and kicks Lizer into going out on the street to become a prostitute.
This is the most harsh, unforgiving story in the set and the finale – a husband forcing his beaten wife to go on the game – ensured the book achieved notoriety among moralistic Victorian reviewers.
Without visible means
This story describes the tramp north of a handful of men who’ve been thrown out of work by the Great Strikes of 1888. In a vague, uneducated way, without maps or a sense of the distance, they set off for Newcastle. We’re introduced to the accordionist among them, who soon gets work entertaining in pubs, to Skulker Newman who talks about overthrowing the capitalist classes and then, one night, steals the toolbag of poor Joey Clayton, weak and victimised because he didn’t immediately join the strike.
Now Joey’s had his last belongings in the world nicked off him, he slowly gets weaker and weaker, worn down by the long days tramping, eventually coughing blood and well on the way to dying. His sole surviving companion on the march leaves him passed out in a pub with a chalked message on the table asking that he be taken to the workhouse.
To Bow Bridge
More an urban sketch than a story, this an account of the 11 o’clock journey of the tram from Stratford to Bow which is packed with drunks travelling from outer London, where pubs shut at 11, to the County of London (Bow), where pubs shut at 12, to get an extra hour of drinking.
The drunks on the tram jostle and fight, a tired prostitute tries to be friendly to a child travelling with a ‘respectable’ woman, who pulls the child closer, a fat woman sits athwart a number of other passengers, a man throws up in the tram doorway, a loud fight upstairs comes tumbling down the steps as the tram arrives at Bow Bridge and all the drunks and drabs hurriedly exit.
That Brute Simmons
A genuinely funny story in which polite, well-employed carpenter and joiner Tommy Simmons is quietly married to Hannah, widow of a Mr Ford.
Hannah always gets her own way. She has Tommy washing the cutlery and cleaning the stairs every week, as well as bathing and putting to bed the children. Then Hannah has the bright idea of making Tommy’s clothes for him out of shreds and patches found in rag shops, with the result that he becomes a laughing stock at work. Long-suffering is Tommy Simmons.
One day there’s a knock at his door and a very shifty, dirty man introduces himself as her first husband, Bob Ford, presumed drowned in a shipping accident but in fact rescued by a German ship and spent years at sea. Now, he says, he’s returned to claim his marriage rights!
Tommy is gobsmacked. Bob observes the effect, then, in the manner of all good confidence men, says he is prepared to waive his claims for a mere £5. At this point the reader realises he is scamming Tommy. But the joke is on Bob because the crux of the story is that Bob’s return is the straw which cracks Tommy’s morale. Rather than offer to pay Ford to clear off, Tommy says that, No, he will go, he will do the decent thing and let Ford get back together with Hannah!
Ford now panics because this wasn’t his plan at all, so he drops his price to £3. But Tommy’s mind is made up and he says, ‘No, he’s going to do the decent thing and leave. Bob can have her.’ ‘How about £1?’ wheedles Bob. ‘And I’ll buy you a pint into the bargain.’
At that point there’s a knock on the door and it is the egregious Hannah. Tommy goes downstairs to open the door, greets Hannah and tells her there’s someone upstairs to see her. As she turns to go inside, Tommy legs it down the street, planning never to come back. Meanwhile, old Bob, having seen all this from the first floor, swiftly:
flung into the back room, threw open the window, dropped from the wash-house roof into the back-yard, scrambled desperately over the fence, and disappeared into the gloom.
This is described so vividly it made me laugh out loud.
But because no-one saw Bob arrive, or leave, or knew who he was or heard of his offer, all the neighbours – and indeed Hannah – ever understood about the affair was that Tommy Simmons thoughtlessly abandoned his wife. So he goes down in street legend as that brute!
Behind the Shade
A rather grim short couple of scenes in which Mrs and Miss Perkins try to keep up appearances after the death of the respectable Mr Perkins removes their only source of income. But then an ‘accident’ occurs to Mrs Perkins – i.e. she is savagely beaten up by a passing drunk – leaving her bed-bound. Miss Perkins wastes away, and one day their bodies are both found dead from starvation.
Three Rounds
A vivid description of young Neddy Milton, 18 and out of work, wandering the Bethnal Green Road having eaten nothing all day, until the evening brings his involvement in one of the prize fights organised in the back of the Prince Regent pub.
It’s a really vivid, visceral description of a hungry and rather puny young man getting badly beaten by his stronger opponent, Patsy Beard, but trying to respond under the encouragement of the one-eyed pug-sized ‘second’, who gives him pep talks and cold water between each of the three rounds.
It’s short and intense and makes the reader feel like they’ve just been through a three-round fight.
In Business
This is a story about snobbery.
Ted Munsey inherits £100 from his uncle. His wife’s family had always thought she married beneath her, since her dad was a dock timekeeper and Ted was only a moulder at Moffat’s. Mrs Munsey immediately decides they must set up a haberdasher’s shop, solely in order to move up into the shop-keeping class. So they hire a shop with rooms in Bromley, and fit it out with stock, and Ted finds himself told to leave Moffat’s, wear smart clothes, brylcreem his hair and become a ‘shopwalker’.
Inevitably it fails. It not only fails but both the Moffats are taken in by a smooth-talking salesman who persuades them to take a quantity of towels and aprons off him, at a very decent wholesale price, the whole to be repaid, with credit, in three months time. The shop attracts fewer customers than ever, and Mrs M takes out her frustration with relentless criticism of Ted, who her mother warned her against etc etc.
One day she wakes up to find he has tried to write a legal document, taking all legal responsibilities for the debt on himself, and has left. What becomes of him, her or the shop, we never find out.
The Red Cow Group
A satire on the low stupidity, ignorance and selfishness of a so-called ‘political’ grouping.
The blowsy, middle-aged inhabitants of the hidden-away Red Cow bar are happy to spend their evenings drinking their pints, until the frustrated young firebrand Sotcher is introduced into their midst, with his simple message that they are the salt of the earth and deserve more. Who wouldn’t believe such a message?
Slowly the Red Cow group came around. Plainly other people were better off than they; and certainly each man found it hard to believe that anybody else was more deserving than himself.
He then persuades them to blow something up, to strike a blow at the, er, you know, them toffs and the system and everythink.
The whole story is played for a series of laughs. Even once the pub drunks are persuaded that they’re ‘as good as any man’ and ‘why shouldn’t they live in big houses with fancy servants’ and that blowing something up will be ‘the first blow in overthrowing the system’ – they are still upset to learn that they won’t be getting paid to blow up the local gasworks. No, explains the young firebrand Sotcher.
They would get the glory, Sotcher assured them, and the consciousness of striking a mighty blow at this, and that, and the other… There was no committee, and no funds: there was nothing but glory, and victory, and triumph, and the social revolution, and things of that kind.
Sotcher gives a couple of the least stupid among them instructions on how to manufacture nitro-glycerine at home. The group begins to take up Sotcher’s rhetoric, especially his form of revolutionary bullying, namely that anyone who questions his orders or hesitates to carry them out is an enemy of the people and of the revolution who must be treated to ‘revolutionary justice’ i.e. whatever he says.
Which makes it all the funnier when the lads one evening turn up in the little pub with a canister of what they claim is pure nitro-glycerine and tell Sotcher that, in his absence, they’ve held a democratic vote and nominated him to be the man to plant the bomb at the gasworks.
Revealing himself to be a first-class coward, Sotcher squeals that he can’t do it, and pompously declares that he’s from the Education Branch not the Active Branch of the group – at which the other members begin muttering that he’s a backslider, probably a copper’s nark. Maybe they ought to ‘eliminate’ him there and then – and while a couple of strong men hold Sotcher in their grip, the others have an educated discussion about the best way to do it – the most garish being putting a stick in his neckerchief and twisting it till he’s garrotted.
During all this they keep plying Sotcher with beer till he’s insensible – then, in the dead of night, they carry him down to the gasworks, prop his unconscious body against the gasometer, tie the explosive canister to his body, light the fuse and scarper.
A small bang alerts the local constable who goes to the scene, finds Sotcher unconscious and reeking of booze, near a homemade firework. Next morning at the magistrates court, the young firebrand is charged with being drunk and incapable, and is fined five shillings.
Morrison implies that so-called ‘radical’ or ‘anarchist’ politics is a sordid and ridiculous shambles.
On the Stairs
Brief sketch of two old women meeting on the stairs in a dilapidated old house inhabited by eight poor families, and discussing the fact that the son of one of them, Bob, is at death’s door. The mother knows, ‘cos she heard a fateful knocking at the bedhead last night. They discuss funeral arrangements and expenses and Mrs Manders describes (for the umpteenth time) the grand sending-off she gave her husband.
They’re disturbed by the arrival of the doctor’s assistant. He goes in to see the sick young man, emerges and says he really needs medicine. Mrs Curtis says she can’t afford it. The assistant is pricked by his conscience and eventually gives her five shillings to buy some – blissfully ignorant that his superior, the doctor, gave the woman the self-same sum the day before.
He tips his hat and leaves. Now she can give her son a decent sending off, she winks at her wizened friend.
Moral: bourgeois charity is misplaced because it misunderstands the completely different value system of the slum dwellers who will do or say anything in order to screw money, now, out of any willing sap prepared to give it, regardless of long-term consequences.
Squire Napper
A very funny account of Bill Napper who inherits £300 from his brother (who had emigrated to Australia and has just passed away). Bill has a job and so is pretty respectable:
Bill Napper was a heavy man of something between thirty-five and forty. His moleskin trousers were strapped below the knees, and he wore his coat loose on his back, with the sleeves tied across his chest. The casual observer set him down a navvy, but Mrs. Napper punctiliously made it known that he was ‘in the paving’; which meant that he was a pavior.
Nonetheless, Bill has the stupid craftiness of the uneducated and is suspicious of every aspect of the lawyer’s office where he’s called, refuses to sign anything, thinking he’s very crafty and canny. The whole thing is done with a nice ironic, comedic touch.
In a nutshell, Bill drinks his way through the entire inheritance, and then beats his wife in his anger at its disappearance. Along the way there are several very comic scenes, such as the time he persuades his entire gang of pavement layers to chuck in work and spend the afternoon in the pub ‘on the wet’; or the way he hires a Victoria Park orator, the shifty Minns, to come to his house and deliver his speeches pulverising Capital and the Greedy Classes in the comfort of his front room.
‘A Poor Stick’
Mrs Jennings:
was what is called rather a fine woman: a woman of large scale and full development; whose slatternly habit left her coarse black hair to tumble in snake-locks about her face and shoulders half the day; who, clad in half-hooked clothes, bore herself notoriously and unabashed in her fulness.
She lords it over her husband, Robert, who has a regular job but is also expected to wash and dress for bed the filthy children. One day she runs off with the lodger, but poor pathetic Robert, though mocked at work, and gently chided by his brother-in-law, refuses to accept she’s gone and, every night, dresses smart and goes to the stretch of the High Street where they used to promenade up and down when they were courting. Genuinely pathetic.
A Conversion
The criminal career of Scuddy Lond, told with hilarious facetiousness describing his unbending commitment to a life of crime, except when he’s caught and brought up before the beak, when he breaks down into a sincere and tearful repentance. Again.
Scuddy went regularly into business as a lob-crawler: that is to say, he returned to his first love, the till: not narrowly to any individual till, but broad-mindedly to the till as a general institution, to be approached in unattended shops by stealthy grovelling on the belly. This he did until he perceived the greater security and comfort of waiting without while a small boy did the actual work within.
From this, and with this, he ventured on peter-claiming: laying hands nonchalantly on unconsidered parcels and bags at railway stations, until a day when, bearing a fat portmanteau, he ran against its owner by the door of a refreshment bar.
[Brought before the magistrate he claimed…] This time the responsibility lay with Drink. Strong Drink, he declared, with deep emotion, had been his ruin; he dated his downfall from the day when a false friend persuaded him to take a Social Glass; he would still have been an honest, upright, self-respecting young man but for the Cursed Drink. From that moment he would never touch it more. The case was met with three months with hard labour, and for all that Scuddy Lond had so clearly pointed out the culpability of Drink, he had to do the drag himself. But the mission-readers were comforted: for clearly there was hope for one whose eyes were so fully opened to the causes of his degradation.
Note the ‘mission-readers’ here i.e. the self-deluding high-minded members of Christian Missions to the East End who see in Scuddy’s long list of slick repentances the chance that he might, one day, actually mean it.
This turns out to be the point of the story which describes how, one hungry evening, as Scuddy is wandering the streets, smelling food, feeling sorry for himself, he listens to a woman on a street corner singing a sentimental song and then, for once, allows one of the barkers on the door of a Christian Mission to persuade him to go inside the hall.
Here he listens to moving testimony from a big navvy about his conversion to Jesus, and then a long sermon from the vicar who preaches the Love of God. At the end of the service Scuddy is presented to the vicar along with a few other converts of the evening. Born again! A new life!
None of which stops him, upon exiting the church and walking along a dank passage, from nicking the day’s takings of the lame woman selling hot pigs’ trotters, when she momentarily turns her back.
The moral doesn’t need to be made explicit but it is the same in all Morrison’s stories: the slum-dwellers are hard cases, can’t be saved, it is folly to think so.
‘All That Messuage’
A story in eleven sections which tells the decline and fall of Old Jack Randall after he spends all his savings to put down a deposit and take out a mortgage on Number Twenty-seven Mulberry Street, Old Ford. Very ignorant, neither his wife nor Old Jack have factored in the rates and other costs of such a project, and right at the start Morrison shows that they will fail, financially.
But it also has social costs. Word gets round that Old Jack is now a landlord with all the respect that engenders. So everyone thinks it must mean he’s rich. So his son comes round to borrow half a pound and when Old Jack refuses – because he genuinely has used up every penny of his saving on the deposit – his son goes away chagrined and his daughter-in-law starts bad-mouthing him. That’s the start of the family rejecting Old Jack.
In the same way a few blokes from the workshop where he works ask Jack to lend them a quid. When he embarrassedly refuses, they turn against him. A landlord has loads of money. Everyone knows that.
Things get worse when the old tenant quits and a new one, a bold pushing public orator named Joe Parsons, offers to rent the house. As the weeks pass it becomes clear that he is not going to pay. More, he is sub-letting the upper room. When Old Jack protests, Parsons calls him a blood-sucking leech and subjects him to one of his ‘radical’ tirades:
‘Y’ ain’t earnt it. It’s you blasted lan’lords as sucks the blood o’ the workers. You go an’ work for your money.’
When Old Jack points out that he, Parsons, is taking (illegal) rent, Parson ignores him, threatens to punch him and finally pushes him out the front door before slamming it in his face.
Meanwhile, Old Jack hasn’t been able to pay the mortgage to the credit company. He’s going deeper into debt. There’s a strike at another factory which extends to his workshop. Everyone downs tools except Old Jack, who can’t afford to, but is vilified as not only a scab but as a filthy rich landlord of a scab.
In the penultimate scene, Old Jack comes across Parsons orating to a crowd in the park, and is unwise enough to shout out ‘Pay me your rent’. Parsons uses the full force of his radical rhetoric to persuade the crowd that Jack is not only a heartless, rich landlord who wants to throw him – Parsons – and his wife out onto the street, but he is a blackleg and a scab too.
The surly crowd punch and hit Jack, knocking him to the ground. His wife, who had been shopping nearby, comes running and throws herself over his body, but the mob just start kicking her as well.
Old Jack was down. A dozen heavy boots were at work about his head and belly. In from the edge of the crowd a woman tore her way, shedding potatoes as she ran, and screaming; threw herself upon the man on the ground; and shared the kicks. Over the shoulders of the kickers whirled the buckle-end of a belt. ‘One for the old cow,’ said a voice.
Months later, alive but unable to work, the house repossessed by an unconcerned mortgage company, all their possessions pawned to pay for necessities, Old Jack and his wife enter a workhouse.
Tone
The tone is knowing and facetious, in several ways. Morrison describes the habits, mindset, values and behaviours of his slum-dwellers in often elaborate and Biblical language, in order to highlight the discrepancy between discourse and content, to create irony, to be funny.
Here he is ventriloquising the thoughts of Bill Napper after he’s inherited his fortune, putting the thoughts into the cod-Biblical phraseology of pompous Victorian prose.
One of the chief comforts of affluence is that you may have beer in by the barrel; for then Sundays and closing times vex not, and you have but to reach the length of your arm for another pot whenever moved thereunto.
Another Morrison tactic is to state unexpected and dire aspects of the life in the slums as if they were well-known facts and commonly accepted values. For example, that all good young ladies should be married by the age of 16 (Lizerunt) or that a man will live off the labour of his wife and regularly beat her up to keep her in line – these are facetiously treated as universal truths which who could possibly deny?
In the end there was a vehement row, and the missis was severely thumped. (Squire Napper)
From within came a noise of knocks and thuds and curses – sometimes a gurgle. Old Jack asked a small boy, whose position in the passage betokened residence, what was going forward. ‘It’s the man downstairs,’ said the boy, ‘a-givin’ of it to ‘is wife’. (‘All That Messuage‘)
It is the casual way that violence, especially against women, is accepted as a boring everyday occurrence, which makes it all the more shocking.
Violence permeates all aspects of life, and is in fact one of the few forms of entertainment the slum-dwellers have. Here is Squire Napper exuding the superiority of his new-found wealth:
In his own street, observing two small boys in the prelusory stages of a fight, he put up sixpence by way of stakes, and supervised the battle from the seat afforded by a convenient window-sill.
That is broad humour, where the permanent background violence which saturates life in the slums is treated as a joke.
Something more complicated is going on in this description of the small house built at the end of a slum terrace, whose tenants reckon themselves a cut above the neighbours. The comedy is at the expense of the ladies’ pretentions to respectability.
Although the house was smaller than the others, and was built upon a remnant, it was always a house of some consideration. In a street like this mere independence of pattern gives distinction. And a house inhabited by one sole family makes a figure among houses inhabited by two or more, even though it be the smallest of all. And here the seal of respectability was set by the shade of fruit – a sign accepted in those parts.
Now, when people keep a house to themselves, and keep it clean; when they neither stand at the doors nor gossip across back-fences; when, moreover, they have a well-dusted shade of fruit in the front window; and, especially, when they are two women who tell nobody their business: they are known at once for well-to-do, and are regarded with the admixture of spite and respect that is proper to the circumstances. They are also watched.
‘Proper to the circumstances’. Morrison lards the stories with the values of the slum-dwellers taken at face value and simultaneously revealing and funny. But it ain’t all fun and games. Contrast both these examples with a slice of much more savage humour.
Then Mrs. Perkins met with her accident. A dweller in Stidder’s Rents overtook her one night, and, having vigorously punched her in the face and the breast, kicked her and jumped on her for five minutes as she lay on the pavement. (In the dark, it afterwards appeared, he had mistaken her for his mother.)
That last phrase made me burst out laughing for its unexpectedness, but it is at the same time a harsh, horrible description, and is meant to be. Mrs Perkins is permanently bed-bound because of this savage attack. It is an example of the way Morrison often lulls you into a state of acquiescence in the humdrum lives of the poor – and then hits you with a sucker punch describing something really horrible – the bottling of a woman, the death of a baby.
(The use of paradox – if that’s the right word – the technique of saying the most outrageous things in the calmest, most natural way, began to remind me of Oscar Wilde. Not the tone, the tone is completely different. Just the structure. Saying the outrageous with cavalier indifference.)
Politics
None of the characters have any serious politics, and Morrison doesn’t waste time editorialising about the viciousness he describes. Maybe it was this lack of sermons, and the sometimes savage way that he accepts the brutality of life in the slums, which made his stories notorious and controversial.
The Press He is consistently dismissive of anyone or anything which is under the delusion that it can change these people. In a throwaway phrase he conveys the uselessness of the Press’s high-minded editorials, all piss and vinegar which change nothing.
After the inquest the street had an evening’s fame: for the papers printed coarse drawings of the house, and in leaderettes demanded the abolition of something. Then it became its wonted self.
‘The abolition of something’ – so irrelevant he can’t even be bothered to specify what. In Squire Napper Orator Minns and his shifty mate try to persuade Napper to invest money in a new newspaper which, it is clear to all concerned, is regarded as simply a money-making scam.
Radicals The Red Cow Group is supposedly about an ‘anarchist’ group and so ought to contain a tincture of political thought, but is used solely as the opportunity for satire.
Here [in the Red Cow pub] he [Sotcher] had an audience, an audience that did not lecture on its own account, a crude audience that might take him at his own valuation. So he gave it to that crude audience, hot and strong. They (and he) were the salt of the earth, bullied, plundered and abused. Down with everything that wasn’t down already. And so forth and so on.
‘And so forth and so on’ – Morrison dismisses the entire radical rhetoric as meaningless puff. The young firebrand Sotcher is shown to be full of highfalutin’ phrases which mean nothing. And then turns out to be a coward. All he stirs in the drinkers in the Red Cow is their long-standing sense of grievance and injustice that other people are somehow richer than them. ‘T’ain’t fair’. There’s no thought or policy behind their griping.
I think the ‘anarchists’ make a bomb not with nitro-glycerine but with sand and castor oil as a joke on Sotcher, though it might be their own incompetence. Either way, the whole ‘anarchist’ movement is shown to be the piss and wind of idiot braggers.
Minns In the story Squire Napper Minns, the public orator who Bill Napper hires to sound off in the comfort of his own front room, is revealed to be not only a windy bullshitter, like Sotcher, but a liar and a thief. With an associate he one night tries to break into Bill’s house. Having opened the casement window, he is just peering his head through the gap when Bill hits him hard with the heel of his boot and Minns tumbles back down into the yard. The real punchline to this is later, at one of his regular public orations to a crowd in the park, Minns claims that the cut and bruise on his head are evidence of police brutality:
the proof and sign of a police bludgeoning at Tower Hill – or Trafalgar Square.
Parsons The shifty-looking man who moves into Old Jack Randall’s house is a well-known orator and agitator and – turns out to be a crook who uses the language of radicalism – all landlords are blood-sucking leeches – purely to justify his own thieving and skiving.
Summary: all socialists and radicals are self-serving hypocrites who use the rhetoric of radicalism solely to express their own personal grievances, who turn out to be liars, bullies and thieves, and who, given half a chance, don’t hesitate to exploit people just as hard as the landlords or owners they execrate.
The fatuousness of political opinions
On Sundays and Saturday afternoons Bill would often take a turn down by the dock gates, or even in Victoria Park, or Mile End Waste, where there were speakers of all sorts. At the dock gates it was mostly Labor and Anarchy, but at the other places there was a fine variety; you could always be sure of a few minutes of Teetotalism, Evangelism, Atheism, Republicanism, Salvationism, Socialism, Anti-Vaccinationism, and Social Purity, with now and again some Mormonism or another curious exotic. Most of the speakers denounced something, and if the denunciations of one speaker were not sufficiently picturesque and lively, you passed on to the next. Indeed, you might always judge afar off where the best denouncing was going on by the size of the crowds, at least until the hat went round.
Bill had always vastly admired the denunciations of one speaker – a little man, shabbier, if anything, than most of the others, and surpassingly tempestuous of antic. He was an unattached orator, not confining himself to any particular creed, but denouncing whatever seemed advisable, considering the audience and circumstances. He was always denouncing something somewhere, and was ever in a crisis that demanded the circulation of a hat. Bill esteemed this speaker for his versatility as well as for the freshness of his abuse.
All these radical oppositional views are seen as interchangeable forms of entertainment, with no higher meaning. This view is taken to extremes when Bill Napper takes a fancy to orator Minns, and pays him a shilling a time to come to his home, stand in the living room and denounce, well, whatever he has handy. When he ran out of steam denouncing one subject, Bill sets him off denouncing another. Like a record player.
Political or social issues are reduced to the level of music hall songs: people make requests for their favourites. All gas and gaiters. Nothing ever changes.
Individual charity such as that of the medical assistant in On the Stairs, is deluded and wasted. He gives the poor old lady five shillings for medicine for her son. 1. Her son dies anyway. 2. She spends it on a smart funeral. 3. His boss, the doctor, had already given her five shillings which disappeared in drink. The only tangible result of his impulse to charity will be that the assistant will now be a prey to every beggar, conman and bleeding heart in the neighbourhood.
He was not a wealthy young man – wealthy young men do not devil for East End doctors – but he was conscious of a certain haul of sixpences at nap the night before; and, being inexperienced, he did not foresee the career of persecution whereon he was entering at his own expense and of his own motion.
Names
The colourful names of Morrison’s proles or near-proles remind me of the lively monikers of Damon Runyon’s characters. They include: Billy Chope, Bella Dawson, Sam Cardew, Joey Clayton, Skulky Newman, Tommy Simmons, Bob Ford, Neddy Milton, Tab Rosser, Beard Patsy, Tab Rosser, Hocko Jones, Tiggy Magson, Ted Munsey, Jerry Shand, Gunno Polson, Snorkey, Bill Napper, and Scuddy Lond.
Related links
Other fiction of the 1890s
Joseph Conrad
- Almayer’s Folly: A Story of an Eastern River (1895)
- An Outcast of The Islands (1896)
- The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897)
- Tales of Unrest (1898)
- Youth (1898)
- Heart of Darkness (1899)
Rudyard Kipling
- The Light That Failed (1891)
- Life’s Handicap (1891)
- Barrack Room Ballads (1892)
- Many Inventions (1893)
- The Jungle Books (1895, 1895)
- The Seven Seas (1896)
- The Absent-Minded Beggar (1899)
- Captains Courageous (1897)
- The Day’s Work (1898)
- Stalky and Co (1899)
Henry Rider Haggard
Sherlock Holmes
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (stories 1891–1892)
- The Sign of the Four (1890)
- The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (stories 1892–1893)
Arthur Morrison
- Tales of Mean Streets (1894)
- Martin Hewitt, Investigator by Arthur Morrison (1894)
- A Child of the Jago
- The Dorrington Deed-Box by Arthur Morrison (1897)
Robert Louis Stevenson
- South Sea Tales (1891-93)
- The Wrecker (1892)
- The Ebb-Tide (1894)
- The Amateur Emigrant (1895)
- Weir of Hermiston (1896)
Bram Stoker
H.G. Wells
- The Time Machine (1895)
- The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896)
- The Invisible Man (1897)
- A Story of the Days To Come (1899)
Books & Boots 