Morrison’s oeuvre

Morrison is remembered for his bleak novel about a squalid East End slum, A Child of the Jago, and the related collection of short stories about slum life, Mean Streets, but he was nothing if not versatile. At the same time as he was producing his dark stories of slum life, he turned out no fewer than 25 short stories about a respectable middle-class detective, Martin Hewitt, and another series of stories, about a corrupt detective, Horace Dorrington.

The third in the loose trilogy of books about London low-life, To London Town (1899) was surprisingly upbeat, and he then wrote a collection of stories about a legendary folk magician of Essex, Cunning Murrell, published in 1900. Morrison also wrote several one-act plays, and a stream of articles about Japanese art about which he made himself an expert. An impressively diverse output.

The Hole in The Wall

Morrison published The Hole In The Wall in 1902, and it marks a return to a working class milieu of his first stories – but with the twist that it’s set very firmly amid the sight and sounds of London’s old docklands, amid sailors, dockers, lightermen and the river police.

The novel is formally interesting because it alternates between the first-person narrative of an eight-year-old boy, little Stephen Kemp, and chapters told by a third-person narrator about characters and events beyond Stevie’s ken.

It is a crime thriller. Almost all the characters are corrupt, greedy and guilty of at least one crime. It features two brutal murders, a drowning, a grotesque blinding scene and climaxes in one of the characters being burned to death. So it is frequently very dark and grim, way painting a much more lurid picture of lower class life than A Child of the Jago had done. And yet not only the presence, but the narrative voice of little Stevie, who doesn’t understand most of what he sees and cleaves to his grandfather as a figure of hope and trust, lend a curious wistful sweetness to the story.

I found the combination really powerful and read the book in one sitting, compared with Jago which I struggled to finish. Partly, I think, because Hole is like a modern thriller, made up of short chapters with melodramatic scenes, and conveys a really effective atmosphere of dread and tension – whereas Jago, or at least the OUP edition of Jago which I read, is so festooned with historical notes and references, that it often feels more like a documentary than a work of fiction.

Moods and settings

When little Stevie’s mother dies in childbirth, Stevie is taken in by his kindly if gruff grandfather, Old Nat, Cap’en Nat as he’s generally referred to, landlord of The Hole in the Wall pub on the river’s edge in Wapping, ‘the bilge of all London’, as he calls it.

Cap’en Nat is big and strong, inspires fear in all his customers, even the hardened crooks, but is sweet and gentle with young Stevie. He is an ideal grandad.

This is overwhelmingly a tale of the London docks. Little Stevie’s mum’s house was hard by the docks in Blackwall, and Stevie has grown up amid the sight and sounds of ships and sailors and cargos. He’s hardly ever seen his dad because he’s a sailor on a merchant vessel owned by the small Wapping trading firm of Marr and Viner, spending most of his life at sea. He is currently on a voyage to Barbados.

The world as seen through eight-year-old Stevie’s eyes is strange and wonderful and often very funny. Early on Morrison gives us a comic portrait of the dead mother’s sisters – Stevie’s aunts – at the wake, all smug sanctimoniousness, sharp elbows and hard-heartedness, and the way one of them bullies her feeble husband.

Later on we meet one of the regulars at the pub, Mr Cripps, an ironically depicted, high-minded ‘artist’ who pays for his drinks in kind by furnishing the small bar at The Hole In The Wall with scores of paintings of ships under sail. Cripps is notorious for the endless delays he’s made about getting round to paint a sign for the pub. ‘A picture of a hole in a wall, what could be more simple?’ asks Old Nat. ‘Well,’ the shabby alcoholic artist replies:

‘It may seem simple enough; that’s because you’re thinkin’ o’ subjick, instead o’ treatment. A common jobber, if you’ll excuse my sayin’ it, ‘ud look at it just in that light—a wall with a ‘ole in it, an’ ‘e’d give it you, an’ p’rhaps you’d be satisfied with it. But I soar ‘igher, sir, ‘igher. What I shall give you’ll be a ‘ole in the wall to charm the heye and delight the intelleck, sir. A dramatic ‘ole in the wall, sir, a hepic ‘ole in the wall; a ‘ole in the wall as will elevate the mind and stimilate the noblest instinks of the be’older. Cap’en Kemp, I don’t ‘esitate to say that my ‘ole in the wall, when you get it, will be—ah! it’ll be the moral palladium of Wapping!’

This deserves to be said out loud and acted with plenty of ham. It’s funny, and Cripps is a regular character, providing a comic chorus to all the events of the novel, just as Stevie is a wide-eyed innocent witness to them all.

Contrasted with the friendly, humorous atmosphere of the pub, is the outside world and the slum-dwellers, whores, thieves and muggers who infest the dark streets of Wapping, especially of one particular alley of ill fame which Morrison names the Blue Gate.

There are quite a few night-time scenes describing the really pitiful slums of the area – the drunken dancing and fights and robberies – and, early on, a grim description of the murder of Marr, partner in the shipping firm which owns the ship Stevie’s dad’s sailing on. Marr had absconded with the firm’s money, got drunk and is easily lured into a literal den of thieves. Here one of the thief’s harridan mistress realises with mounting horror that the gang are not just going to mug him, but to murder him.

Between the comic warmth of the pub and the grim and lurid descriptions of docklands at night, there is the daylight world of the docks, where grandad Nat takes Stevie and which is described through Stevie’s young eyes as an Arabian Nights scene of wonder and marvels. This is his first sight of Ratcliffe Highway.

I think there could never have been another street in this country at once so foul and so picturesque as Ratcliff Highway at the time I speak of… From end to end of the Highway and beyond, and through all its tributaries and purlieus everything and everybody was for, by, and of, the sailor ashore; every house and shop was devoted to his convenience and inconvenience; in the Highway it seemed to me that every other house was a tavern, and in several places two stood together. There were shops full of slops, sou’westers, pilot-coats, sea-boots, tin pannikins, and canvas kit-bags like giants’ bolsters; and rows of big knives and daggers. (Chapter 7)

He goes on to describe all the different nationalities of sailors that you see strolling up and down the Highway. On a different expedition grandfather takes him to the sugar dock where he sees piles of sugar bigger than any boy could imagine, and discovers plenty of it lying around crystallised in the street or warehouses and docks, which you can just snap off and suck for free.

The plot

The plot centres round an early version of a MacGuffin. According to Wikipedia:

In fiction, a MacGuffin is a plot device in the form of some goal, desired object, or another motivator that the protagonist pursues, often with little or no narrative explanation. The MacGuffin’s importance to the plot is not the object itself, but rather its effect on the characters and their motivations.

The dying stranger

In The Hole In The Wall, Cap’en Nat, Stevie and a few regulars are in the pub one evening when there’s a sudden bang and grunt against the parlour door. They open it and an unconscious body slumps onto the floor while another figure – which had been stooping over it – leaps up and runs off, with Cap’en Nat in hot pursuit.

It is an inky night so Cap’en Nat can’t see the identity of the figure he pursues down the quayside steps and who jumps into the captain’s own dinghy, casts off and within seconds is lost amid the maze of barges, coalers and lighters moored to the river bank.

Stevie had also given little-boy chase but almost immediately trodden on something soft which he assumed was grandad’s tobacco pouch – the Cap’en had been filling his pipe when the bang on the door happens. So Stevie scoops it up and follows the fleeing figures.

The fugitive gets away, the characters all crowd round the man on the floor who has been stabbed in the chest, puncturing the lung, and he quickly drowns in his own blood. One of the many macabre images which imprints itself on the young boy’s memory.

The fortune in notes

More importantly, when Stevie shows his grandad what he picked up, it turns out to be a notebook containing a huge amount of cash – £800 in white banknotes! This is the MacGuffin or target or goal or treasure, which triggers the complicated action of the second half of the novel.

In scenes which are shocking or upsetting or lurid or conspiratorial, the reader then slowly learns that:

• The brig Stevie’s dad (and Cap’en Nat’s son) was aboard as first mate, the Juno has gone down and he was drowned. But not before they receive a letter from him claiming that the owners want it to sink in order to claim the insurance and that the corrupt captain has tried to run it aground several times, with only Stevie’s dad preventing him. Now (he writes, in his last letter) he is worried that they’ll murder or drug him in his sleep, and do it so he goes down with the ship. Which is what then appeared to happen, according to newspaper reports…
• The Juno was owned by the firm of Viney and Marr. They were teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Their plan was to sink the Juno and quickly claim the insurance money in order to pay off their creditors. But due to the delays caused by Stevie’s dad, and the rumours that spread about the ship (at each port it docked some of the crew jumped ship with stories about its owners’ plans) the insurance money might now be difficult to claim. So the partners had liquidated all their assets and gathered the cash into the pocket book – the one Stevie found.
• But no sooner had they done this than Marr did a runner, betraying his partner Viney and taking all the money. But he didn’t get far. He’d begun drinking in pubs along the Highway and we meet him, very drunk, in a squalid furniture-less thieves den, accompanied by the prostitute known as Musky Mag, serenaded by the sinister blind fiddler, Blind George, and loomed over by the book’s bully-boy murderer, Dan Ogle. Mag picks Marr’s pocket but Dan indicates he wants more than that. Later, three sailors are seen staggering down to the docks, singing and weaving. In fact only two of them are actually walking, supporting the middle figure who appears comatose. It is Marr. They have killed him. (In later scenes, we see Mag alone in the room where the murder took place as night falls and, with Poe-like or Dickensian luridness, she watches the shadows recreate the shape of the black thing which lay there i.e. Marr’s body).
• Having murdered Marr for the pocket book full of notes, Ogle gives the pocket book to an associate to hide somewhere safe but, following him, sees him make for Grandfather Nat’s. Now we have already seen enough through Stevie’s eyes to begin to realise that Cap’en Nat is in fact a ‘fence’, a handler of stolen goods. He is careful about it – dodgy-looking blokes come to the snug bar, show him silvery objects which Stevie only partly sees, and he sends them out again. But tips a wink to a pale quiet man who sits in the corner of the pub all day, who then goes out to negotiate with the bringers of stolen goods. The reader realises that what’s going on is that Nat assesses the loot, then the pale man actually pays for it. Thus, if ever caught or questioned by the police, Cap’en Nat can honestly say that he never pays for stolen goods.
• We learn more about Cap’en Nat’s illicit activities when, in one tense midnight scene, Stevie hears noises and creeps down the stairs from his bedroom in the attic, squeaks open the door into the lumber room – and discovers Cap’en Nat receiving smuggled tobacco, handed up to him through a secret opening in the floorboards of the bit of the pub which overhangs the river, by the lighterman Bill Stagg (chapter 14).
• Back to Ogle following his associate. Ogle realises that his associate was clearly making for Cap’en Nat’s in order to get rid of the hot money (the bank notes had numbers which would be recorded and noticed if handed in to a proper bank). Infuriated, Ogle catches up with him right at the door of the pub, stabs him and is in the middle of getting the pocket book out of his pockets when the door opens and Cap’en Nat gives chase.

All of that is the background to the scene we witnessed, of everyone quietly drinking when there’s a thump at the pub door, the figures slumps into the bar and Cap’en Nat gives chase of the person we now know was Ogle.

So, number one, Marr and Viney are responsible for the death of Cap’en Nat’s son and Stevie’s father. Stevie notices a change come over his granddad, a new bitterness and determination.

• However, it turns out that the crooked ship-owner Viney has something over the Cap’en. Years ago, when Nat was still a sailor, a man was lost overboard on a ship on which he was first mate. The Cap’en insists the drowned sailor was drunk, but Viney says he can bring witnesses to prove that the Cap’en murdered him, by throwing him overboard. The fact that he can be blackmailed and silenced by the man who more or less killed his own son hardens the Cap’en’s heart, but it is very effective that we see this process mostly through the eyes of little Stevie who notices a change come over his revered granddad.
• There’s an added complication in the form of the gaunt harridan of a cleaning lady who the Cap’en employs, Mrs Grimes. Always sneaking around the place, she spies the pocket book being opened and assessed and, in a broadly comic scene, later steals it and tries to smuggle it out of the house in the rubbish scuttle. Unfortunately for her, the drunk artist Mr Cripps is hanging round (as usual) and offers to help the little lady – in order to suck up to the Cap’en – but when he grabs one end of the scuttle and Mrs Grimes refuses to let go of the other, the scuttle tips over and spills out the loot, hidden under the rubbish. Nat sacks her on the spot, with typical graciousness refusing to report her to the police, and giving her a week’s pay. Mrs Grime is a convincing portrait of an embittered harridan and this kindness only drives her to even greater heights of vindictiveness. From now to the end of the book she bends all her energies to ruining the Cap’en anyway she can think of.

A congeries of conspiracies

So the scene is set for the final third of the book to boil down into a very complicated series of manoeuvres between five crooked characters who are all conspiring to regain the pocket book and its £800 and/or ruin the Cap’en – namely Dan Ogle the murderer, his girlfriend Mag, Viney seeking to get his money back, Blind George who knows what is going on and sees the opportunity to squeeze a percentage of the loot for himself, and vindictive Mrs Grimes.

After murdering the unnamed associate on Cap’en Nat’s door, Ogle flees Wapping and is hiding out in the lime works out on the remote marshes towards the River Lea, owned by the brother of Ogle’s brother-in-law. This brother makes his first appearance as a stranger wandering around Wapping, his clothes stained with white lime, and so he is henceforth referred to as ‘the limy man’. The remote setting is a pretext for Morrison to give vivid descriptions of what was then waste land on the edge of London – with one particularly good description of the sun setting over the smog of London in the west.

Out to these remote wastes comes Ogle’s mistress, Mag, with beer and sustenance, though Ogle treats her with all the casual brutality which Bill Sykes shows towards Nancy in Oliver Twist.

Then out to this remote location comes Viney the crooked shipowner, who has learned through the grapevine that Ogle somehow has gotten hold of his money. The pair of crooks have a long interview in which they consider every variation of theft, burglary and mugging of the Cap’en to get the money back, before Ogle settles on a simple plan. Viney will knock on the pub door late one night, after closing time, and when the Cap’en opens, Ogle will step up behind the Cap’en and crack him on the head. Then it will be easy to clean out the pub, not only of the £800 but all the other goods hidden there.

The blinding of Ogle

So far so wicked and corrupt. But there is a big twist in the story. Blind George, the wheedling, whining, calculating blind musician and crook, tipped off as to Ogle’s location, rather improbably taps his way all the way out across the waste marshes and finds Ogle in some half-derelict sheds at the bottom of his brother-in-law’s limeworks. Here he has a lengthy interview with Ogle wherein he, George, tries to bargain for a share of the loot.

Ogle rudely and brutally denies him any involvement and their argument quickly gets out of hand, with Ogle pushing George and George retaliating with his stick which cracks Ogle hard on the wrist and makes him see red. Ogle knocks George to the ground, kicking and punching him till his face is red and bloody. All the while George is yelling out, ‘Attack a blind man, would ye? Wouldn’t be so easy if you was blind, too, then, would it? If we woz both blind I’d give yer a licking’ and so on.

What I hadn’t anticipated is that, after a scene or two back at the pub in order to vary the scene and pace, the narrative returns us to follow a shadowy figure tapping its way across the wasteland the next evening, carrying a sort of sock full of something. Progressing down the muddy banks of the River Lea. Soaking the sock. Then everso quietly going to the door of the ramshackle shed where Ogle is sleeping. Silently lifting the latch. Tiptoeing inside…

And then there is a truly blood-curdling scene – because the figure is Blind George and he is carrying lime which he was soaked in the water in order to turn it into the highly acidic quicklime and, before Ogle can waken, he has thrust two handfuls of quicklime into Ogle’s eyes and holds them there despite the man’s kicking and punching and fighting, holds them there long enough to sear the flesh of his face and to blind Ogle.

Then he lets go and sneaks away from the screaming figure. ‘Now we’re equal, Dan Ogle,’ he mocks. ‘Now you know what it’s like to fight in the dark,’ and he slips away as the limy man comes running from his nearby cottage.

Ogle is taken to the Accident Hospital. Cut to Viney arriving at the hospital after he’s heard the news, to discover Mag in floods of tears. Nonetheless, despite his permanent injury, Viney discovers that Ogle is more determined than ever to get ‘his’ money.

Fiery climax

And so – partly seen through Stevie’s eyes, partly through the third-person narrator – the story builds to its climax. Viney and Ogle go through with their plan. Viney takes Ogle to the alley beside The Hole In The Wall and positions him by a post just a step or two from the back door. Then knocks. The Cap’en answers.

Viney is nervous. The Cap’en has all sorts of reasons to hate him, it is late at night in a dark alley. But to Viney’s astonishment, when he demands the money, instead of arguing a bit, something in Cap’en Nat snaps. Up till now, for the entire time that they’ve had the pocket book, Grandfather Nat has sworn to Stevie that the money is theirs, finders-keepers, there’s no other claimant and that they will use it to pay Stevie through a good public school, kitted out in all the right togs, and make a ‘gentleman’ of him.

But news of the death of his son, and the his last letter which revealed that the shipwreck was all a wicked scheme by Viney and Marr, made the Cap’en, at first, flare up with anger and then… and then… realise he is sick of crime and a life of crime.

Now, to Viney’s amazement he turns, goes up to Stevie’s room and, to Stevie’s dismay, gets the pocket book out from its hiding place and insists that he ‘has to do right’; he has to give it back to its rightful owner.

Back in the alley he hands the pocket book over to Viney but then – seizes him and insists that they’re going to the police with the whole story. The Cap’en will admit he held onto the pocket book and money which wasn’t his, he’ll even come clean about the drowning incident on the boat all those years ago – but he’ll also tell them all about how Viney and Marr conspired to sink the Juno for the insurance money. It’s time for him to come completely clean and make a new start.

Viney whines, complains, argues and then wriggles himself free and sets off down the alleyways towards the Highway, with the Cap’en in hot pursuit. Stevie has watched all this from his bedroom window, pulls on some clothes and also goes haring off after his granddad.

‘Police, police, stop thief’ the Cap’en yells as he runs. When Viney sees a couple of constables approaching over the bridge of the lock which separates the spit of land the Hole In The Wall sits on from the mainland, Viney instead heads for the actual lock gates, which are narrower, much more precarious, and only secured with a low chain (as anyone who’s crossed an English lock knows).

In his panic and in the dark Viney misses the sharp angle where the two lock gates meet, trips over the low chain which always lines locks gates, and plunges into the bubbling water at the foot of the gates, instantly disappearing in the strong undertow.

The Cap’en and Stevie arrive along with the police who’d been crossing the bridge and a crowd of neighbours woken by the hue and cry. But they are still staring down into the bubbles and swirl of water, when others raise a cry. The Hole In The Wall is on fire!

Remember that Ogle had been left by a post deep in the darkness of the alleyway, waiting to strike the Cap’en and equally surprised when Nat simply handed over the money? Well, once everyone ran off, he saw his opportunity and had blundered into the pub in search of goods and money. But, in doing so, he had knocked over the paraffin lantern and the dry old house had gone up like a torch.

Now a huge crowd gathers round the flame-ridden building and watch horrified as a human figure appears shrieking in agony at a window, a human torch. It is Ogle. First blinded, then burned to death. When the fire brigade arrives its sole concern is to protect the neighbouring buildings. The Hole In The Wall is a lost cause. As Stevie laconically records:

And that was the end of the Hole in the Wall: the end of its landlord’s doubts and embarrassments and dangers, and the beginning of another chapter in his history – his history and mine.

A swift half page coda ties up the loose ends. Viney’s body was never found. Ogle’s body was found, burned to a crisp. Humorous Mr Cripps tried to claim insurance for the loss of his priceless works of art. Mrs Grimes continued her vendetta against the Cap’en and was eventually locked up for assaulting a police officer in her frustration. The Hole In The Wall was rebuilt in brick and renamed. The Cap’en, or Captain Nat Kemp to give him his proper name, turns to honest work, enlarging the nearby wharf which he owned and setting up a company of lighters or flat-bottomed barges.

And little Stevie? In a plain sentence which, after so much storm and stress, moved me to tears:

As for me, I went to school at last.

Characters

This feels the most Dickensian of Morrison’s novels. In the Jago life is too brutal for people to be afforded much description. They just fight and steal and sometimes seem a bit interchangeable, in activity and appearance.

What is Dickensian is the way the brutality of this novel is leavened by the innocence and charm of eight-year-old Stevie, which allows Morrison to approach his characters with a bit more genuine humour than in the Jago.

Also the point of the Jago is that its inhabitants are trapped in it, stuck in a very limited space with only occasional outings to Shoreditch High Street or a little further afield as relief, creating a horrible sense of claustrophobia.

By contrast, the characters of the Hole range widely, and the presence of the mighty Thames, the bustling Ratcliffe Highway, the other pubs and alleys, and the wide wasteland towards the River Lea, all this variety of scene somehow allows for more variety and colour among the characters. Grim they may mostly be, but they are more variegated and vivid and lively than the Jagos.

There was one quiet little man in their midst, who, when not eating cake or drinking wine, was sucking the bone handle of a woman’s umbrella, which he carried with him everywhere, indoors and out. He was in the custody of the largest and grimmest of ladies, whom the others called Aunt Martha.

On the victim’s opposite side sat a large-framed bony fellow, with a thin, unhealthy face that seemed to belong to some other body, and dress that proclaimed him long-shore ruffian. The woman called him Dan, and nods and winks passed between the two, over the drooping head between them. Next to Dan was an ugly rascal with a broken nose; singular in that place, as bearing in his dress none of the marks of waterside habits, crimpery and the Highway, but seeming rather the commonplace town rat of Shoreditch or Whitechapel. And, last, a blind fiddler sat in a corner, fiddling a flourish from time to time, roaring with foul jest, and roiling his single white eye upward.

The man’s right eye was closed, but the left was horribly wide and white and rolling, and it quite unpleasantly reminded me of a large china marble that lay at that moment at the bottom of my breeches pocket, under some uniform buttons, a key you could whistle on, a brass knob from a fender, and a tangle of string. So much indeed was I possessed with this uncomfortable resemblance in later weeks, when I had seen Blind George often, and knew more of him, that at last I had no choice but to fling the marble into the river; though indeed it was something of a rarity in marbles

It was anything but a clean face on the head, and it was overshadowed by a very greasy wideawake hat. Grubbiness and unhealthy redness contended for mastery in the features, of which the nose was the most surprising, wide and bulbous and knobbed all over; so that ever afterward, in any attempt to look Mr. Cripps in the face, I found myself wholly disregarding his eyes, and fixing a fascinated gaze on his nose; and I could never recall his face to memory as I recalled another, but always as a Nose, garnished with a fringe of inferior features.

She was scarce an attractive woman, I thought, being rusty and bony, slack-faced and very red-nosed. She swept the carpet and dusted the shelves with an air of angry contempt for everything she touched… ‘Ho!’ interjected Mrs. Grimes, who could fill a misplaced aspirate with subtle offence… It was not long ere I learned that Mrs. Grimes was one of those persons who grumble and clamour and bully at everything and everybody on principle, finding that, with a concession here and another there, it pays very well on the whole; and so nag along very comfortably through life. As for herself, as I had seen, Mrs. Grimes did not lack the cunning to carry away any fit of virtuous indignation that seemed like to push her employer out of his patience.

There was a knock at the back door, which opened, and disclosed one of the purlmen, who had left his boat in sight at the stairs, and wanted a quart of gin in the large tin can he brought with him. He was a short, red-faced, tough-looking fellow, and he needed the gin, as I soon learned, to mix with his hot beer to make the purl. (Bill Stagg)

I was not prepossessed by Mr. Viney. His face – a face no doubt originally pale and pasty, but too long sun-burned to revert to anything but yellow in these later years of shore-life – his yellow face was ever stretched in an uneasy grin, a grin that might mean either propitiation or malice, and remained the same for both. He had the watery eyes and the goatee beard that were not uncommon among seamen, and in total I thought he much resembled one of those same hang-dog fellows that stood at corners and leaned on posts in the neighbourhood, making a mysterious living out of sailors; one of them, that is to say, in a superior suit of clothes that seemed too good for him. I suppose he may have been an inch taller than Grandfather Nat; but in the contrast between them he seemed very small and mean.

Dickens’ influence broods over the whole story. The Hole In The Wall pub reminds me of the The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters pub in Our Mutual Friend. The scenes out on the marshes towards the River Lea remind me of the opening and the ending of Great Expectations. The bully boy Dan Ogle reminds me of Bill Sykes from Oliver Twist and the pathetic devotion of Musky Mag reminds me of the equally ill-rewarded loyalty of Nancy.

The way so much adult brutality is seen and only partially understood by an innocent boy reminds me of Oliver Twist, and also David Copperfield, and Pip. Little Stevie is a very effective creation. We know that little Arthur Morrison grew up near the docks in Poplar on the Isle of Dogs where his dad was an engine-fitter. A lot of Stevie’s impressions and feelings have the force of real experiences and memories.

And the way the narrative is split between Stevie’s innocent point of view and the unadulterated view of the omniscient narrator, reminds me of the similar split between the first-person Esther Summerson chapters and the third-person narrator chapters of Bleak House.

This is a gripping novel – not, maybe, a work of art like Henry James or Joseph Conrad, but with far more psychological penetration and artfulness than Morrison’s detective stories. If you read A Child of the Jago you should read this too.

Sea songs

This is one of the songs performed on the fiddle by Blind George.

Related links

• The Hole in The Wall online

Reviews of other fiction of the 1880s and 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)

E.W. Hornung

• The Amateur Cracksman (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

• King Solomon’s Mines (1885)
• She: A History of Adventure (1887)
• Allan Quatermain (1887)
• Maiwa’s revenge, or The War of The Little Hand (1888)
• Allan’s Wife and Other Tales (1889)
• Nada the Lily (1892)

Sherlock Holmes

• A Study in Scarlet (1887)
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (stories 1891–1892)
• The Sign of the Four (1890)
• The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (stories 1892–1893)

• The Shadows of Sherlock Holmes (a selection of detective stories influenced by Conan Doyle)

Anthony Hope

• The Prisoner of Zenda (1894)
• Rupert of Hentzau (1898)

Arthur Morrison

• Tales of Mean Streets (1894)
• Martin Hewitt, Investigator (1894)
• A Child of the Jago (1896)
• The Dorrington Deed-Box (1897)
• The Hole in The Wall (1902)

Robert Louis Stevenson

• New Arabian Nights (1882)
• Treasure Island (1883)
• The Silverado Squatters (1883)
• More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter (1885)
• The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)
• Kidnapped (1886)
• The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables (1887)
• The Black Arrow (1888)
• The Master of Ballantrae (1889)
• South Sea Tales (1891-93)
• The Wrecker (1892)
• The Ebb-Tide (1894)
• The Amateur Emigrant (1895)
• Weir of Hermiston (1896)

Bram Stoker

• Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)

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)

Oscar Wilde

• The Happy Prince and other stories (1888)
• The Decay of Lying: An Observation (1891)
• The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891)