Arthur Morrison and the East End

Eliza Cubitt received her BA and MA from King’s College London, and was awarded a PhD from UCL in 2016. She has published work on Morrison, W. Somerset Maugham and Margaret Harkness. She has taught at UCL and at Universität Tübingen, Germany. Since 2014, she has been a committee member of the Literary London Society.

Introduction.



I. Arthur Morrison (1863-1945): An East End Writer



II. ‘The Pure Fame of the Place’: The Unreal Victorian Slum



III. ‘Who Knows Arthur Morrison?’



IV. The Problem of Realism: Whose Reality is it Anyway?



V. The Legacy of Slum Fictions



Chapter 1. Poplar and Ratcliff



I. Arthur Morrison: ‘Another Coming Man.’



II. ‘The Scenes of his Wondering Childhood’: 1863-1887



III. On Being Ministered To: ‘A Grateful People’



IV. In Darkest Dockland and the Way Out



Chapter 2. Whitechapel



I. Writing the Victorian East End



II. ‘Cockney Corners’: Sketches of the East End



III. Sketches of Whitechapel, 1872-1889



Chapter 3. Mile End



I. The People’s Palace: A ‘possibility, a certainty and a fact.’



II. At the Palace, Looking West.



III. From Mile End to The Strand.



IV. ‘Henley’s Regatta’



V. The Pursuit of Happiness



Chapter 4. Limehouse and Stratford



I. ‘A Street’ and the reappraisal of the Slum



II. Behind the Doors: Dangerous Domesticity



III. ‘Behind the Shade’: Gossip and the Silenced



IV. Regions of Strange Order



V. Becoming ‘them’: The Reception of Tales



Chapter 5. Shoreditch, Bethnal Green and the ‘Jago’



I. Father Jay and the Nichol Slum in fiction



II. Creative reconstruction: Morrison’s ‘Jago’ and the Boundary Street Scheme



Chapter 6. Blackwall and the Docks



I. Repenting for Realism



II. Landscapes of the Mind: Epping and Blackwall in To London Town (1899).



III. ‘Romance and squalor’: The Hole in the Wall (1902).



Chapter 7. Return to the East End



I. ‘I foresaw a story’: The Bathos of the Journalist-Narrator in Divers Vanities (1905).



II. Heads and Tales: London and Elsewhere



III. ‘I knew the place, indeed’: Return to the Mean Streets



IV. The inescapable Jago: Literary Hauntings



V. ‘The Story that I am to Tell Again’: Folk Realism



Conclusion.



I. ‘My Own Country’: Rewriting the East End



II. The Duty of the Respectable: the Self-Made man of letters



III. ‘Another Way Out’: "The Farthest East"



IV. Afterwords: ‘To correct your recollections…’



V. ‘Well now, Arthur Morrison, how to put into words?’