Arthur Morrison: Social Sensationalist?

Arthur Morrison was an English writer who grew up in the East End of London in the mid 19^th century. When he became a published author, he hid his working-class background but still took an interest in sharing the living conditions of the poor to a broader audience. He began submitting sketches and short pieces to the Cockney Corner, fueling public interest in Victorian crime and poverty. His most popular work was A Child of the Jargo (1896, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Child_of_the_Jago#/media/File:The_Old_Jago.jpg).

A Child of the Jargo is now regarded as a fictionalization of the Old Nichol slum in the later 19^th century. But Jargo portrays slum light in a different manner than Dicken’s novels do; Morrison seems to sensationalize the crime aspect of the Victorian slums. This may have something to do with the date of publication, for Morrison submitted his work after the Ripper murders and “the deviant criminal (as opposed to the criminal who wears the trappings of respectability) functions as the absolute other that seemingly stabilizes the boundaries of normalcy, while symbolically posing the threat of degeneration to a self-proclaimed civilized and progressive society” (Swafford, “Translating the Slums: The Coding of Criminality and the Grotesque in Arthur Morrison’s “’A Child of the Jago,’” p. 50). Therefore, one could argue that the Ripper murders shifted slum literature from one of social commentary to one of social sensationalism.

A deeper look at Morrison’s writing style suggests that he did not believe in philanthropy efforts for the lower class. The best option was to clear the poor neighborhoods and displace the impoverished because “Morrison saw the slum as a socially deviant culture that had to be radically eradicated” (Diniejko, “Arthur Morrison’s Slum Fiction: The Voice of New Realism,” 2011). This too is a different approach to poverty than Dickens, which allows scholars to further understand the hidden social objectives of Dickens’ works.