Full Description
"Learn to read and write, learn all you can, learn cunning, spare nobody and stop at nothing. ... Do your devilmost ... for the Jago's got you!" Dicky Perrott, growing up in the notoriously criminal enclave of the Jago, listens and learns. Compelled by his family's circumstances to provide for his mother and siblings, he sharpens his skills as a boy thief. Along the way, he navigates the Jago's topsy-turvy ethics, vacillating between the rival messages of his mentors, a devious local fence and a righteous slum priest. Relentless in its bleakness and violence, A Child of the Jago captures the desperate struggle for survival in 1890s East London.
This Broadview Edition provides the literary, socio-historical, and philosophical contexts vital to readers' understanding and appreciation of the novel. Historical appendices include materials on eugenics, hooliganism, women's sweated labor, cultural philanthropy, and the debate over the novel's accuracy.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Arthur Morrison: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text
A Child of the Jago
Glossary of Slang and Criminal Terms
Appendix A: The Debate over the Novel's Veracity
From H.D. Traill, "The New Fiction" (1897)
From Arthur Osborne Jay, "The New Realism: To the Editor of The Fortnightly Review" (February 1897)
From Arthur Morrison, "What Is a Realist?" (March 1897)
From Harold Boulton, "A Novel of the Lowest Life" (9 January 1897)
From Clementina Black, "A Septet of Stories" (February 1897)
Appendix B: Deciphering the Slum
From Lady Jeune, "The Homes of the Poor" (1894)
From Charles Booth, Labour and Life of the People (1889)
Appendix C: Class and Heredity: Slum Degeneration and Atavism
From Helen Dendy, "The Children of Working London" (1895)
From "To Check the Survival of the Unfit: A New Scheme by the Rev. Osborne Jay, a Militant Bethnal Green Parson, for Sending the Submerged to a Penal Settlement" (12 March 1896)
From Mary Higgs, "Mankind in the Making" (June 1906)
Appendix D: On Eugenic Discourse in A Child of the Jago
From H.G. Wells, "A Slum Novel" (28 November 1896)
From "The Children of the Jago: Slum Life at Close Quarters: A Talk with Mr. Arthur Morrison" (12 December 1896)
Appendix E: Restless Energies
From Reginald A. Bray, "The Children of the Town" (1901)
From C.F.G. Masterman, "Of the Hooligan" (1902)
From Arthur Osborne Jay, Life in Darkest London (1891)
Appendix F: Women and Match-Box Making at Home
From Clementina Black, "Match-Box Making at Home" (May 1892)
From Raphael Samuel, ed., East End Underworld: Chapters in the Life of Arthur Harding (1981)
Match-Box Making at Home (c. 1900)
Appendix G: A Nichol Boyhood
From Raphael Samuel, ed., East End Underworld: Chapters in the Life of Arthur Harding (1981)
Appendix H: Middle-Class Views on Working-Class Economic Practices
From Octavia Hill, "A Few Words to Volunteer Visitors among the Poor" (1877)
From Helen Dendy Bosanquet, "The Burden of Small Debts" (1896)
From Maude Pember Reeves, Round about a Pound a Week (1913)
Appendix I: Cultural Philanthropy
From Samuel A. Barnett, "The Universities and the Poor" (February 1884)
From Walter Besant, All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882)
From Jack London, The People of the Abyss (1903)
Appendix J: Maps of the Area
Boundary Street Scheme, Plan No. 26: Map of the Nichol
Boundary Street Scheme, Plan No. 27: Plan for the Boundary Street Estate
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