Arthur Morrison

Tales of Mean Streets Arthur Morrison

Publisher Marketing: This street is in the East End. There is no need to say in the East End of what. The East End is a vast city, as famous in its way as any the hand of man has made. But who knows the East End? It is down through Cornhill and out beyond Leadenhall Street and Aldgate Pump, one will say: a shocking place, where he once went with a curate; an evil plexus of slums hat hide human creeping things; where filthy men and women live on pennorths of gin, where collars and clean shirts are decencies unknown, where every citizen wears a black eye, and none ever combs his hair. The East End is a place, says another, which is given over to the unemployed. And the unemployed is a race whose token is a clay pipe, and whose enemy is soap: now and again it migrates bodily to Hyde Park with banners, and furnishes adjacent police courts with disorderly drunks. Still another knows the East End only as a place whence begging letters come; there are coal and blanket funds there, all perennially insolvent, and everybody always wants a day in the country. Many and misty are people's notions of the East End; and each is commonly but the distorted shadow of a minor feature. Foul slums there are in the East End, of course, as there are in the West; want and misery there are, as wherever a host is gathered together to fight for food. But they are not often spectacular in kind. Contributor Bio:  Morrison, Arthur Morrison (1863-1945) was born and grew up in the East End of London. He became a journalist and author, most famous for his slum fiction books chronicling the stories of London's poor, Tales of the Mean Streets (1894), A Child of the Jago (1896), and The Holes in the Wall (1902). He later became a noted collector and expert of Japanese Art. In addition, he was also the author of the twenty-five Martin Hewitt stories, originally collected in four volumes between 1894 and 1903. David Marcum is the author of The Papers of Sherlock Holmes in two volumes "The Papers of Sherlock Holmes by David Marcum contains nine intriguing mysteries...very much in the classic tradition... He writes well, too."The Sherlock Holmes Society of London. "Marcum offers nine clever pastiches."The Baker Street Journal