A Child of the Jago

Description

'If the community have left horrible places and horrible lives before his eyes, then the fault is the community's: and to picture these places and these lives becomes not merely his privilege, but his duty.' The Jago was a corner of Shoreditch, notorious as the filthiest of London's late nineteenth-century slums. In his second East End work, Arthur Morrison brings to life all the squalor of this area - among those whose only commandment was 'thou shall not nark' - through the life of little Dicky Perrot, who fought and stole and loved his family like the rest of them. With the help of the respected Father Sturt, Dicky tries to earn an honest living as a shop assistant, but the bubble of his new pride and responsibility is soon burst, through no fault of his, but because no one makes good in the Jago.

Arthur George Morrison (1863-1945) was born and raised in the East End of London. His journalism was first published in the Globe in 1885 and he then worked as a clerk to the Beaumont Trustees, becoming sub-editor of the house paper, the Palace Journal. He left at the end of 1890 to join the editorial staff of the evening Globe before publishing his first book, The Shadows around Us, a collection of supernatural tales, in 1891. It is his acclaimed and controversial East End works though, Tales of Mean Streets (1894), A Child of the Jago (1896), and The Hole in the Wall (1902), for which he is best known.