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3:AM Reloaded

Arthur Morrison

What you (may have) missed on 3:AM recently:

Fiction: ‘The Wood Tick’ by Adam Graupe

Reviewed: Andrew Coates on David Szalay’s The Innocent, Richard Marshall on Laura Oldfield Ford’s Savage Messiah zine, Max Dunbar on Shahriar Mandanipour’s Censoring an Iranian Love Story & John Houghton on Arthur Morrison’s The Child of the Jago of 1896 and its contemporary relevance:

The experience of reading the book today, in the papyrically fragile pages of the 1946 Penguin edition, is to be transported back to a dead age, and yet be struck by how pitifully little our collective ability to describe and discuss life in poor places has moved on from the assumptions and prejudices of Morrison’s day.

Like many fact-based but fictionalised accounts of Victorian poverty, there is a dual sentimentality at work in The Child of the Jago. Morrison’s portrayal of his central characters is essentially sympathetic. Young Dicky learns very quickly that the only way to survive is to “spare nobody and stop at nothing”. Yet he is constantly troubled by the harm his thieving causes others, as symbolised by the Ropers’ stolen clock, which is given an almost Freudian resonance. His attempt to escape the Jago with a legit job, in which he takes great pride, is thwarted not by any personal defect but by the seemingly endless hunger of the slum to drag its children back into its maw.

In other passages, Morrison’s descriptions of drunken courtyard brawls, promiscuous family arrangements and pitched mob battles serve a more salacious purpose. The characters who are not the focus of the author’s pity are much more venal than the just-about-salvageable Perrots. As Orwell put it in his essay on Charles Dickens, the heroes are saved, but the author “delights in describing scenes in which the “dregs” of the population behave with atrocious bestiality” and the general description of slum life gives “the impression of whole submerged populations whom he regards as being beyond the pale”.

Through this second descriptive method, which plays on a very different emotional register, Morrison like Dickens give his readers a vicarious thrill and allows them to sidestep any moral responsibility. If only these people would stop stabbing and fucking each other, then we could help them.

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