Clarence Rook was a journalist, novelist, and writer of short, witty sketches of Edwardian London and its inhabitants. Bernard Shaw praised Rook as a "very clever fellow"; and Rook was most admired for his novel of working-class life, The Hooligan Nights (1899), an evocative, irreverent portrait of a young petty criminal, Alf, and his felonious and amorous adventures. As a chronicler of the slums of London's East End, Rook takes his literary and historical place among such eminent contemporaries as George Gissing, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Morrison, and Sir Walter Besant--writers of fiction, nonfiction, and semifiction in the literature of urban life popular in Britain during the 1880s and 1890s.

It is virtually impossible to determine how Rook came to his fascination for stories of London life. "Few authors of the period can have vanished as effectively as Rook," writes Benny Green in his introduction to the 1979 edition of The...