Literary historians have nearly forgotten Edwin Pugh. During the late 1890s, however, he (along with W. Pett Ridge, Arthur Morrison, and Richard Whiteing, also obscure writers today) published some well-received essays, short stories, and novels in the realist tradition, or, more specifically, in the Cockney School. Although Pugh's popularity as a writer was brief and the Cockney School's influence on later fiction is slight, his works are interesting as examples of realistic fiction as practiced by a working-class man.

Edwin William Pugh was born a Londoner, less than four years after the death of Charles Dickens, on 27 January 1874. Like Dickens, Pugh was greatly interested in working-class London, which during his youth was still (as Vincent Brome notes in Four Realist Novelists , 1965) "a London where the streets were gas lit, hansom cabs plied for hire, women wore skirts to the ground, men rode penny-farthing bicycles and Gladstone dominated the...