SOURCE : A review of "Tales of Mean Streets," in The Spectator, Vol. 74, No . 3480, March 9, 1895, pp. 329-30.

In the following review, critic praises Tales of Mean Streets, but contends that Morrison's characters are not typical of London's East End dwellers.

These tales [Tales of Mean Streets.] paint with a marvellous literary skill and force the life which the author by implication alleges to be the normal life of the London poor. Were this the East-End, the whole of the East-End, and were the East-End nothing but this, then indeed are we of all men most miserable. If the squalor, the cruelty, the drunkenness, the deadly and grinding monotony, the total lack of all that is wholesome and loveable in human nature, here so vividly depicted, were really typical of the poorer streets of London, we should have to admit that we are face to face with a moral situation...