SOURCE : A review of "A Child of the Jago," in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 160, December, 1896, pp. 841-44.

In the following essay, the critic questions why the reading public would want to expose itself to the "den of horrors" detailed in A Child of the Jago.

Mr Arthur Morrison's work [A Child of the Jago] is [a] development of the New School. It is not a piece of deliberately constructed pessimism (which is the fashionable word), like the horrible story of the Carissima, in which there is so little trace of a real story to tell, or any natural impulse, and so much of elaborate manufacture. Mr Morrison's method is different. He does not attempt to horrify us by the sudden apparition of the demon under an exterior made up of all the attractive graces. There is nothing attractive at all in the world which he opens to our...