SOURCE : "An East End Novelist," in The Living Novel & Later Appreciations, revised edition, 1964. Reprint by Vintage Books, 1967, pp. 206-12.

In the following essay, which was first published in 1947, Pritchett praises Morrison's realistic storytelling.

"And the effect is as of stables." My eye has been often baffled by lack of the word which would define the poor streets of the East End, as they used to be before the last war; and here in Arthur Morrison's Tales of Mean Streets which were written in 1894,1 find it. Those acres of two-story houses which lay below the level of the railway arches of Bethnal Green and which stood like an alien stretch of unfeatured plowing beyond the Commercial Road, are particularized at last. The mind has won a foothold in a foreign city.

For, east of Aldgate, another city begins. London flattens and sinks into its clay. Over those lower dwellings...