SOURCE: “Arthur Morrison's East End of London,” in Victorian Writers and the City, edited by Jean-Paul Hulin and Pierre Coustillas, De l'universite de lile III, 1979, pp. 147-82.

In the following essay, Krzak describes Morrison's personal and professional connections to London's East End.

Arthur Morrison, who died in December 1945 at the age of 82, is still described as a native of Kent in many reference books—for instance in the 1974 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica—despite new data found notably in P. J. Keating's introduction to the 1969 edition of A Child of the Jago. Such an indication is unfortunate since it may lead readers to think that his was an outsider's picture of London.

We may wonder what prompted Arthur Morrison to provide false information about his origins to Who's Who's first biographical enquiry in 1897, at a time when he was an established short-story writer and the novelist of A...