Arthur Morrison

Arthur Morrison (born Nov. 1, 1863, London, Eng.—died Dec. 4, 1945, Chalfont St. Peter, Buckinghamshire) was an English writer noted for realist novels and short stories describing slum life in London’s East End at the end of the Victorian era.

Morrison, himself born in the East End, began his writing career in 1889 as subeditor of the journal of the People’s Palace, an institution designed to bring culture into the London slums. In 1890 he became a freelance journalist and in 1892 a regular contributor to William Ernest Henley’s National Observer, in which most of the stories in Morrison’s first major work, Tales of Mean Streets (1894), originally appeared. A Child of the Jago (1896) and To London Town (1899) completed this East End trilogy. Morrison published another powerful novel of slum life, The Hole in the Wall, in 1902. His realistic novels and stories are sober in tone, but the characters are portrayed with a Dickensian colourfulness. His attitude toward the people he described was paternalist, rather than radical, and he opposed socialism and the trades-union movement. He also wrote detective fiction that featured the lawyer-detective Martin Hewitt, published primarily in the Strand magazine (1894–96); it was the most successful rival to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.

An authority on and collector of Chinese and Japanese art, Morrison also published the authoritative Painters of Japan (1911).