A Child of the Jago

This novel is 156 pages long but you have to have all the extra 60 pages of notes &amp; glossaries &amp; so forth because of this kind of thing:<br /><br /><i><br />They and their friends resorted to a shop in Meakin Street kept by an “ikey” tailor, there to buy the original out-and-out benjamins, or the celebrated bang-up kicksies, cut saucy, with artful buttons and a double fakement down the sides</i><br /><br />Or<br /><br /><i>Those of the High Mob were the flourishing practitioners in burglary, the mag, the mace, and the broads with an outer fringe of such dippers as could dress well, welshers and snidesmen.</i><br /><br /><br />So this is a short novel of life in the very worst slum in the East End of London around 1890, where the death rate was four times higher than London in general. We follow the fortunes of the Perrott family and it is no spoiler to say that the general drift is down, down, down and down.<br />Morrison veers between broad satire, low comedy, and bald tragedy. He distinctly echoes Dickens’ brilliant sketches of lowlife. Our hero Dicky Perrott learns to become an Artful Dodger character, and his main criminal accomplice is a fence who is surely first cousin of Fagin. <br /><br />In the late Victorian period the astonishing squalor and wretchedness of the East End (and other English slums) became a source of fascination for the army of middle-class do-gooders (parodied here as the East End Elevation Mission and Pansophical Institute) and there were a bundle of books, novels and reportage, published –<br /><br /><i>In Darkest England<br />Homes of the London Poor<br />Workers in the Dawn<br />How the Poor Live<br />Life below the Surface<br />Neighbours of Ours : Slum Stories of London<br />Maggie : A Child of the Streets</i><br /><br />You can see it was a whole genre. <i>A Child of the Jago</i> became maybe the most famous, most read, and most discussed of all of these. <br /><br />By the way, the genre continues into our own times – check out Lou Reed’s great album <i>New York</i> which is a meditation on ghetto life<br /><br /><i>Pedro lives out of the Wilshire hotel<br />He looks out a window without glass<br />The walls are made of cardboard, newspapers on his feet<br />His father beats him cause he’s too tired to beg<br /><br />He’s got 9 brothers and sisters<br />They're brought up on their knees<br />Its hard to run when a coat hanger beats you on the thighs<br />Pedro dreams of being older and killing the old man<br />But that's a slim chance<br />he’s going to the boulevard<br />He’s going to end up, on the dirty boulevard</i><br /><br />(Dirty Boulevard)<br /><br />And Neil Young from his album Freedom<br /><br /><i>I see a woman in the night with a baby in her hand<br />Under an old street light near a garbage can<br />Now she puts the kid away, and she's gone to get a hit<br />She hates her life, and what she's done to it<br />There's one more kid that will never go to school<br />Never get to fall in love, never get to be cool.<br />Keep on rockin' in the free world</i><br /><br />(Rockin’ in the Free World)<br /><br />And you may also check out several movies like <i>Boyz n the Hood, Menace II Society</i> and <i>City of God.</i><br /><br />So none of this has gone away.<br /><br />This bitter novel has a raw energy and is surprisingly nasty. The violence which permeates every facet of slum life is wearing, as is the constant near-starvation. Usually, writers on the underclass turn out to be keeping some kind of patented socialist solution close to hand, to brandish in the closing chapters or to berate the reader with in the introduction. Arthur Morrison had no such beliefs in improvability. He seems to have thought that the slum families were born into Hell and lived in Hell and died in Hell and could never get out of Hell due to their own corrupted natures and the incorrigibility of their environment. A cheerful soul, our Arthur. And yet, why write a novel like this at all if not as a protest? And why protest something which can never be ameliorated?<br />Utterly bleak it may be, but <i>A Child of the Jago</i> was criticized by several writers at the time of pulling its punches.<br /><br />The book grew out of Mr Morrison’s friendship with a pastor who was working in the slums here depicted, and he is the hero of the novel. He really does do a lot of good work. He almost acts as a corrective to the bleak wail of despair which is the rest of the novel. But he’s just one guy. What you are left with is an acrid aftertaste, the sound of broken glass and someone slumped and bleeding in a corner. Rats looking on.

While watching an old ep of Rumpole of the Bailey this book was the star of an ep I thought it was made up but no it really is a good classic.<br />Like the Gangs of New York or The modern Gangbangers of America this set in later part of the dirty Gin slums of underside of London like Martin Chuzzlewit or Oliver Twist the Nightmare on Elm Street of Queen Victorian London the part that no one gave blind fuck about.<br />This been homeless in 1880s when Jack walked this violence of East End.<br />Don't read the intro as it's only if know the story.

This book is much shorter than The Nether World, but follows a very similar storyline and setting, as well as time period.<br /><br />The places where this book takes place truly existed in the East End of London over 100 years ago, but no longer exists as there was a massive slum clearance many many years ago. The area was called ' The old Nichol ', and you can google it and see old maps and if lucky a few old photos taken from the area at the time.<br /><br />Yet another grim, grimy, depressing and miserable story of the East End's sub poor, not just regualar poor, meaning just making ends meet, I mean the type of poor where you may not eat for two days, the infant may sleep on a dirty blanket on the floor, and the wife or common law girlfriend may get a good slap in the mouth when her drunk man comes home and there is no food so no dinner.<br /><br />Despite its grimness, it is in my top 3 favorite books, especially Victorian books about the East End.<br />A++++

Hobsbawm sanayi devriminin toplumsal hayat üzerindeki etkilerini döneme ait bazı edebiyat eserlerinde de gözlemleyebileceğimizi söylüyor. Önerdiği eserler arasında bu kitap da var. <br /><br />Düzenli bir iş bulma ümidini toptan yitirmiş, geleceğe dair hiçbir öngörüsü veya beklentisi olamayan koca bir mahalle dolusu insanın hayatta kalma mücadelesini anlatıyor. Yazar Arthur Morrison bir gazeteciymiş ve bu kitabı 1896’da gazetecilik deneyimine ve gördüklerine dayanarak yazmış. Anlatımı bir parçacık kuru geldi bana ama yine de memnun kaldım. Dönemle özel olarak ilgilenenlere tavsiye ederim.

“The Jago- enclave of squalor and brutality in London’s East End.”<br /><br />If you are interested in reading how the poor fared in the Victorian period (19 th century) in London, then this is a book I would recommend!<br /><br />We meet Dicky Perot, born into the Jago, who dreams of a better life. But it’s hard to escape this life, with little means of work, and barely enough food to exist.<br /><br />The book reminded me of “Oliver Twist”, but without any potential for Dicky to escape his circumstances. The author has captured the brutality and utter hopelessness of the people who lived in the Jago. How they made it through each day was unfathomable.<br /><br />I’d never heard of this author, but I am currently taking a course on Victorian society, and my professor made this book available, as it is a very true and accurate description of the slums as they were in that time.<br /><br />Very well written. Glad I read it.<br />.

A shockingly bleak and realistic portrait of Victorian slum life in Shoreditch. Is there any way the young Dick, the main character, can keep away from the seemingly inevitable life of crime? Every man in the Jago is a criminal (petty or greater), every woman either drinks or drudges, every child knows that there is no way out. Even the saintly (and just about credible) Father Sturt cannot save their souls.<br />Modern crime novels do their best to shock you. Few can hit you as hard as this.

Naturalism has been called the literature of "pessimistic materialistic determinism"...and by golly Arthur Morrison gives us a basinful in <i>A Child of the Jago</i>, his 1896 novel of slum-life in the East End of London. <br /><br />Taking his cue from arch-Naturalist <a href="https://goodreads.com/author/show/4750._mile_Zola" title="Émile Zola" rel="noopener">Émile Zola</a>’s view of mankind as <i>“human beasts”</i>, Morrison tells the story of young Dicky Perrott – doomed at conception to poverty, squalor, ignorance, immorality, and violence thanks to <i>“the grimed walls and foul earth”, “the close, mingled stink”</i> of the Jago slums. <br /><br />This is not so much a novel as a fictionalized anthropological study of an alien underclass by a highly biased observer. The book was dedicated to (and largely commissioned by) Arthur Osborne Jay, a muscular and rather eccentric clergymen who appears in the novel in the guise of Father Sturt. Jay worked in the Old Nichol Street rookery – the model for the fictional Jago – and though he may have done his best to help individuals, took an extraordinarily pessimistic view of his neighbours en masse. In his opinion, they were condemned by their hereditary environment to lives of vice. You just had to look at their bestial and subhuman phrenology. Best to level the slums and transport the residents to some not unpleasant penal settlement, managed so as to ”to stop the supply of persons born to be lazy, immoral, and deficient in intellect”. Eugenics – the scientific answer to the blighted lives of the poor!<br /><br />All this means that, as a piece of fiction, <i>A Child of the Jago</i> is dispiriting. Not so much for its content – some of the slang and period descriptions are lively enough – but for the way its pseudoscientific message is hammered home page after page after page. The deliberately stereotyped characters can never be more than cartoon-like and are led through their predestined paces for the education of the shocked but concerned Victorian reader. A bit of Dickensian sentimentality and good humour wouldn’t have gone amiss – but no such luck. <br /><br /><i>“Here lies the Jago, a nest of rats, breeding, breeding, as only rats can...Is there a child in all this place that wouldn’t be better dead – still better unborn?”</i> Amen to that, says Father Sturt. And so the book beats on till death and slum clearance bring it to a close. Interesting as a piece of period social commentary perhaps, but not much of a literary treat.

Gang violence, running battles with the police, an underclass stealing everything that isn't nailed down? Let's hope Osborne &amp; co haven't read this novel; they'll be using it as a blueprint for our future society.<br /><br />Coming off somewhere between Dickens and Zola, Morrison writes not particularly sympathetically about life in the Victorian Shoreditch slum but posits, against the prevailing belief of the time, that criminality is caused by poverty rather than it being the natural character of the underclass. Morrison died in 1945 so didn't get to see the changes in the East End; how surprised he'd be by Shoreditch nowadays.

Painful story of an impovershed family in London who must lie, steal and murder to feed themselves. Statement on the demoralizing effects of hunger, poverty and ghetto mentality.

This book was an eye-opener for me. Although, set in an English slum in the Victorian era, this story can be applied to dwellers of the inner-city in my own country. <br /><br />It seems that Morrison wants the reader to think about how social class impacts on an individual's destiny. From an early age, Dicky Perrot appeareded to be on a downward spiral, not because he was a bad person but due to the fact that he grew up in an environment that never stimulated positive moral development. Productive ambition was never an option because he did not know that his life could be better until the vicar got him a job. I think this illustrates that children need to be encouraged to dream about success and constantly told that they are capable of achieve such success. His attitude to the new job was heartwarming.<br /><br />Mr. Weech who I would call the main antagonist of the book, selfishly thwarts any dreams that Dicky has of success. At this point of the story, I wished that I could somehown enter the Jago and set things right.<br /><br />The conclusion evoked feelings of discomfort, sadness and weary releif.