Arthur Morrison's Authorial Distance in A Child of the Jago

DOI IR Web Site Open Access

Search this article

Abstract

Arthur Morrison's A Child of the Jago (1896) is a critically acclaimed novel depicting a starkly realistic picture of life on the darkest periphery of the city of London-the late 19th-century East End slums. It is true that with this novel's subject motivating the empathy of the middle-class readers, amelioration of the wretched conditions of the slum attracted their growing interest, but it is interesting to read the distance Morrison-and the "respectable" bourgeoisie he belonged to-maintained from the "residuum," or what they perceived as the lowest stratum of society, in the graphic imagery of such negative elements as abject poverty, crimes, and violence. Although the Jago is essentially composed of the same social structure as the middleclass world in terms of values, the middle-class world tries to reject the Jago as inverted and aberrational. With its searing portrayal of the Jago's inhabitants as a purely degenerate species, the novel strongly exhibits revulsion toward their deformed bodies and dirt. However, this adverse rendition of life in the Jago reflects late 19thcentury London's middle-class anxiety about the dangerous power such as violence and "rat-like fertility" potentially contained within the urban poor. Such ambivalence in Morrison’s attitude toward the inhabitants of the Jago betrays the emotional turmoil raging within him, disallowing him from suppressing his mortal fear of them.

Journal

  • 人文研究

    人文研究 72 43-57, 2021-03-31

    大阪市立大学大学院文学研究科

Related Projects

See more

Keywords

Details 詳細情報について

Report a problem

Back to top