ABSTRACT
Reviewing Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago, H. G. Wells noted a new concern in English fiction: ‘The son of the alcoholic proletarian, the apparently exhausted topic of Dr Barnardo, has suddenly replaced the woman with the past in the current novel ... It is indisputable that the rediscovery of Oliver Twist is upon us.’ 1 Together with Morrison’s novel Wells had in mind James Barrie’s Sentimental Tommy and S. R. Crockett’s Cleg Kelly: Arab of the City, all three of which were published in 1896; and beyond these specific works he was pointing out that not since the 1840s had there been such a widespread desire to write fiction centred upon working-class life. The young Dickens was a more natural point of comparison than Mrs Gaskell or Disraeli. Like Dickens the novelists of the nineties wrote primarily about London: their work dealt with the poor of a great metropolis rather than the industrial workers of northern manufacturing cities, with slums and streets rather than factories. The slum novelists were themselves aware of this affinity with Dickens, though while they usually expressed great admiration for his work, they also felt that one of their tasks was to bring him up to date. The ambiguous position this placed them in was well understood by George Gissing, one of Dickens’s most enthusiastic late-Victorian admirers:
It is a thankless task to write of such a man as Dickens in disparaging phrase. I am impatient to reach that point of my essay where I shall be at liberty to speak with admiration unstinted, to dwell upon the strength of the master’s work, xand exalt him where he is unsurpassed. But it is necessary to clear the way. So great a change has come over the theory and practice of fiction in the England of our times that we must needs treat of Dickens as, in many respects, antiquated. 2
