ABSTRACT
Describing the East End in 1773, topographer John Noorthouck wrote that ‘these parishes in general close and ill-built afford little worthy of observation’. For nineteenth-century journalists, reformers and slum fiction writers, however, it was precisely the close, ill-built houses and the struggle for life in these overcrowded places that fascinated and entranced. The idea of the late-Victorian slum encapsulated a fear of the poor, which was: no longer the fear and loathing of the riotous and criminal urban poor of the first Victorian age, or the anthropological curiosity of the second, it was a fear that an isolated, undernourished, diseased yet hedonistic and feckless working mass was dragging down the country and threatening the decline of Britain and the Empire. In 1967, P. J. Keating mooted that ‘Arthur Morrison’s position in the history of the English novel is firmly fixed and is unlikely to enjoy any major re-evaluation’.
