ABSTRACT
Morrison was never merely an observer of late-Victorian social reform. Born in Poplar in the London docks in 1863, Morrison’s early life was touched by the efforts of religious and charitable institutions to uplift children like himself from the poverty and drudgery of everyday life in the East End. His social mobility demonstrates an unusual fluidity between being the problem which such interventions were designed to solve, and embodying and critiquing its solution. In the first part of this chapter, I outline his childhood in Poplar and his family’s history in the docks. I examine some of the literature written about Poplar and Ratcliff from this period, noting themes and patterns which Morrison mirrored, often satirically, in his own writing. Morrison’s efforts to disguise his origins are evident in some of his turn-of-the-century non-fiction writings. The irresistible pull of Ratcliff Highway, however, later revealed more about Morrison’s boyhood than has commonly been assumed to have been public knowledge. A fondness and nostalgia for the city of his youth, as well as a critical view of ‘improvements’ to it, I argue, informed Morrison’s complex representations of the East End in his own writing.
