ABSTRACT
Morrison’s 1894 collection Tales of Mean Streets presents a rejoinder to the impression of the East End as wholly consisting of a slum, but observes a new menace. The quiet, bleak, endless streets of Limehouse, Canning Town and Stratford are threatening not because of their antipathy to ordinary Victorian ideals of respectability and gentility, but for the unequivocal embrace of these. The fear inspired by Tales was not the one the public had become accustomed to, whereby the horrific state of the slums would inspire vengeance, radicalism and social instability. Rather, it was that adherence to middle-class standards of behaviour could produce outwardly decent, privately violent people. In the relentless monotony of the East End streets, the destructiveness of conformity is unavoidable, but rebelliousness from conformity also offers nothing. The problem of the immorality of poverty is redefined: it is the immorality of gentility that prevails in Morrison’s East End. Attempting to redress a sensational view of the East End in this text, Morrison nonetheless angered East Enders with what was seen as another derogatory, outsider’s view.
