ABSTRACT
In To London Town (1899) and The Hole in the Wall (1902), Morrison departs from the representation of the city as a dangerous trap, its children as harbingers of doom. In these texts, indeed, he reveals that the city is a place of possibility, wherein young, vital people can overcome any hazards they are presented with. This reconfiguration relies, in To London Town, on contrasts with the countryside which draw upon a pre-Victorian understanding of the city as a place of greater safety. In The Hole in the Wall, Morrison evokes nostalgia for docklands of the 1860s, representing notorious areas as viewed through the eyes of an innocent but interested child. In these texts, the environmental determinism of the Jago is set aside. Rather than representing the debasement of the entire city, the orphan boys in these later works not only survive in the East End, but thrive there, despite witnessing and even participating in violence and criminality. Youth, in these novels, is no longer the ‘persistent motif’ of social problems, but the promise of modernity (Miles, ‘Introduction’ to Jago, p. xix).
