Photographic Realism and the “Ragged Boy” in Arthur Morrison's A Child of the Jago (1896), To London Town (1899), and The Hole in the Wall (1902)

The ragged boy, a subject of fascination for the nascent art of photography in the late-nineteenth century, was repeatedly represented: of indeterminate age, obscured with dirt, this urban character appears in Oscar Gustave Rejlander’s “Homeless” (1860), John Thomson’s “Little Mic-Mac Gosling” (1877), and Jacob Riis’s New York “Street Arabs” (1893). In this chapter, Cubitt argues that Morrison’s realist aesthetic uncovers not “kodak fidelity,” but the unreality of photography. Reading the photographic into Morrison’s boy protagonists, whose appearances are blurred, limited, and obfuscated, Cubitt suggests that Morrison disrupts contemporary visual representations and thereby problematizes the commodification of the ragged boy.