MORRISON, Arthur.
Tales of Mean Streets. Lizerunt, Squire Napper, Without Visible Means, Three Rounds and Others …
Methuen & Co. … London, 1894.
8vo., pp. 301, [3], 32 (publisher’s catalogue for October 1894); slightly skewed, but a good copy in the original green publisher’s cloth, gilt lettering; ownership signatures of Leonard Whibley and (in pencil) George ‘Dadie’ Rylands.
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Tales of Mean Streets. Lizerunt, Squire Napper, Without Visible Means, Three Rounds and Others …
First edition of Morrison’s second book. Born into a working-class family in Poplar, Morrison was first employed at the People’s Palace in Mile End, and then as a journalist for the evening Globe. His first book, The Shadows around Us (1891), comprised supernatural tales first printed in The People. He began to contribute to Macmillan’s and the National Observer unsentimental sketches of the East End, drawn from a personal experience he attempted to conceal behind the fiction of middle-class birth. Collected as Tales of Mean Streets, the work was a commercial success, but there was critical backlash against its violence, in particular that of ‘Lizerunt’, a story of wife-beating and prostitution. He continued to explore the squalor of East End life in his powerful novels The Child of the Jago (1896) and The Hole in the Wall (1902).
Leonard Whibley, who has signed the title-page, worked as an editor at Methuen during its formative period, possibly handling the publication of Morrison’s early work. In 1896 he left for Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he was a classics fellow until his death in 1941. Dadie Rylands, one of the Cambridge Apostles and an early employee of the Hogarth Press, was a fellow at King’s, Cambridge, from 1927 until his death in 1999.
Wolff 4949.
