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Summary

This edition includes the following editor's introduction: Poverty in London during the splendorous Victorian Era


Originally published in 1896, “A Child of the Jago” is a novel by English author Arthur Morrison, a bestseller in its time.

“A Child of the Jago” tells the story of Dick Perrot, born and bred in the Jago; but it is also a brilliant portrait of the community. The Jago is a London slum where crime and violence are the only way of life, and from which there is no escape for the inhabitants.

Only the characters themselves are fictional: Morrison's descriptions of the fearful physical conditions are based directly on what he saw. He conjures up an extraordinarily vivid picture of a world which, even as he wrote, was about to vanish in one of the first of the slum clearance schemes. Actually, the Old Jago was a fictionalisation of the Old Nichol, a slum located between Shoreditch High Street and Bethnal Green Road in the East End of London.

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