Tales of Mean Streets

Tales of Mean Streets
by Arthur Morrison
Preface by H. L. Mencken Copyright 1921, by Boni & Liveright, Inc.
Manufactured in the USA for the Modern Library, Inc., by H. Wolff

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Table of Contents
Lizerunt
Without Visible Means
To Bow Bridge
That Brute Simmons
Behind the shade
Three Rounds
In Business
The Red Cow Group
On The Stairs
Squire Napper
A Poor Stick
A Conversion

All that Messuage

* * *
PREFACE.
After a quarter of a century these, brief and searching tales of Arthur
Morrison's still keep the breath of life in them--modest but precious
salvages from the high washings and roarings of the eighteen-nineties.
The decade--the last of the Victorian age, as of the century--was so
fecund that some Englishman has spread out its record to the
proportions of a book. It was a time of youngsters, of literary rebellions,
of adventures in new forms. No great three-decker sailed out of it, but
what a host there was of smaller craft, rakish and impudent--the first
'Jungle Book,' the 'Dolly Dialogues,' 'The Second Mrs. Tanqueray,' the
first plays and criticisms of George Bernard Shaw, 'Sherlock Holmes,'
the matriculation pieces of H.G. Wells, Jerome K. Jerome, Hewlett,
'Dodo' Benson, Hichens and so on, and all the best of Gissing and
Wilde. Think of the novelties of one year only, 1894: 'The Green
Carnation,' 'Salomé,' 'The Prisoner of Zenda,' the 'Dolly Dialogues,'
Gissing's 'In the Year of jubilee,' the first 'Jungle Book,' 'Arms and the
Man,' 'Round the Red Lamp,' and, not least, these 'Tales of Mean
Streets.'
In the whole lot there was no book or play, save it be Wilde's 'Salomé,'
that caused more gabble than the one here printed again, nor was any
destined to hold its public longer. 'The Prisoner of Zenda, ' chewed to
bits on the stage, is now almost as dead as Baal; not even the stock
companies in the oil towns set any store by it. So with 'The Green
Carnation,' 'Round the Red Lamp,' the 'Dolly Dialogues,' and even
'Arms and the Man,' and, I am almost tempted to add, the 'Jungle
Book.' But 'Tales of Mean Streets' is still on its legs. People read it, talk
about it, ask for it in the bookstores; periodically it gets out of print.
Well, here it is once more, and perhaps a new generation is ready for it,
or the older generation--so young and full of fine enthusiasm in
1894!--will want to read it again.

The causes of its success are so plain that they scarcely need pointing
out. It was not only a sound and discreet piece of writing, with people
in it who were fully alive; there was also a sort of news in it, and even a
touch of the truculent. What the news uncovered was something near
and yet scarcely known or even suspected: the amazing life of the
London East End, the sewer of England and of Christendom. Morrison,
in brief, brought on a whole new company of comedians and set them
to playing novel pieces, tragedy and farce. He made them, in his light
tales, more real than any solemn Blue Book or polemic had ever made
them, and by a great deal; he not only created plausible characters, but
lighted up the whole dark scene behind them. People took joy in the
book as fiction, and pondered it as a fact. It got a kind of double fame,
as a work of art and as social document--a very dubious and dangerous
kind of fame in most cases, for the document usually swallows the
work of art. But here the document has faded, and what remains is the
book.
At the start, as I say, there was a sort of challenge in it as well as news:
it was, in a sense, a flouting of Victorian complacency, a headlong leap
into the unmentionable. Since Dickens' time there had been no such
plowing up of sour soils. Other men of the decade, true enough, issued
challenges too, but that was surely not its dominant note. On the
contrary, it was rather romantic, ameliorative, sweet-singing; its high
god was Kipling, the sentimental optimist. The Empire was flourishing;
the British public was in good humor; life seemed a lovely thing. In the
midst of all this the voice of Morrison had a raucous touch of it. He was
amusing and interesting, but he was also somewhat disquieting, and
even alarming. If this London of his really existed--and inquiry soon
showed that it did--then there was a rift somewhere in the lute, and a
wart on the graceful body politic.
Now all such considerations are forgotten, and there remains only the
book of excellent tales. It has been imitated almost as much as 'Plain
Tales From the Hills,' and