Arthur Morrison

Arthur George Morrison (born November 1, 1863 in London , † December 4, 1945 in Chalfont St Peter , Buckinghamshire ) was an English journalist , writer and art dealer .

Live and act

Early years

Arthur Morrison

Arthur Morrison was the son of a steam engine mechanic and was born in the Poplar district in east London. His father died in an industrial accident before Arthur was seven years old. As a widow, his mother had to support her three children on her own; she ran a small dry goods store. Little is known about Morrison's childhood and youth because he tried all his life to disguise his proletarian origins from the East End of London and even gave false information on official documents. What is certain is that the skinny youngster was enthusiastic about cycling and boxing and spent a lot of time in the antiquarian bookshops on Whitechapel Road. There was not enough money to attend a high school or university, which is why he continued his self-taught education.

In 1879 he was hired as an office assistant by an architect for the London School Board. In the course of five years he made it to the third-class clerk (for example: third-class registry). He also wrote articles for newspapers and magazines. A humorous poem for the bicycle magazine Cycling in 1880 already heralded his literary inclination, but at that time his goal was to become a journalist . In 1885 he moved, presumably through the mediation of his employer, to the People's Palace and worked for several years as the secretary of this welfare project, which was to act as a center for education and culture for the underprivileged population of the East End. In 1888 he was given permission to use the reading room of the British Museum.

Journalist and author

In March 1889 he was appointed editor of the in-house weekly Palace Journal , which Walter Besant published. In this role he learned everything about the journalistic craft and the practice of newspaper making. He has written articles on local issues and places in London that already demonstrated his vivid sign skills. When the Palace Journal got into financial difficulties in 1890, he applied to the London evening newspaper The Globe and was accepted. In addition to his journalistic work, he wrote stories about paranormal phenomena for People magazine . A selection of these appeared under the title The Shadows Around Us as his first book. At the end of 1891, Morrison was apparently convinced that he could live “on the pen” and support a family: He quit the Globe , became a freelance journalist and in August married Elizabeth Thatcher, a teacher he had met at the People's Palace. His professional success and her salary enabled the couple to move from London - to Chingfort in Essex , where their only child, Guy, was born in 1893.

In the 1890s, Morrison established himself as a writer. He was supported in this by the poet and playwright William Ernest Henley , who was then the editor of the National Observer and an influential man in the literary scene. Henley took Morrison under his wing and commissioned him to write realistic stories about life in the East End - a landmark impetus for the young writer. This is how the anthology Tales of Mean Streets came into being, from which the laconic short story Lizerunt caused particular excitement in the Victorian reading public: It tells of the 17-year-old factory worker Elizabeth Hunt, who marries a man who soon turns out to be a work-shy drifter and petty criminal and bullies her and suggests, taking her wages and sending her to the streets when she becomes unemployed after the third child.

Mercilessly open, almost emotionless descriptions of the dreary living conditions in the East End, the repulsive sides of misery, violence and human brutality, also characterize his novels A Child of The Jago (1896), To London Town (1899) and The Hole in the Wall (1902), which is why he was called "the English Zola" and is now considered the founder of modern slum literature. A Child of The Iago was considered particularly brutal and perhaps even dangerous . - While in Reading Penitentiary in 1896, Oscar Wilde ordered a reading copy of the novel. He didn't get it, probably because of the detailed descriptions of robberies, trick thefts, and break-ins it contained.

Another favorable factor for Morrison's literary career was the 'tragedy' that Arthur Conan Doyle suddenly broke off his Sherlock Holmes series in late 1893. ( The Final Problem , in which the "advisory" detective falls in a fight with Professor Moriarty in the great Reichenbach Falls above Meiringen in Switzerland, appeared in the December issue of Strand Magazine ). Herbert Greenaugh Smith, the publisher of the popular magazine, was desperately looking for a similar follow-up series of detective stories and talked to several authors, including Morrison, who had been writing articles for the magazine since 1892. He delivered promptly: just two months later his first Hewitt story appeared in Strand Magazine . The Hewitt series, initially even provided with drawings by Holmes illustrator Sidney Paget , was a complete success with readers and also met the publisher's expectations. The new detective became one of the sharpest rivals of Sherlock Holmes, albeit without achieving his popularity - he was far too "normal" with his appearance and demeanor. (The common man as an investigator was not to prevail until much later, with Georges Simenon's inspector Maigret .) Martin Hewitt does not have a highly specialized mastermind like Sherlock Holmes (which is compared to a racing engine), he is not a “thinking machine” like Professor van Dusen , but a jovial, sociable, somewhat overweight man with a round, friendly face who solves his cases with close observation and common sense. Morrison consistently refrained from romantic exaggerations at Hewitt. He broke with the traditional cult of genius around the detective figure, giving it more average - more human - traits; this is his literary historical merit.

Morrison's second serial detective - Horace Dorrington , fell completely out of the ordinary, at least by the standards of a hundred years ago . He's not a law-abiding citizen, but a completely amoral lawyer who doesn't even shy away from a murder assignment in order to appropriate a client's property. He behaves completely opportunistically : depending on what is most useful to him, he works either for or against his clients. Sometimes, however, he fails to go it alone and he stands there as a betrayed cheater - almost as a comical figure. With this strange detective, Morrison blatantly violated the strict rule of good and evil, which at that time was still something of a sacred cow for crime fiction. Readers took note of the series with aloof interest, but the book never got beyond the first edition . Only decades later, for example with the books by Patricia Highsmith , did an acceptance develop for similarly ambivalent protagonists , for example their “talented” Mr. Ripley .

Art dealer

In the 1910s, Morrison gave up his journalistic and literary activities entirely and concentrated on collecting Japanese and Chinese antiques . He had been interested in this hobby since his youth (around 1890), fascinated by the Far Eastern souvenirs from seafarers, which were offered cheaply in curio shops on the edge of the harbor and in London's Chinatown . Like all real collectors, he acquired special expertise in his field of collection; he studied the relevant art historical literature in the reading room of the British Museum . The linguistically gifted Morrison even learned Japanese and corresponded with the painters Kanzan Shimomura (1873–1930) and Wakan Kazunori (1876–1928).

In 1906, Morrison had sold Japanese woodblock prints to the British Museum for £ 4,500 in 1851. In 1909 and 1910 he exhibited his collections in the Fine Art Society and in the Royal Society of Arts and published extensive catalogs on them. In 1911 he published the two-volume compendium The Painters of Japan , which was considered the standard work on this subject for decades . At first, Morrison worked as a freelance expert and art consultant for some time before he (when is not known) started the art trade commercially. But even before the First World War he was able to make a living from the sales from his collections. In 1913 he sold 33 Chinese and 589 Japanese paintings to a real estate agent who later handed the objects over to the British Museum. Morrison later expanded his collecting area and began collecting English masters such as John Constable , Thomas Gainsborough , William Hogarth and William Turner , among others .

From 1914 Morrison resided in a stately three-story mansion in High Beach (Essex) with service staff and a chauffeur. There he had enough space to store his collections and also to organize exhibitions. When the First World War broke out , Morrison volunteered for the police, where he served with the rank of Chief Inspector (and in 1915 warned London by telephone of the first German zeppelin attack). His son Guy survived the war, but died in 1921 at the age of 28, probably from the effects of malaria that he contracted while serving in Egypt .

In 1920 and 1927, Morrison donated around 30 drawings to the British Museum, which he gave in his will in 1945 with another 60 paintings and 71 ukiyo-e , Japanese colored woodblock prints , as well as a collection of ceremonial tea sets.

In 1924 he was elected a member of the Royal Society of Literature - an honor that surprised him. When asked to give a lecture on literature on the occasion, he politely but firmly declined. In 1930 he was one of the founding members of the British Detection Club . In the same year he moved into a house in Chalfont St Peters, the upper floor of which he used for exhibitions and his art trade.

In 1929 and 1933 he published - probably as a literary sign of life - volumes of short stories , some of which had already appeared earlier or came from his drawer, but when he died of thrombosis in 1945 at the age of 82 , his writer was as good as forgotten.

Works

The Shadows Around Us , 1891
Zig Zags at the Zoo , in collaboration with the draftsman JA Shepherd, 1894
Tales of Mean Streets , 1894
Martin Hewitt, Investigator , 1894
Chronicles of Martin Hewitt , 1895
Adventures of Martin Hewitt , 1896
A Child of the Jago , 1896
The Dorrington Deed Box , 1897
To London Town , 1899
Cunning Murrell , 1900
The Hole in the Wall , 1902
The Red Triangle , 1903
That Brute Simmons , stage play, in collaboration with Herbert C. Sargent, 1904
The Green Eye of Goona (in the US The Green Diamond ), 1904
Divers Vanities , 1905
The Dumb Cake , stage play, in collaboration with Richard Pryce, 1907
A Stroke of Business , stage play, in collaboration with Horace Newte (performed but not printed), 1907
Green Ginger , 1909
Illustrated Catalog of Japanese Prints , 1909
Illustrated Catalog of Japanese Screens , 1910
The Painters of Japan , 2 volumes, 1911
Short Stories of Today and Yesterday , 1929
Fiddle O'Dreams , 1933

German-language editions

Detective Martin Hewitt : Part I; Crime stories, authorized translation by Frida von Holtzendorff a. Wally Landsberg, Stuttgart: Lutz o. J., Lutz 'crime and detective novels, 49
Detective Martin Hewitt : Part II; Stories, authorized translation by Frida von Holtzendorff a. Wally Landsberg. Stuttgart: Lutz o. J., (Lutz 'crime and detective novels, 67)
Arthur Morrison: Selected works in 6 volumes, edited by Reinhard Hillich, Berlin, self-published 2017–2019

Dorrington's cases : detective stories of a different kind . With illustrations by Stanley L. Wood, Sidney Cowell, and others. Harold Pifford. Ed. U. from d. Engl. Transl. by Reinhard Hillich, Berlin, 2017, ISBN 978-3-9818907-6-1
Martin Hewitt, Private Investigator: Detective Stories . With illustrations by Sidney Paget. Ed. U. from d. Engl. Transl. by Reinhard Hillich, Berlin, 2017, ISBN 978-3-9818907-2-3
The Chronicle of Martin Hewitt , Detective Stories. Ed. U. from d. Engl. Transl. by Reinhard Hillich, Berlin, 2018, ISBN 978-3-9818907-4-7
The adventures of Martin Hewitt , detective stories. Ed. U. from d. Engl. Transl. by Reinhard Hillich, Berlin, 2018, ISBN 978-3-9818907-5-4
Martin Hewitt and the Red Triangle , detective stories. Ed. U. from d. Engl. Transl. by Reinhard Hillich, Berlin, 2019, ISBN 978-3-9818907-7-8
The pub on the Thames , Roman. Ed., From d. Engl. Transl. u. with e. Nachw. By Reinhard Hillich, Berlin, 2019, ISBN 978-3-9818907-8-5

literature

Obituary for Arthur Morrison. In: The Times, December 5, 1945
Jocelyn Bell: A Study of Arthur Morrison. In: Arundell Esdaile (Ed.): Essays and Studies collected for the English Association. Vol. 5. John Murray (Publishers) Ltd., London 1952, pp. 77-89
Peter J. Keating: Who Knows Arthur Morrison? In: East London Papers, Vol. 10. No. 1 (1967), pp. 43-47
NN: Arthur Morrison. In: Who was Who 1941–1950 . London: St Martin's Press 1969
Werner G. Urlaub: Arthur Morrison and the Cockney School. Slum and proletariat in English literature from 1890–1900 (= treatises on art, music and literary studies. Vol. 268). Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, Bonn 1978, ISBN 978-3-416-01424-3 , table of contents
Robert Calder: Arthur Morrison: A Commentary With Annotated Bibliography of Writings About Him . In: English Literature in Transition, Vol. 28, No. 3 (1985), pp. 276-297
Stan Newens: Arthur Morrison. The novelist of realism in East London and Essex. The Alderton Press, Loughton, England, GB 2008, ISBN 978-1-905269-10-5 (English)
Adrian Hunter: Arthur Morrison and the Tyranny of Sentimental Charity . In: English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, Vol. 56, No. 3, 2013, pp. 292–312
Eliza Cubitt: Arthur Morrison and the East End. The Legacy of Slum Fictions (= Routledge studies in nineteenth-century literature ). Routledge; Taylor & Francis, New York; London 2019, ISBN 978-0-367-18823-8 , p. 202

Web links

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Laurence Binyon: The Painters of Japan. In: Saturday Review. No. 112 (9/30/1911), pp. 427-428
Review of Fiddle o 'Dreams. In: Times Literary Supplement of November 30, 1933
CH Peake: The Hole in the Wall by Arthur Morrison. In: East London Papers, Vol. 10, No. 1 (1967), pp. 35-42
John Greenfield: Ideological Naturalism and Representation of Class in Arthur Morrison's A Child of the Jago . Studies in Literary Imagination 29.1, Spring 1996
John L. Kijinski: Ethnography in the East End: Native Customs and Colonial Solutions in A Child of the Jago. In: English Literature in TransitionVol. 37 No. 4: 490-501 (1994)
Jessica Maynard: Arthur Morrison. The Floating World and the Pictorial Method in A Child of the Jago: Painters of the East. In: English Literature in Transition 1880–1920 , 51, No. 1 (2008), pp. 44–56
Peter Miles: Morrison and His Critics. In: Arthur Morrison: A Child of the Iago. Oxford: Oxford World's Classics 2012, pp. 166-187

Individual evidence

^ Arthur Morrison | British author. Accessed June 1, 2019 .
↑ Arthur Morrison biography. Retrieved June 1, 2019 .
^ Arthur Morrison, Selected Works. Retrieved June 1, 2019 .

personal data
SURNAME	Morrison, Arthur
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Morrison, Arthur George (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	English journalist, writer and art dealer
DATE OF BIRTH	November 1, 1863
PLACE OF BIRTH	Metropolitan Borough of Poplar , London
DATE OF DEATH	4th December 1945
Place of death	Chalfont St Peter , Buckinghamshire

[1] Arthur Morrison | British author. Accessed June 1, 2019 .

[2] Arthur Morrison biography. Retrieved June 1, 2019 .

[3] Arthur Morrison, Selected Works. Retrieved June 1, 2019 .