A Child of the Jago by Arthur Morrison

Look at any map or Atlas of the Victorian era and you will not find The Jago. However, every large city and town and even some smaller towns throughout Britain had their own Jago, an area of streets for which the word "mean" really comes nowhere near descriptive enough.

The Jago of Arthur Morrison in his work A Child of the Jago is based very closely on the worst part of the East End of London.

His description of the hovels the people of the East end occupied, of the filth, the dirt and the squalor are very well realised.

There are certain little facts that he salts his novel with that make its reading even more compelling. For example, did you know that people residing in slum areas such as the Jago often had to keep a light on all night, to ensure that their sleep was not disturbed by being attacked by rats?

Morrison tells the tale of young Dicky Perrott, who is the child of the Jago. His mother reminds him that they are not like the other people of The Jago, although when his father returns home with a cosh covered in the blood and hair of a victim of a coshing robbery, the reader is forced to conclude that perhaps she is not really even fooling herself. Street robberies and urders punctuate the book like grimy comas.

Dicky knows what he wants out of life. He wants to become a leading criminal, in the parlance of the area, a High Mobsman.

But due to the herculean efforts of Father Sturt, it eventually becomes clear to Dicky that perhaps there is another way? Another path that might not lead him ever downwards to the prison cell or even the gallows? Or worse?

Some novels that told of the life of the Victorian working classes were sentimental and mawkish. This novel, however, is not. Its attention to detail and its realism set it high above novels by Morrisons well-meaning but lesser fellow contemporaries.

Although Morrison gives a warts and all description of what was the worst part of the East End of London, a place where even some criminals would fear to visit, let alone the police officers who would only ever visit it in threes, he also showed that the denizens were capable of normal acts of human kindness. One example of this is the obvious love that Dicky Perrott showed to his baby sister, early in the novel.

This edition caries a very good introduction which gives a background to the area upon which The Jago is based. It also provides as much biographical detail of the author as is to hand. Which is not much. Morrison was an extremely private man whose desire for privacy seemed deep-rooted. He felt that he had enemies who would use information from his past against him.

The book also contains a very helpful glossary of terms used in the book.

The Appendix also includes a chapter on Morrison and his Critics, 

It is published by the Oxford University Press in paperback at £8.99 and is available via the That's Books bookshop and all good bookshops.

The Three Little Pigs, retold

The Three Little Pigs is here retold and illustrated by Little Red Riding Hood.

See The Three Little Pigs as you have probably never quite envisioned them, as they meet the challenges from the Big Bad Wolf who wants to eat the three little pigs all up!

It's all here, the foolish pig, who builds a house of straw, the not particularly smart little pig who builds a house of sticks and the rather clever little pig who builds a far more substantial house of bricks.

It is published (piglished?) in hardback by Far Far Away Books the ISBN is 978-989-8441-00-3.

The book is part of the Plant for the Planet series a Billion Tree Campaign aided by the UN Environment Programme. So when you buy this book, you are planting a tree.

www.farfarawaybooks.com

The cost quoted on the website is $15.00 + $3.00 postage.

Tied With An Easy Thread

There are many books of children who were abandoned, people escaping from Nazi persecution, coping with poverty, prejudice, and loss. There are not so many that end with a large inheritance, followed by an amazing discovery ten years after the subject's death. Rarely do you find all these in the true chronicle of one woman's life.

When she was four years old in 1917, Ruth's German mother abandoned her and her brother in a Christian children's home in Dresden. When her Jewish father came there to reclaim his children two years later, Ruth was influenced by the matron to reject him. She never saw him again. At fourteen she left the children's home to become a Haustochter, and spent the next eleven years in various domestic posts. Despised as a half Jew, she escaped from Nazi Germany just eight weeks before the beginning of WWII, to become a refugee in England.

This book, written by her daughter, chronicles Ruth's life in Germany, England and Wales. Struggling against poverty all her life, her fortune was dramatically changed by a very large inheritance from a totally unexpected source when she was eighty two.

Throughout her life she regretted her rejection of her father, and expressed a desire to know what had become of him. This led to her daughter's ten year search, a DNA test, and an astonishing discovery.

In a recent edition of "Look up your Genes" on BBC Radio Wales, the presenter described this as '... a story that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end.' Kristina Taylor wants the story to be read and passed on so that new generations can hear Ruth's testament of events in the twentieth century that affected her so deeply, and impacted on the next generations of her family.

The book is published by Authors on Line.