Tales of mean streets (Arthur Morrison)

„Tales of Mean Streets”, published in 1894, is a collection of short stories describing the appalling conditions that many working people endured. These stories are a brilliant evocation of a narrow, close-knit community, that of the streets of London’s East End. Having lived and worked there, he author knew that East Enders were not a race apart, but ordinary men and women, scraping aby perhaps, but neither criminals nor paupers. Here Arthur Morrison chronicles their adventures and misadventures, their wooings and their funerals, with sympathy, humor and a sense of both the tragedies and the comedies to be found in the ’mean streets’. One of tales, „Lizerunt”, was condemned for depicting all too clearly the victimization and degradation of women.