Arthur Morrison 
A Child of the Jago 

A Child of the Jago is an 1896 novel by
Arthur Morrison.  A bestseller in its time, it recounts the brief life of Dicky Perrott, a child growing up in the ‘Old Jago’, a fictionalisation of the Old Nichol, a slum located between Shoreditch High Street and Bethnal Green Road in the East End of London. The late nineteenth century English novelist George Gissing, who read the novel on Christmas Day 1896, felt that it was ‘poor stuff’.




Arthur George Morrison (1 November 1863 – 4 December 1945) was an English writer and journalist known for his realistic novels and stories about working-class life in London’s East End, and for his detective stories, featuring the detective Martin Hewitt. He also collected Japanese art and published several works on the subject. He left a large collection of paintings and other works of art to the British Museum after his death in 1945. Morrison’s best known work of fiction is his novel
A Child of the Jago (1896).