A Child Of The Jago

The 1896 book A Child of the Jago was written by Arthur Morrison. It tells the story of Dicky Perrott, a little boy growing up in the "Old Jago," a fictionalized version of the Old Nichol slum in the East End of London, which is situated between Shoreditch High Street and Bethnal Green Road. The book was a success at the time. George Gissing, an English novelist from the late nineteenth century, described the book as "bad stuff" after reading it on Christmas Day 1896. The book begins after midnight on a steamy summer night, when many of the Jago's inhabitants, who have been compared to "great rats," opt to sleep outside to escape the intense heat and foul odor of the neighborhood's tightly packed homes. A man is severely coshed, robbed, and dragged unconscious into the street where others remove his boots after he is enticed into a home by a woman. Dicky Perrott, who is 8 or 9 years old (the age difference is significant), arrives at home and finds his mother, Hannah Perrott, and his baby sister, Looey, who has flea bites, but just a crust of bread to eat.