A child of the Jago - Arthur Morrison

This novel, first published in 1896, is the story of Dick Perrot, born and bred in the Jago; but it is also a brilliant portrait of the community. The Jago is a London slum where crime and violence are the only way of life, and from which there is no escape for the inhabitants. Only the characters themselves are fictional: Morrison's descriptions of the fearful physical conditions are based directly on what he saw. He conjures up an extraordinarily vivid picture of a world which, even as he wrote, was about to vanish in one of the first of the slum clearance schemes.