BOOKS and AUTHORS.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XV, Issue IV, 27 July 1895, Page 96

BOOKS and AUTHORS.

A LITERARY CAUSERIE for COLONIAL BOOKBUYERS and BORROWERS. BOOKS marked thus (*) have arrived in the colony, and could at the time of writing be purchased in the prin ipal colonial bookshops, and borrowed at the libraries. For the convenience of country cousins who find difficulty in procuring the latest books and new editions, the ‘BOOKMAN' will send to any New Zealand address any book which can be obtained. No notice will, o f course, be taken of requests unaccompanied by remittance to cover postage as well as published price of book. It is requested that only those who find it impossible to procure books through the ordinary channels, should take advantage of this offer. The labour involved will be heavy and entirely unremunerative, no f ees or commission being taken. Queries and Correspondence on Literary Matters Invited. AU Communications and Commissions must be addressed ‘THE BOOKMAN,’ Graphic Office, Auckland. Here is a book which it is well should be * ‘Tales of . , , , . . . , — widely read in this colony. To some it Mean Streets. w j j J p rove a wholesome, though possibly an unwelcome reminder ; to others, to the majority, indeed, it will come as a terrible revelation of what life means and t-s for thousands —nay, millions of their fellow creatures in the East End of London. Photographic in their faithfulness to the scenes, the class, the places they describe, many of the Tales oj Mean Streets are powerful, and indeed painful to a degree which cannot be without its effect on the most cold-blooded and unemotional temperaments. Ultra sensitive natures would probably suffer too much from a perusal of certain chapters of the book to make that course advisable, but it is not an undesirable thing that average, comfortableminded and easy-souled men and women should occasionally be made uncomfortable by the knowledge of the sort of life led by so vast a number of their Englishspeaking fellows. The absolute unexaggerated truthfulness of these sketches from East End life can only be properly appreciated by one who has lived in and known that densely populated city, for as the author remarks, the East Eud is a city in itself.

The East End it a vast city, as famous in its way as any the hand of man has made. But who knows the East End! It is down through Cornhill and out beyond Leadenhall-street and Aidgate Pump, one will say : a shocking place, where he once went with a curate ; an evil plexus of slums that hide human creeping things; where filthy men and women live on penn’orths of gin, where collars and clean shirts are decencies unknown, where every citizen wears a black eye. and none ever combs his hair. The East End is a place, says another, which is given over to the Unemployed. And the Unemployed is a race whose token is a clay pipe, and whose enemy is soap: now and again it migrates bodily to Hyde Park with banners, and furnishes adjacent police courts with disorderly drunks. Still another knows the East End only as the place whence begging letters come; there are coal and blanket funds there, all perennially insolvent, and everybody always wants a day in the country. Many and misty are peoples's notions of the East End ; and each is commonly but the distorted shadow of a minor feature. Foul slums there are in the East End, of course, as there are in ths West; want and misery there are, as everywhere a host is gathered together to fight for food. But they are not often spectacular in kind. Into the real East End the author of Mean Streets takes us, and if we emerge from some of them startled and a little uncomfortable at the outrageous contrast afforded by our own comfort, why, then, the author has accomplished what was probably his purpose. But if Mr Morrison, like the fat boy in Pickwick, ‘ wants to make our flesh creep,’he doesit without colouring his incidents or over-drawing his characters. Besides, Mr Morrison does not confine himself to the horrors of the East Eud. He has a keen sense of humour, and his lighter sketches, though more fiction-natured in tone and style, are characteristic of the class, and true to its nature under the circumstances described. It never was my personal lot to know an East Ender who came into money, but I feel convinced that had ninety-nine of the men I used one time to meet there done so, they would have behaved as did Squire Napper in Mr Morrison’s sketch of that name. The writer of this notice, having worked on a great East Bind newspaper, can vouch for the unadulterated fact of every line in the more sombre sketches. The most of the types drawn are so commonly met with by one whose work takes him or her amongst these people, that to me the majority of the characters in Mr Morrison’s book are men whom I have met and spoken with, and there is not one of the darker scenes in the book for which memory does not provide parallel cases which have occurred within my own experience.

The courts and slums of the East End have been frequently described, but the following wood etching of the respectable East End-street will be new to all but the readers of Mr Gissing’s novels : —

Every morning nt half past five there is a curions dem nstratlon. The street resounds with thunderous knockings, repeated upon door after door, nnd acknowledged ever by a mu filed shout from within. These signals are the work of the night-watchman or the early policeman, or both, and they summon the sleepers to go forth to the docks, the gasworks, anil tho ship yards. To bo - wakened in this wise costs fourpence a week, and for this four-

pence fierce rivalry rages between night-watchmen and policemen. The night-watchman—a sort of by-blow of the ancient * Charley ’ and himself a fast-vanishing quantity—is the real professional performer; but he goes to the wall, because a large connection must be worked if the pursuit is to pay at fourpence a knocker. Now.it is not easy to-bangattwoknockere three quarters of a mile apart, and a hundred others lying between, all punctually at half-past five. Wherefore the policeman, to whom the fourpence is but a perquisite, and who is content with a smaller round, is rapidly supplanting the night-watchman, whose cry of ‘Past nine o’clock,’ as lie collects orders in the evening, is now seldom heard.

The knocking and the shouting pass, and there comes the noise < f opening and shutting of doors, and a clattering away to the docks, the gasworks, and the ship-yards. Later more door-shut-ting is heard, and then the trotting of sorrow-laden little feet along the grim street to the grim Board School three grim streets off. Thon silence, save for a subdued sound of scrubbing hero and there, and the puny squall of croupy infants. After this, a new trotting of little feet to docks, gasworks and slip-yards with father’s dinner in a basin and a red handkerchief, and so to the Board School again. More muffled scrubbing and more squalling, and perhaps a feeble attempt or two at decorating tho blackness of a square hole here and there by pouring water into a grimy flower-pot full of diit. Then comes the trot of little feet toward the oblong ho’ds, heralding the slower tread of sooty artisians; a smell of bloater up and down ; nightfall; the fighting of boys in the street, perhaps of men at the corner near tho beer-shop; sleep. And this is the record of a day in this street; and every day is hopelessly the same. Every day, that is, but Sunday. On Sunday morning a smell of cooking floats round the corner from the half-shut baker’s, and the little feet trot down the street under streaming burdens of beef, potatoes, and batter pudding—the lucky little feet these, with Sunday boo’son them, when father isin good work and has brought home all his money ; not the poor little feet in worn shoes carrying little bodies in the thread-bare clothes of all the week, when father is out of work, cr ill, or drunk, and the Sunday cooking may vety easily be done at home—if any there be to do.

The chapter conctruing the respectable East End street, from which the above extracts are given, is specially worthy of notice as showing that Mr Morrison is absolutely truthful, and willing to give us every side of life. For already mentioned darker but unhappily quite as veracious chronicles, the reader has but to turn one page. The story of Lizerunt is the story of thousands upon thousands of married women in the East End of London. In graphic, faithful, and intensely powerful, because of its impressive photographic exactitude, the author describes the courting of Lizerunt and her marriage to a familiar but debased type of East End manhood, Billy Chope. A somewhat severer application of the husbandly boot, consequent on a refusal of two shillings for beer some months later, precipitates the birth of the first-born. The following extract shows the manner in which such events are too often treated :— The front dcor was open, and in the first room, where the mangle stood, there were no signs of dinner. And this was at three o’c ock 1 Billy pushed into the room behind, demanding why. • Billy,’ Lizer said faintly from her bed, ‘ look at the baby I’ Something was moving feebly nnder a flannel petticoat. Billy pulled the petticoat aside, and said,—" That ? Well, it is a measly snipe.’ It was a blind, hairless homunculous, short of a foot long, with a skinny face set in a great skull. There was a black bruise on one side from hip to armpit. Billy dropped the petticoat and said. ‘ Where’s my dinner ?’ ■ I dunno ’ Lizer responded hazily. ‘ What’s the time T ‘Time? Don’t try to kid me. You git up; goon. I want my dinner.’ • Mother's gittin’ it. 1 think,’ said Lizer. ‘Doctor had to slap 'im •ike anythink ’fore ’e’d cry. ‘E don’t cry now much. 'E—’ ■Go on; out ye git. I do’ want no more damn jaw. Git my dinner.’ ‘I m a-gittin’ of it, Billy,’ his mother said, at the door. She had begun when he first entered. ‘ It won’t be a minute.' ‘You come 'ere; y’aint alwis ’steady to do ’er work, are ye? She ain't no call to stop there no longer, an’ I owe ’er one for this mornin’. Will ye git out, or shall I kick yc?' ‘ She can't, Billy,’ his mother said. And Lizer snivelled and said, ‘ You’re a damn brute. Y’oiight to be bleedin’ well booted.’ But Billy had her by the shoulders and began tobaul; and again bis mether besought him to remember what he might bring upon himself. At this moment the doctor's dispenser, a fourth-year London Hospital student of many inches, who had been washing his hands in the kitchen, came in. For a moment he failed to comprehend the scene. Then he took Billy Chope by the collar, haulel him poll-mell along the passage, kicked him (hard) into the gutter, and shu'the door. When he returned to the room, Lizer, silting up and holding on by the b:d-frame, gasped hysterically: * Ye bleedin’ makeshift, I’d 'ave yer liver cut it I could reach ye! You touch my ’usband. ye long pisenin’ 'ound you! Ow!’ And infirm of aim. she flung a cracked teacup at his head. Billy's mother said Y’oiight to be ashamed of yourself, you low blaggard. If 's father was alive e’d knock yer’ead auf. Call yourself a doctor—a passel of boys —I Gii, out I Git out o'my'ouse or I’ll give y'in charge I’ • But— why, hang it, he'd have killed her.’ Then to Lizer— ‘ Lie down.’ ‘ Shan't lie down. Keepauf! if you come near me I’ll corpse ye.' You go while ye're safe !' The dispenser appaalerl fo Bill’s mother. ‘ For God’s sake make her lie down. She’ll kill herself. I'll go. Perhaps the doctor had better come.’ And he went: leaving the coast clear for Billy Chope to return and avenge his kicking, Billy Chop. 1 , as here deputed, is common. The Billy Chope of the last chapter of Lizerunt’s sordid tragedy is happily less common, but, unfortunately, by no means rare. The following incident, terrible as it is, is of daily occurrence : — The mangling orders fell away as snddonly and completely as ho had feared ; they were duly absorbed among the local widows. Neglect tho children as Lizer mlgl.t she could no longer leave them as she had done. Things then were bad with Billy, and neither threats nor thumps could evoke a shilling now. It was more than Billy could bear, so that, ' 'Ere,' he said one

night, *1 ve 'ad enough o’ this. You go and get some money ; go on.’ ‘Go an'git it T replied Lizer. Oyus. That’s easy, ain’t it? “Go an'git it," says you. 'OwT * Any'ow—l don't care. Go on.’ • Wy’, replied Lizer, looking up with wide eyes, ‘d’ye think I can go an' pick it up in the street T ’Course you can. Plenty others does, don’t they T 'Gawd, Billy • * * wot d'ye mean f ‘ Wot I say ; plenty others does it. Go on—you ain’t so bleed’n’ innocent as all that. Go an* see Sam Cardew. Go on—'ook it.’ Lizer who had been kneeling at the child's floor-bed, rose to her feet, pale faced and bright of eye. ' Stow kiddin’, Billy,’ she said, ‘ You don’t mean that. I’ll go round to the fact'ry in the mornin: p’raps they’ll take me on temp’ry ’ ‘ Damn the fact’ry.' He pu bed her into the passage. ‘Go on—you git mo some money, if yer don’t want yer bleed’n' ’cad knocked auf.’ There was a scuffle in the dark passage, with certain blows, a few b oken words, and a sob. Then the door slammed, and Lizer Chope was in the windy street. I have included this extract after some hesitation, but in the belief that those to whom such things should not be known will not understand, and that those who do understand should not be allowed to plead ignorance of what is suffered by some women—a suffering which it may be impossible to abolish, but which it is one’s duty to endeavour to mitigate. ‘Th m The fact that the scene of The Marriage * e ar of Esther is laid in Thursday Island, and riage of Esther. j s , most o f Q U y Boothby’s stories, colonial, will no doubt prejudice colonial readers in its favour. But indeed this was not needed. The Marriage of Esther is a distinctly readable book, with two admirably drawn central figures. The plot is somewhat thin, but is admirably managed. The story of companion ne’er-do-wells who preserve through all their faults and weaknesses a certain nobility and lovableness, and one of whom eventually gives his life for the other is by no means new. It was old even before Mr Bret Harte came to delight the world, but the fact did not prevent him from writing ‘ The Outcasts of Poker Fla.t’ It is older now by many years and many hundreds of stories, bnt it has not prevented Mr Boothby from telling it again with variations and a vigorous truthfulness that have a'somewhat rare and pleasant flavour for the fiction devourer's jaded palate. Some of the descriptive work is a distinct advance on anything I have previously read of Mr Boothby’s, but it is in the character-drawing the Australian author is at his best. Murkard, with his weakness for drink and his capability for noblest sacrifices, is extremely well done. It was daring to give the other hero, Cuthbert, the weakness of a lying tongue, but Mr Boothby has not only done it, but managed keep for the man Cuthbert the sympathies of his readers. In less capable hands the experiment would probably have proved a decided failure. Men may lie themselves, but the fact never lesses their contempt for those who share their weakness. Cuthbert’s character is, indeed, exceedingly complex, and is worked out with considerable care. It is indicated in brief in the following extract: — He was the possessor of one besetting sin, of. which he had good reason to be aware; and the existence of that peccability was the chief terror of his existence. It crowded his waking hours, spoilt bis dreams, operated on all his thoughts and utterances, was a source of continual danger and self-humiliation, alienated his friends, reduced the value of his assertions to a minimum ; and yet with it all he considered himself an honourable man. His had been a gradual fall Coming to Australia with a considerable sum of money and valuable introductions, he had quickly set himself to dissipate the one and to forfeit any claim upon the other. His poverty forced uncongenial employment upon him when the first departed ; and bis pride prevented him from deriving any benefit from the second, when his hunger and destitution called npon him to make use of them. In sheer despair he drified into the bush, and, by reason of his very incompetence, was obliged to herd with the lowesHQiere. At the end of six months, more of a beast than a human, he found his way back into the towns, to become that most hopeless of all the hopeless—a Remittance man At first be had earnestly desired employment, but seek how he would he could discover none; when he did find it the desire to work had left him. His few friends, tried past endurance, having lost what little faith they had ever possessed in him, now turned their backs upon him in despair. So, from being an ordinary decayed gentleman, he had degenerated into a dead-beat beach-comber of the most despised description. And the difference is even greater than the lay mind would at first suppose. By the time he had come down to sleeping in tanks on wharves, and thinking himself lucky to obtain one to himself; to existing on cabmen’s broken victuals, and prowling round dust bins for a meal, he had brought himself to understand many and curious things. It was at thisjuncture that he met Silas Murkard, a man whose fail had been, if possible, even greater than his own. After a period of mutual distrust they had become migrated together into Queensland, tried their hands at a variety of employments, and at last found their way as far north as Torres Straits and its capital, Thursday Island. What their next move was going to be they could not have told. Most probably they had not given the matter a thought. Blind Fate had a good deal to do with their lives and actions. ‘ Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,’ had become their motto, and for that reason they had no desire to be made aware of any further misery the morrow had in store for them.

Several very fine half-tone engravings illustrate the book, which is very handsomely bound and printed. It is, by the way, entirely free from anything which should render it an unadvisable book for the modern girl to lend an old-fashioned mother. In other words it is entirely free from any of the topics so much discussed by ‘ lota,’ Miss Dowie, and Sara Grand.

Mr WalstrETE- 1 You painted my portrait in two sittings, but my daughter has given you ten and hers is not done yet!’ Jack Van Dyke— 1 Yes—er —I always find that it takes longer—er—to paint a ’ Mr Walstrete—‘ A pretty gir, eh ?’

‘ How many stories has this building?’ asked the stranger. • Several thousand was the reply. ‘What — where am I?’ ‘ln the fiction department of the public library. Content consists largely in not wanting something that is out of your reach.