MORRISON, ARTHUR

born Nov. 1, 1863, Kent, Eng. died Dec. 4, 1945, Chalfont St. Peter, Buckinghamshire English writer noted for novels and short stories describing slum lifein London's East End at the end of the Victorian eraso vividly that they helped bring about changes in British housing legislation. Morrison began his career as a journalist. He wrote for many of the notable London journals of his time, including the National Observer, in which most of the stories in his first major work, Tales of Mean Streets (1894), originally appeared. His next important publication was A Child of the Jago (1896), a novel credited with precipitating the clearance of the worst London slum of that time. His realistic novels and stories are sober in tone, but the characters are portrayed with a Dickensian colourfulness. His attitude toward the people he described was paternalist, rather than radical, and he opposed socialism and the trades-union movement. He also wrote detective fiction that featured the lawyer-detective Martin Hewitt and that kept the detective genre alive during the post-Sherlock Holmes period. An authority on and collector of Chinese and Japanese art, Morrison also published the authoritative Painters of Japan (1911).