Arthur Morrison’s novel A Child of the Jago (1896) is, among other things, the most impressive of literary re-brandings of a district in London history, perhaps even in world history. Morrison had exaggerated the awfulness of life in the real slum, the Old Nichol, and so powerful is his artistic vision, his fictional Jago has usurped the real Nichol in London imaginations.

We don’t know why Morrison chose to libel the Nichol population. Writing in the late 1960s, Morrison scholar PJ Keating stated that Morrison’s horror and loathing of the slum residents was probably attributable to some personal source. Morrison remains a rather mysterious figure. Interviewers failed to winkle much background information from him; and, as she had been instructed, Morrison’s wife, Elizabeth, burnt all his private papers upon his death in 1945. But we do know that he tried to blur the truth about his humble early years in Poplar. It is tempting to view A Child of the Jago as the work of a gifted, ambitious young working-class man putting a lot of distance between himself and those who had fallen into the abyss of chronic poverty.

Despite the furore that A Child of the Jago caused (Morrison faced years of criticism for his attitude towards the slum dwellers), he remained unrepentant. In the first of these two letters below (bottom of first page and top of the second page), he continues to defend his take on the slum, to one Mr Anderson, who had written to him enclosing a cutting from the New Statesman in which commentator Mr Mitchell retrospectively praised his novel.

The second letter, dating from 1929, relates to Morrison’s second, and even more successful, career – as an art-dealer and connoisseur.

Copies of both letters were very kindly given to me by Iain Sinclair, who found them during his second-hand book-dealing days.