The View from John Street: Richard Whiteing’s Social Realism

Abstract

In Arnold Bennett’s first novel, A Man from the North, published in 1898, the sardonic Mr Aked tells the hero, Richard Larch, an aspiring young writer very like Bennett himself, that a novelist may find all the drama he needs in the life and character of any single London street. Twenty-five years later, in Riceyman Steps, Bennett fully realised the aesthetic potential of a dreary Clerkenwell square. But Mr Aked’s advice was as much descriptive of a current mode as prescriptive of a future fiction, for the London street, usually of a dreary kind, was already well established in the 1890s as an appropriate setting for realistic narrative. Arthur Morrison had followed up his Tales of Mean Streets (1895) with A Child of the Jago (1896), a grim report on violence in an East End slum block. Somerset Maugham began his career as storyteller with Liza of Lambeth (1897), the action of which, except for one scene, transpires entirely on and in a rowdy Vere Street, ‘leading out of Westminster Bridge Road’. Richard Whiteing’s No. 5 John Street, which appeared a year after A Man from the North, has been virtually forgotten, apart from an occasional mention alongside the Morrison and the Maugham in histories of English realism.¹ Yet it still, I believe, deserves attention not only as one slum-street novel among others, but also as a late-Victorian social and political satire of broader import, remarkable for its own qualities of intelligence, originality and wit.