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Tales of Mean Streets
by Arthur Morrison
Preface by H. L. Mencken Copyright 1921, by Boni & Liveright, Inc.
Manufactured in the USA for the Modern Library, Inc., by H. Wolff
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Table of Contents
Lizerunt
Without Visible Means
To Bow Bridge
That Brute Simmons
Behind the shade
Three Rounds
In Business
The Red Cow Group
On The Stairs
Squire Napper
A Poor Stick
A Conversion
All that Messuage
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PREFACE.
After a quarter of a century these, brief and searching tales of Arthur Morrison's still keep the breath of life in them--modest but precious salvages from the high washings and roarings of the eighteen-nineties. The decade--the last of the Victorian age, as of the century--was so fecund that some Englishman has spread out its record to the proportions of a book. It was a time of youngsters, of literary rebellions, of adventures in new forms. No great three-decker sailed out of it, but what a host there was of smaller craft, rakish and impudent--the first 'Jungle Book,' the 'Dolly Dialogues,' 'The Second Mrs. Tanqueray,' the first plays and criticisms of George Bernard Shaw, 'Sherlock Holmes,' the matriculation pieces of H.G. Wells, Jerome K. Jerome, Hewlett, 'Dodo' Benson, Hichens and so on, and all the best of Gissing and Wilde. Think of the novelties of one year only, 1894: 'The Green Carnation,' 'Salomé,' 'The Prisoner of Zenda,' the 'Dolly Dialogues,' Gissing's 'In the Year of jubilee,' the first 'Jungle Book,' 'Arms and the Man,' 'Round the Red Lamp,' and, not least, these 'Tales of Mean Streets.'