Dimensions
129 x 198 x 17mm
The Jago - enclave of squalor and brutality in London's East End. Dicky Perrot, born into the Jago's casual crime and violence, has inarticulate yearnings towards other possibilities. At first, he dreams of becoming a High Mobsman - one of the aristocrats of Jago crime. With the arrival of Father Sturt, he sees how his horizons might alter. But the Jago holds fast to its own. Dicky's path takes him through a savage but colourful community of fighting tribes, pickpockets and cosh-carriers, where the police only ever enter in threes, and where murder erupts with an unusual horror and intimacy.
In the labyrinthine slums of the East End, Morrison found not only a republic of the Victorian underclass and its underworld but a dark metaphor for the condition of the mind and spirit that imprisoned the inhabitants of the demesne he called 'The Jago'.
The only paperback edition available, with introduction, notes, selected criticism, glossary and chronology of Morrison's life and times.
