'The Jago' of Morrison's title was the scarcely disguised 'Old Nichol' slum, which stood, until the mid-1890s, just behind Shoreditch High Street, on its eastern side. Published in November 1896, A Child of the Jago caused an instant furore. Few reviewers of the novel had failed to be impressed by the power of Morrison's fiction - the savagery of the depiction of street violence, the pathos of neglected, diseased infants, the scathing attack on high-minded philanthropic interventions; what many refused to accept, though, was Morrison's insistence that his book had been based entirely on fact. Traill had continued his assault upon Morrison's claims to reportage with the words: 'He invites the world to inspect [the Jago] as a sort of essence or extract of metropolitan degradation... It is the idealising method, and its result is as essentially ideal as the Venus of Milo... the total effect of the story is unreal and phantasmagoric.' But over the past 100 years, it is Morrison's vision of that square quarter-mile of East London that has prevailed: his mythic location ('a fairyland of horror', in Traill's view) has usurped the historical fact of the Nichol, which was entirely mundane in its awfulness; and from 1896 onwards, many East London residents have used the words 'Jago' and 'Nichol' interchangeably. When historian Raphael Samuel came to record days' worth of cassette tapes with Arthur Harding, who had lived the first ten years of his life in the Nichol's final ten years, Harding spoke of his childhood in the Jago, as often as he called it the Nichol. This has been one of the most impressive literary re-brandings of a district. Morrison stated that his intention in writing A Child of the Jago had been to show the gradual corruption of a basically decent boy, Dicky Perrott, by the slum in which he was born and grew. 'It was my fate, ' wrote Morrison in his preface to the third edition of the novel, 'to encounter a place in Shoreditch, where children were born and reared in circumstances which gave them no reasonable chance of living decent lives: where they were born foredamned to a criminal or semi-criminal career.' No matter what good impulses Dicky has, no matter any kindnesses shown to him by an outsider, nor any stroke of good luck - he cannot evade the destiny that awaits all who are bred within the filthy streets and noxious moral atmosphere of the Jago.