These stories are a brilliant evocatin of a narrow, close-knit community-that of the streets of London’s East End in the 1890s. Having lived and worked there, he knew that his East Enders were not a race apart, but ordinary men and women, scraping by perhaps, but neither criminals nor paupers. He chronicled their adventures and misadventures, their wooings and their funerals, with sympathy, humor and a sense of both the tragedies and comedies to be found in the "mean streets, " from Lizerunt’s disastrous marriage to Scuddy Lond’s plausible but imperfect conversion and "Squire" Napper’s quickly dispersed fortune.