"TALES OF MEAN STREETS."
[To THR EDITOR OF TEl " SPIOTLTOR."] Sin,—Your reviewer treais my "Tales of Mean Streets" with a kindness which I acknowledge with gratitude,—a kindness. which I might venture to call extreme were I in any way entitled to qualify his judgment in a matter of purely literary criticism. But I hope he will allow me to suggest that a very natural personal antipathy to squalor and some of its accompaniments has led him to some misconception of my view of life in East London,—life which, if I may say so, I do happen to know at first hand, and without the help of a- note-book. I do not present Billy Chope as a type of all dwellers in the East-End ; an effort to typify the people of a, city in one character would be foolish indeed. Chope is a blackguard in a book of men of all sorts, among whom the blackguards are in what is, I hope, a just minority. There are fourteen numbers in the collection, of which the story of Lizerunt is only one. In whatever terms your reviewer might have thought fit to judge the book as a written performance, I should not, of course, have attempted to challenge them, but Jam loth to be considered to have generalised half London as a race of Yahoos,—as loth as to be thought to suppose the world (which I did not attempt to cram into my book) a place without light and sunshine.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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