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.