Henry Lawson’s Slum Stories: “Jones’ Alley,” Gender, and Birth Control

Henry Lawson is best known for his short stories of the Australian rural “bush.” He also wrote stories set in urban Sydney, and in a rediscovered letter he describes one of those stories, “Two Larrikins” (1893), as “realistic or Zolaistic.” The story is set in Lawson’s fictional Sydney slum locality of “Jones’ Alley,” also the title of one of the urban-set stories in his definitive collection While the Billy Boils (1896). This reference to Zola invites new attention to Lawson’s own slum setting and to his own conception of realism, as applied in his urban stories. The term “zolaistic” also alludes to the sex- and gender-related content of these stories, and that content connects in turn with contemporary feminist thought. The article argues that these aspects of the literary significance of Lawson’s early urban material were inevitably overshadowed by the Bush, obscuring some of the earliest examples of a minority Australian urban realist tradition.