From The Likes Of Us by Michael Collins:

Edwin Pugh was a slum novelist who attempted to insert a layer of sympathy between the hooliganism and the hangings. A former city clerk, Pugh was notable for lighting up the nether worlds of which he wrote with pathos and humour, even when the subject is a child with a hunched body, rickety legs, a flute-playing, philosopher father who seldom works, and a mother who drinks herself into oblivion, or at least the nearest kerb. Such is the content of Tony Drum, A Cockney Boy (1898).