Arnold Bennett
Enoch Arnold Bennett was an English author, best known as a novelist, who wrote prolifically. Between the 1890s and the 1930s he completed 34 novels, seven volumes of short stories, 13 plays, and a daily journal totalling more than a million words. He wrote articles and stories for more than 100 newspapers and periodicals, worked in and briefly ran the Ministry of Information during the First World War, and wrote for the cinema in the 1920s. Sales of his books were substantial, and he was the most financially successful British author of his day.
Born into a modest but upwardly mobile family in Hanley, in the Staffordshire Potteries, Bennett was intended by his father, a solicitor, to follow him into the legal profession. Bennett worked for his father before moving to another law firm in London as a clerk at the age of 21. He became assistant editor and then editor of a women's magazine before becoming a full-time author in 1900. Always a devotee of French culture in general and French literature in particular, he moved to Paris in 1903; there the relaxed milieu helped him overcome his intense shyness, particularly with women. He spent ten years in France, marrying a Frenchwoman in 1907. In 1912 he moved back to England. He and his wife separated in 1921, and he spent the last years of his life with a new partner, an English actress. He died in 1931 of typhoid fever, having unwisely drunk tap-water in France.
Many of Bennett's novels and short stories are set in a fictionalised version of the Staffordshire Potteries, which he called The Five Towns. He strongly believed that literature should be accessible to ordinary people and he deplored literary cliques and élites. His books appealed to a wide public and sold in large numbers. For this reason, and for his adherence to realism, writers and supporters of the modernist school, notably Virginia Woolf, belittled him, and his fiction became neglected after his death. During his lifetime his journalistic "self-help" books sold in substantial numbers, and he was also a playwright; he did less well in the theatre than with novels but achieved two considerable successes with Milestones and The Great Adventure.
Studies by Margaret Drabble, John Carey, and others have led to a re-evaluation of Bennett's work. The finest of his novels, including Anna of the Five Towns, The Old Wives' Tale, Clayhanger and Riceyman Steps, are now widely recognised as major works.
Life and career
Early years
Arnold Bennett was born on 27 May 1867 in Hanley, Staffordshire, now part of Stoke-on-Trent but then a separate town. He was the eldest child of the three sons and three daughters of Enoch Bennett and his wife Sarah Ann, née Longson. Enoch Bennett's early career had been one of mixed fortunes: after an unsuccessful attempt to run a business making and selling pottery, he set up as a draper and pawnbroker in 1866. Four years later, Enoch's father died, leaving him some money with which he articled himself to a local law firm; in 1876, he qualified as a solicitor. The Bennetts were staunch Wesleyans, musical, cultured and sociable. Enoch Bennett had an authoritarian side, but it was a happy household, although a mobile one: as Enoch's success as a solicitor increased, the family moved, within the space of five years in the late 1870s and early 1880s, to four different houses in Hanley and the neighbouring Burslem.From 1877 to 1882, Bennett's schooling was at the Wedgwood Institute, Burslem, followed by a year at a grammar school in Newcastle-under-Lyme. He was good at Latin and better at French; he had an inspirational headmaster who gave him a love for French literature and the French language that lasted all his life. He did well academically and passed Cambridge University examinations that could have led to an Oxbridge education, but his father had other plans. In 1883, aged 16, Bennett left school and began work – unpaid – in his father's office. He divided his time between uncongenial jobs, such as rent collecting, during the day, and studying for examinations in the evening. He began writing in a modest way, contributing light pieces to the local newspaper. He became adept in Pitman's shorthand, a skill much sought after in commercial offices, and on the strength of that he secured a post as a clerk at a firm of solicitors in Lincoln's Inn Fields, London. In March 1889, aged 21, he left for London and never returned to live in his native county.
First years in London
In the solicitors' office in London, Bennett became friendly with a young colleague, John Eland, who had a passion for books. Eland's friendship helped alleviate Bennett's innate shyness, which was exacerbated by a lifelong stammer. Together, they explored the world of literature. Among the writers who impressed and influenced Bennett were George Moore, Émile Zola, Honoré de Balzac, Guy de Maupassant, Gustave Flaubert and Ivan Turgenev. He continued his own writing, and won a prize of twenty guineas from Tit-Bits in 1893 for his story 'The Artist's Model'; another short story, 'A Letter Home', was submitted successfully to The Yellow Book, where it featured in 1895 alongside contributions from Henry James and other well-known writers.In 1894 Bennett resigned from the law firm and became assistant editor of the magazine Woman. The salary, £150 a year, was £50 less than he was earning as a clerk, but the post left him much more free time to write his first novel. For the magazine he wrote under a range of female pen-names such as "Barbara" and "Cecile". As his biographer Margaret Drabble puts it:
The informal office life of the magazine suited Bennett, not least because it brought him into lively female company, and he began to be a little more relaxed with young women. He continued work on his novel and wrote short stories and articles. He was modest about his literary talent: he wrote to a friend, "I have no inward assurance that I could ever do anything more than mediocre viewed strictly as art – very mediocre", but he knew he could "turn out things which would be read with zest, & about which the man in the street would say to friends 'Have you read so & so in the What-is-it?" He was happy to write for popular journals like Hearth and Home or for the highbrow The Academy.
His debut novel, A Man from the North, completed in 1896, was published two years later, by John Lane, whose reader, John Buchan, recommended it for publication. It elicited a letter of praise from Joseph Conrad and was well and widely reviewed, but Bennett's profits from the sale of the book were less than the cost of having it typed.
In 1896 Bennett was promoted to be editor of Woman; by then he had set his sights on a career as a full-time author, but he served as editor for four years. During that time he wrote two popular books, described by the critic John Lucas as "pot-boilers": Journalism for Women and Polite Farces for the Drawing Room. He also began work on a second novel, Anna of the Five Towns, the five towns being Bennett's lightly fictionalised version of the Staffordshire Potteries, where he grew up.
Freelance; Paris
In 1900 Bennett resigned his post at Woman, and left London to set up house at Trinity Hall Farm, near the village of Hockliffe in Bedfordshire, where he made a home not only for himself but for his parents and younger sister. He completed Anna of the Five Towns in 1901; it was published the following year, as was its successor, The Grand Babylon Hotel. The latter, an extravagant story of crime in high society, sold 50,000 copies in hardback and was almost immediately translated into four languages. By this stage he was confident enough in his abilities to tell a friend:In January 1902 Enoch Bennett died, after a decline into dementia. His widow chose to move back to Burslem, and Bennett's sister married shortly afterwards. With no dependants, Bennett − always a devotee of French culture − decided to move to Paris; he took up residence there in March 1903. Biographers have speculated on his precise reasons for doing so. Drabble suggests that perhaps "he was hoping for some kind of liberation. He was thirty-five and unmarried"; Lucas writes that it was almost certainly Bennett's desire to be recognised as a serious artist that prompted his move; according to his friend and colleague Frank Swinnerton, Bennett was following in the footsteps of George Moore by going to live in "the home of modern realism"; in the view of the biographer Reginald Pound it was "to begin his career as a man of the world". The 9th arrondissement of Paris was Bennett's home for the next five years, first in the rue de Calais, near the Place Pigalle, and then the more upmarket rue d'Aumale.
Life in Paris evidently helped Bennett overcome much of his remaining shyness with women. His journals for his early months in Paris mention a young woman identified as "C" or "Chichi", who was a chorus girl; the journals – or at least the cautiously selected extracts published since his death – do not record the precise nature of the relationship, but the two spent a considerable amount of time together.
In a restaurant where he dined frequently a trivial incident in 1903 gave Bennett the germ of an idea for the novel generally regarded as his masterpiece. A grotesque old woman came in and caused a fuss; the beautiful young waitress laughed at her, and Bennett was struck by the thought that the old woman had once been as young and lovely as the waitress. From this grew the story of two contrasting sisters in The Old Wives' Tale. He did not begin work on that novel until 1907, before which he wrote ten others, some "sadly undistinguished", in the view of his biographer Kenneth Young. Throughout his career, Bennett interspersed his best novels with some that his biographers and others have labelled pot-boilers.