The Craft of Arnold Bennett

338 Pages·2016·1.99 MB·English

The Craft of Arnold Bennett

Thesis submitted in accordance with the requirements of the
University of Liverpool for the degree of
Doctor in Philosophy

by Barry Howarth
January 2016
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Contents

Acknowledgements v

Abstract vii

Introduction: Artist, Craftsman, Tradesman 1

Chapter 1: Born Journalist and Tradesman of Letters 31

Chapter 2: The Regional Novelist and the Five Towns Fiction 75

Chapter 3: The Conflicted Craftsman: Potboilers and Serials 139

Chapter 4: The Metropolitan Author from the North 187

Chapter 5: Raconteur and Teller of Tales: The Short Stories 259

Chapter 6: Conclusion 307

Bibliography 315

Illustrations

Pornocrates – Félicien Rops 210

Olympia – Édouard Manet 246

Portrait de Madame Récamier – Jacques-Louis David 246

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Acknowledgements

Over the last seven years, I have been fortunate to receive considerable help and
support for which I am grateful from the Library staff at the University of Liverpool
and from the staff in the Reading Room at the British Library.
I am particularly indebted to Helen Burton, Special Collections and Archives
Administrator of the University of Keele, whose kindness and knowledge enabled
me to select and examine many of Bennett’s unpublished letters.
I owe my greatest debt, of course, to my supervisors.
I wish to thank Professor Dinah Birch and Professor Mark Llewellyn for directing
me so skilfully and so incisively when I began my research in 2008.
More recently, I have enjoyed the support of Dr. Nick Davis, who patiently set out
the pathways for refining and strengthening my arguments, just when they were most
needed.
My greatest debt, an incalculable one, is to my current primary supervisor, Dr. Lisa
Regan. I have profited from her experience, encouragement, critical acumen and
assiduous support, without which my thesis would not have been completed.

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The Craft of Arnold Bennett

Author: Barry Howarth, 2016

Abstract:

For the first thirty years of the twentieth century, Arnold Bennett (1867 – 1931) was
one of most famous writers in Great Britain and the United States of America. His
stock began to wane after the end of the First World War, and since his death his
work has been neglected. What remains of his reputation today rests largely on his
achievements in his Five Towns fiction.

During his lifetime and posthumously, Bennett was accused of operating as a literary
profiteer and vulgar self-promoter. Some of his contemporaries alleged that, as a
literary reviewer, he exercised a capricious and excessive influence on the
middlebrow reading public. His detractors also suggested that his penchant for
writing potboiling serials revealed that he was little more than a commercial servant
of magazine and newspaper editors, and of the mass consumerist ideology which
they blandly sustained. Most damagingly, his critics came to believe that the quality
of his fiction had so declined by the end of the war that he was artistically incapable
of embracing the radical challenges of Modernist experimentation.

The thesis shows that, as a prolific journalist and perceptive literary critic, his
catholic appeal to the reading public was extensive. It also shows that his articles are
important for contemporary readers because they sketch out a relief map pointing to
the most significant contours of the literary landscape between 1900 and 1930.

In addition, the thesis demonstrates that his serials have been injudiciously
undervalued. Whilst they were never conceived as high Art, they were important
because they helped him to develop as a writer. They provide cogent proof that he
always travelled freely along a continuum linking the artist to the craftsman and
tradesman. Furthermore, the cultural codes, social values and moral shibboleths
which they presciently evoke still resonate in the digital age of the twenty-first
century.

In his presentation of the enclosed Five Towns communities, the thesis argues that
Bennett combined mimetic topography and local culture with deft and complex
interpretations of social and private identity. This sophisticated construct allowed
him to combine his fidelity to realism with subtle explorations of self-definition.

Bennett was not just an accomplished regionalist, and the thesis concludes that he
never became stranded as a beached reactionary after the war. His metropolitan
novels draw freely upon the interest which he took in the work of Freud and W.H.R.
Rivers. They shaped the emergence of his new manner fiction and several of his
short stories, allowing him to demonstrate the invalidity of Virginia Woolf’s claim
that he could not write convincingly and powerfully about human psychology and its
susceptibilities to the refracted and sublimated impressions of daily life.

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INTRODUCTION
ARTIST, CRAFTSMAN, TRADESMAN

This thesis will examine the range and nuances of Arnold Bennett’s work as a
professional writer. It will identify the reasons why, and the process by which, his
reputation declined after the First World War. In so doing, it will seek to define and
authenticate his position as a hybrid artist, craftsman and tradesman who welcomed
modernity and its experimental adjuncts and exploited a multiplicity of practice and
a range of personae, in order to cater for the tastes and interests of his readership and
audiences.
Lord of the English Language, master of plot and plan,
Wizard of clever diction, seer of the heart of man;
Sculptor of subtle syntax, scribbler of sapient screed,
We in our breathless interest, quiver with joy as we read
Story or sermon or satire, confessions, reflections, reviews,
Essay or drama or novel – eagerly these we peruse,
All other authors forgotten while his new books we devour;
All other idols dethroning, Bennett’s the Man of the Hour!
Have we an author to match him? Is there a writer of us
So vigorous, various, versatile, vivid, voluminous?
No; to our Old World brother we offer the laurel and bays;
His to write magical marvels, ours but to read and to praise.
Loud as Olympian thunders, clear as Pandean Pipes,
May he record his impressions under the Stars and Stripes.
Gladly we give him our homage, hopefully seeking the way
How to Read Arnold Bennett on Twenty-Four Hours a Day.1

I forget which of the French symbolist writers of the late nineteenth
century denounced a hack writer as a urinator of journalistic copy in
the phrase ‘pisseur de copie’.2

1 Letters of Arnold Bennett, ed., James Hepburn, 4 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1966 –
1986), IV, 23 November 1911, pp. 93 – 94. The footnote to the letter, written by Bennett to his wife
Marguerite, indicates that the poem was recited by Carolyn Wells at a grand dinner which took place
at the St Regis Hotel, New York on 27 November 1911. The dinner was given in honour of Bennett
by Colonel Harvey, President of Harper’s. Carolyn Wells (18 June 1862 to 26 March 1942) was a
prolific American writer, whose specialities were popular mysteries, children’s books and humorous
verse.
2 Muriel Spark, A Far Cry from Kensington (London: Penguin, 1988), p. 45.
1
Arnold Enoch Bennett was born in Hanley, Staffordshire in May 1867. He was a
prolific writer; from the inception of his career in 1898 until his death in 1931 he
wrote 34 novels (a further one, The Dream of Destiny (1932), was never finished), 7
volumes of short stories, 13 plays (on some of which he collaborated with other
dramatists), and his autobiography. In addition to this prodigious output, he also
wrote articles and stories for over 100 different newspapers and periodicals, worked
in the Ministry of Information for a short period of time towards the end of the First
World War in 1918, and wrote librettos and film stories at the end of his career.3
During the first decade of the twentieth century his popularity and fame grew
exponentially. By the time he made his first visit to the United States of America in
1911 at the age of forty-four, he had achieved international celebrity and popularity
as a writer. As the first epigraph to this chapter implies, he was received by the
American public with adulation, and he was even considered to be the most popular
and influential English author to visit America since Charles Dickens in 1867.4 After
Bennett’s death his reputation and achievements were first undermined and then
destroyed, and today he is largely unremembered. What remains of his reputation is
confined to his novels, the best known of which depict in documentary detail the
Potteries of his childhood and youth. This thesis will identify the reasons for the
precipitous decline of Bennett’s reputation during his lifetime. More significantly, it
will also analyse the nuances and flexibility of his approach to his work and
demonstrate how this was mediated not just by the commercialisation of authorship
and commodity culture, but also by his ambitions for recognition as an artist and
craftsman. It will also show that his oeuvre was multi-faceted, that he was able to
engage with popularity and wealth in spite of his egalitarian principles, that as an

3 Margaret Drabble, Arnold Bennett: A Biography (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974),
pp. 375 – 77.
4 Ibid., p. 186.
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