Bennett, Arnold
Bennett, Arnold (1867–1931). Like George Eliot, Bennett was a fine novelist of provincial middle-class society—in his case that of the Potteries, a landscape of canals and kilns and trams and chimneys and dust. The Old Wives' Tale (1908) tells the story of two sisters, daughters of a draper in Bursley (Burslem). Clayhanger (1910) recalls the introduction of steam-printing into the Potteries and begins with two lads watching a horse-drawn canal barge bringing china clay up from Cornwall. Riceyman Steps (1923) moves the scene to Clerkenwell and the date to the 1920s, but stays with the same kind of people running a second-hand bookshop and a grocer's with pretensions to be a confectionery. Bennett, born in Hanley, started by following his father's career as a solicitor but went to London in 1888 where he made a living editing and writing reviews and short stories. From 1902 until 1912 he lived in Paris. Bennett's shabby, hard-working characters have something in common with those of Gissing, whom he tried to help, and with those of H. G. Wells, with whom he maintained a lengthy friendship and literary correspondence.
J. A. Cannon
More From encyclopedia.com
NEARBY TERMS
Bennett, Arnold