2008 saw the 100th anniversary of the publication of Arnold Bennett’s finest novel “Old Wives Tale”. Its publication date quickly follows that of Bennett’s great friend and rival HG Wells book “In the Days of the Comet” which was written in 1906. What links these two pieces of Edwardian fiction? They both have a Leek connection.
Bennett knew the Staffordshire Moorlands and while the main setting of his books remained Stoke, Leek especially crops up in various guises in his work. In first appears as “Axe” or “Manifold” in one of his earliest novels “Anna of the Five Towns” published in 1902 and again in his collection of short stories “ Tales of the Five Towns (1905) and “The Grim Smile of the Five Towns” which have Leek and Rudyard Lake settings. This is especially the case in the later collection in the story “ Death of Simon Fuge” his short story on the artistic life and pretensions of Burslem in the 1890s. Rudyard Lake was a popular venue for a young man from the Potteries to visit in that decade with frequent train from Stoke.
The Moorland connection is continued in Old Wives Tale. Sam walks to Axe (Leek) to tell his mother in law that he is become a father. Leek also played a role in perhaps his most popular literary creation Denry Machin in the “Card”. The character on which the novel is based HK Hales once in the 1890s cycled on a penny-farthing for a bet against a horseman to get from Burslem to Leek in the shortest time. Hales won.
Wells, who lived in North Staffordshire for several months in 1888, used his experience of living in the area in a number of his novels and short stories prior to his “Comet” novel. The short story Cone with its gristly ending of a character falling into a furnace was based at Shelton Bar Steel Works.
North Staffordshire with its industrial and squalid landscape had a profound impact upon his work, which stayed with him throughout his life.
But it came to me then, I am sure, for the first time how promiscuous, how higgledy piggedy was that jumble of mines and homes, collieries and pot banks, railway yards, canals, schools, forges and blast furnaces, churches, chapels, allotments hovels a vast irregular agglomeration of ugly smoking accidents in which men lived as happily as frogs in a dustbin.
I get the impression that Wells used the surrounding countryside to contrast with the hideousness of the industrial landscape which he experienced in his stay in Basford.
But back to the North Staffordshire based Bennett who was born in Hanley in September 1867 to lower middle class parents. Bennett professed to be a radical, and he remained throughout his life a hater of injustice, but his own belief system marked him out as a child of nonconformist certainties. He had a belief in industry, patriotism and thrift. He was of a class and from a geographical area. He soaked up every detail of the people and character of North Staffordshire. He was a laureate to the lower middle class and the provincial.
He regarded writing as a trade and at each year’s end would note the amount of words that he had written that year and how much he had been paid. One critic unkindly suggested that a sign should be erected outside his study “Articles written to order”
If he took a workingman’s approach to his craft he still remained a bourgeois and a little tyrant as well especially in his relationship with women, something that he shared in common with Wells. He was easily bored- he tired of his home, his car, his yacht and of his wife. He certainly recoiled from the area that has provided the source of his material. On his last visit through North Staffordshire he is alleged to have shuddered and pulled the blind of his railway carriage down. But behind his heavy set figure with his showy clothes, his heavy lidded eyes, his half open mouth and his slight speech impediment, was a shy man.
But he never wrote of a dull character and he made the ordinary interesting chronicling the lives of a stoical and defiant people. North Staffordshire belongs to him as Wessex belongs to Hardy or Haworth to the Bronte’s
His greatest novel was the Old Wives Tale. It also celebrates the commonplace although never in a dull way. It is the story of two women Constance and Sophia Baines who have different destinies. It charters their progress from running a drapers shop to old age. It contrasts the stay at home Constance who marries Sam Povey with the spirited Sophia who elopes with the dashing but wastrel Gerald Scales. It proved to be the most critically acclaimed of his books.
One of the admirers of Old Wives Tales was Wells who wrote to Bennett praising him for his efforts.
No further question of First Rank. A great book and a big one.
Wells came to live in the area following an accident he suffered as a schoolteacher when working at a school in Wrexham. The accident damaged his lungs and he went to convalesce with an old College friend John Burton, originally from Manchester, who was working at Wedgwood at the time. (It does seem odd that you would choose to stay in Stoke of the late 1880s with its appalling atmospheric pollution to recuperate from a lung injury!) He went to live with the Burton’s at their house in Basford. He proved to be a very difficult lodger. He was fractious, touchy, quarrelsome, impatient and without much control. He behaved like Kevin the Teenager. In later life Wells did apologies for behaviour that he felt was very immature. But he did spend his time in the area in a productive way and it allowed him to explore the local scenery. He used this experience to colour descriptive passages on industrial landscape and as a metaphor for the hell of modern life. Although Bennett was living only 2 miles away: they never met in 1888.
Bennett wrote to Wells after the publication of the Invisible Man enclosing a review he had written and enquiring whether Wells time in North Staffordshire had an impact upon his writing. Wells reply was genial and a friendship developed which lasted until Bennett’s death in 1931. The men were of the same age, their social class was similar, and their writing practices were very alike to be bracketed together.
Wells was full of praise and acknowledgement of Bennett’s support
Arnold, you are a dear. The best friend I’ve ever had
Bennett however had the measure of Wells when he wrote following the publication of In the Days of the Comet
“You aren’t an artist insofar as you make use of your art for your reforming ends; you are simply a reformer. Like all great reformers you are inhumane, and scornful of everything that does not interest you
In the Days of the Comet is formed by Wells political belief. He had become a member of the socialist group the Fabian Society in 1903, which included Bernard Shaw the Irish playwright another writer who was well known in North Staffordshire.
In the novel Willie Leadford is a socialist smitten with a young woman Nettie. England is a war with Germany. As the story unfolds a comet has been observed on collision course with Earth. Willie has other concerns as Nettie has left him for a wealthy man named Verrall. Willie swears revenge a buys a revolver with the intention of shooting them. He goes after Nettie and Verrall. The Comet smashes into the earth and releases a green gas, which puts everyone asleep. Humanity has been changed and a socialist view prevails. War is over, the slums are torn down, and everyone is equal thanks to the effects of the Comet.
Willie practises with his gun on land near the road between Leek and Stafford, which suggests the Leek or Cheddleton area.
I had walked out with it four or five miles across a piece of moorland and down to a secluded coppice full of bluebells, half way along the high road between Leet and Stafford.
Wells changes slightly the name of the town.
The two men’s reputation has suffered but the anniversary of Bennett’s greatest novel next year should ensure that his reputation continues high and Wells experience of life in the area while convalescing during several months in 1888 had an impact upon his political beliefs for years afterwards.
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