Arnold Bennett and HG Wells- A Leek connection

2008 saw the 100^th 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 practises were very alike to be bracketed together.

Arnold Bennett, HG Wells- a friendship formed in N Staffs

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.

Victorians and Food

Barely a week goes by without items appearing on the adulteration of food. The current controversy over burgers and horse meat being a recent example and a local newsagent was prosecuted ,last year for selling vodka to which a toxic substance was added. Concerns over the quality of food and its impact on the populace first come to the fore during the 19^th century.

All through the Victorian era food was adulterated. It was, put simply, a fact of life. Almost anything you purchased was likely to have had something added. The main reason was economic diluting the product increased profit. Adding water to milk is probably the most common instance of this although adulteration was far more widely practised.

The list of poisonous additives reads like the stock list of some mad and malevolent chemist: strychnine, cocculus inculus (both are hallucinogens) and copperas in rum and beer; sulphate of copper in pickles, bottled fruit, wine, and preserves; lead chromate in mustard and snuff; sulphate of iron in tea and beer; ferric ferrocynanide, lime sulphate, and turmeric in Chinese tea; copper carbonate, lead sulphate, bi-sulphate of mercury, and Venetian lead in sugar confectionery and chocolate; lead in wine and cider; all were extensively used and were accumulative in effect, resulting, over a long period, in chronic gastritis, and, indeed, often fatal food poisoning. It is not surprising that purgatives were frequently used

It also explains the trust people had in the Cooperative Movement in securing quality in food . The Rochdale Pioneers opened their store in 1844 and within a few months they had become known for providing unadulterated goods and a movement was born.

By the 1870s legislation was enacted and from that date prosecutions start to come through the courts. In February 1879 a local butcher Enoch Clarkson was taken to court in Cheadle for selling discoloured beef unfit for human consumption. A grocer in Burslem was fined for adding alum to flour and in Kidsgrove another was found guilty for adding plaster of paris called “daft” to confectionery On that example sometimes the tendency could have fatal consequences . In 1858 a sweet shop owner in Bradford named Neal mistakenly added arsenic to his peppermint lozenges resulting in over 20 deaths. It was cases like this led to legislation on food quality

The Rushton Mutilation

When two farmers Johnson and Clowes left the Fox Inn at Rushton Spencer one snowy December night in 1879 they little thought of the terrible ramifications over an argument about the sale of geese with another local man named Brooks would have. The pair met farmer Brooks on the road. That night Johnson realised that Brooks was still annoyed at being out bid by Johnson for the birds. But in Johnson’s account nothing was really said and the men went home. A day or so later Johnson heard that Brooks had been attacked and maltreated. Although in the demur way of the press of the time this was not the whole of it as Brooks had been castrated by an unknown assailant. Johnson thought that when the police called a day or so later that he would be called as a witness having seen Brooks prior to the assault. It turned out that the police had arrived to arrest both men on a charge of grievous assault. The judicial process was speedy and both men found themselves in the dock by the end of January 1880. They were found guilty. Johnson in a subsequent interview was very contemptuous of the lack of guidance and support by his legal team. Johnson and Clowes got ten years penal servitude. They rigorously protested their innocence and began to serve a prison term firstly at Pentonville and then at Chatham. It was hard at first as they were in solitary confinement and the two men were used to the outdoor life. The regime was a severe one and the two men were put to work in menial back breaking work. Johnson did not feel any bitterness to Brooks for allowing this situation to develop. Johnson gained some solace from the prison chaplain at Pentonville “ But many a night I burst my eyes thinking about it”. The poor diet and toil reduced both men to shadows of their former selves physically and mentally.

Clowes added a statement ” Our conviction came on us sudden. We could not blame the jury or the judge, for no one at the trial had anything to say for us and Brooks words were not contradicted”.

The two men’s luck changed when Brooks died and in a death bed confession insisted that the two men were innocent. Brooks had in fact wounded himself. The Home Secretary ordered their release and the two men were given a change of clothing and put on a train to North Staffordshire. They were well treated and spent some time in Burslem where the Mayor of the town gave them money before the men went to their homes.

Mrs Clowes told the press that the family had been broken up and she had been turned out of the farm. The children were living with other relatives and she now ran a shop on Biddulph Moor. Johnson had been much changed by the experience.