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 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.
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.
