Clayhanger

The life and times of Edwin Clayhanger will surprise, move and fascinate, as he grows from boy to man in the Five Towns at the beginning of the twentieth century

Crammed with details of Victorian life, the first book in Bennett's trilogy about a Potteries family examines how one man, Edwin Clayhanger, is shaped by class, geography and ties of blood.

Arnold Bennett writes marvelously on the stuff of life

For Bennett...compassion is not soggy. It involves understanding. The core of his writing is psychological truth, clinically observed, crisply reported

Arnold Bennett was born in Staffordshire on 27 May 1867, the son of a solicitor. Rather than following his father into the law, Bennett moved to London at the age of twenty-one and began a career in writing . His first novel, The Man from the North, was published in 1898 during a spell as editor of a periodical - throughout his life journalism supplemented his writing career. In 1902 Bennett moved to Paris, married, and published some of his best known novels, most of which were set in The Potteries district where he grew up: Anna of the Five Towns (1902), The Old Wives Tale (1908), and the Clayhanger series (1910-1918). These works, as well as several successful plays, established him both in Europe and America as one of the most popular and acclaimed writers of his era. Bennett returned to England in 1912, and during the First World War worked for Lord Beaverbrook in the Ministry of Information. In 1921, separated from his first wife, he fell in love with an actress, Dorothy Cheston, with whom he had a child. He received the James Tait Black Award for his novel Riceyman Steps in 1923. Arnold Bennett died of typhoid in London on 27 March 1931.

No longer a boy, not quite a man, Edwin Clayhanger stands on a canal bridge on his last day of school, and surveys the valley of Bursley and the Five Towns. Serious, good-natured and full of incoherent ambition, Edwin's hopes and dreams for the future are just taking shape, even as they are put to the test by challenges from Edwin's domineering father, the stifling constraints of society, and an unusual young woman.

Anna of the Five Towns

A young woman used to life under the strict rule of her tyrannical father finds herself on the brink of a new existence

Arnold Bennett is very much worth reading. This will be contrary to what any of you who might have studied English Literature at university since the last war will have been told, so please park such prejudices.

Bennett's great novels  all deal with the great emotions, though they are revealed through the stories of 'ordinary' people

Bennett has long been one of my favourite writers

Miserly and mysterious, the richest man in the Five Towns lives simply, ruling his household with an iron fist and a cruel temper. His daughter, Anna, is used to the life of strict, thrifty order imposed by her father. But when she comes of age, Anna inherits a small fortune and attracts the attentions of the town's most eligible bachelor. A new world seems to be opening to Anna, but her heart, given a taste of freedom, leads her in unexpected directions.

The Grand Babylon Hotel

An American millionaire buys an exclusive hotel on a whim, but soon discovers that shady dealings, secret passageways, kidnapping and murder lurk behind the expensive exteriors and aristocratic calm of the Grand Babylon Hotel.

Funny, undemanding... involves kidnapping, dilapidated central European royalty and redoubtable American millionairesses.

Arnold Bennett is generally rather excellent

Nella, daughter of millionaire Theodore Racksole, orders a dinner of steak and beer at the exclusive Grand Babylon Hotel in London. Her order is refused, so Theodore promptly buys the chef, the kitchen and the whole hotel. But when hotel staff begin to vanish and a German prince goes missing, Nella discovers that murder, blackmail and kidnapping are also on the menu. A rollicking murder mystery from one of the finest writers of the last century.

Riceyman Steps

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Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) was one of the most versatile, ambitious and successful British novelists of the early 20th century.  His novels and short stories both celebrate and deplore a rapidly changing Britain.  Much of his greatest work is set where he grew up, in the Potteries of the West Midlands.  Inspired by Zola and Maupassant, he realized that this world of brutal industrial work and rapid social change, religious severity and material temptation, was the perfect backdrop for everything from comedy to tragedy.  He died of typhoid.

Henry Earlforward, a shabby Clerkenwell bookseller, has retired from life to devote himself (and his wife Violet) to a consuming passion for money. Miserliness becomes a fatal illness and Bennett gives a terrifying description of its ravages. But the book's horrible situation is saved through the character of Elsie - whose life-affirming refusal to engage with the nightmarish world of the bookseller transforms the story. 
 
Bennett wished in Riceyman Steps to create an English novel as powerful as anything by Balzac, the writer he most admired, with the same sense of great human issues being played out within the confines of a household. The result is an unforgettable work which is also a gripping description of the harsh, battered London of the period just after the First World War.

'Deeply moving, original, and dealing with material that I had never encountered in fiction, but only in life' Margaret Drabble 
 
Growing up in the world of the 'five towns' of industrial England, with their furnaces and chimneys, huddled red-brown streets, prayer meetings and small-minded bigotry, Anna is dominated by her miserly and tyrannical father. When she inherits a fortune and finds love, she struggles to break free from the constraints upon her, even though she is torn between duty and her deepest feelings. Arnold's novel of parental tyranny and rebellion is a portrayal of a woman of great spirit, complexity and integrity.

A Story of Adventure in the Five Towns

The Card

One of fiction's greatest chancers - the story of Denry Machin and his unceasing, ingenious efforts to become a great man 
 
Set in the raw, Victorian world of the 'Five Towns', The Card tells the extremely funny and tangled story of Denry Machin's rise from mediocrity to fame through a series of ludicrous and yet perversely successful schemes. He dances, pleads, cheats and inspires his way through life in a series of set-pieces which wonderfully evoke a now long-gone world of civic balls, seaside excursions, newspaper boys and patent chocolate remedies. As everybody said after one of his most stylish coups, Denry 'was not simply a card; he was the card.'

Arnold Bennett

Kate O'Flynn

Neil Dudgeon

Tim McInnerny

Don Gilet

Rebekah Staton

Full Cast

BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisations

Neil Dudgeon and Tim McInnerny star in this epic tale of money, passion and defiance, inspired by the 'Five Towns' novels of Arnold Bennett 
 
In this radical reinterpretation of Arnold Bennett's classic novels set in the Staffordshire potteries, it's the 19th Century and the Industrial Revolution is at full throttle. Only the ruthless thrive in this uncompromising world - and Ephraim Tellwright and Darius Clayhanger are both determined to succeed. 
 
From humble beginnings, these two self-made men have risen to become wealthy and powerful. Now, they hold the fate of the Five Towns in their hands, passing judgement on those who put the prosperity and reputation of their community at risk... 
 
Over 10 hours and almost 40 years, we follow them, their descendants, and the inhabitants of Bursley and the Five Towns, as individuals rise, fall, flourish, age, and see the world around them become unrecognisable, transformed by new technology. Fortunes are lost, hearts broken, empires built and compromises made. 
 
These tales of aspiration and passion, damage and danger are told with Bennett's forensic eye for human psychology and a surprising degree of witty comedy, and feature a star cast including Emma Cunniffe, Kate O'Flynn, Don Gilet and Rebekah Staton.

Arnold Bennett

Books by Arnold Bennett

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