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Hudson, Brian (2017) Transport and travel in the world of Arnold Bennett. Journal of the Railway and Canal Historical Society, 39(230), pp. 130-142.
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Brian Hudson
English novelist and journalist Arnold Bennett was one of the most famous and successful
writers of the early twentieth century. The literary works of this prolific author have been used as source material by researchers from a remarkably wide range of academic and professional backgrounds. His writings have been examined and discussed in published books and papers on subjects that include geography, landscape aesthetics, nineteenth-century costume, modernism, education, law, business, medicine and transport history.1 This essay
further explores Bennett’s writings on transport, examining the author’s descriptions of
journeys on land and water, mainly in England, but also in continental Europe and the USA.
The focus of this study is the experience of travel as it changed with the technological
innovations which facilitated the movement of people between and within towns and cities,
on journeys long and short.
As a writer and lover of books, Bennett believed that, ‘The aim of literary study is not to
amuse the hours of leisure, it is to awake oneself, it is to be alive, to intensify one’s capacity
for pleasure, for sympathy, and for comprehension. … It is to change utterly one’s relations
with the world. An understanding appreciation of the world, and it means nothing else.’2
Works of fiction offer much scope for gaining an understanding of the experience of travel,
for, as Adams argues, ‘prose fiction and the travel account have evolved together and are
heavily indebted to each other, and are often similar in both content and technique.’3 Over
half a century ago, sociologist Lewis Coser observed, ‘Literature, though it may be many
other things, is social evidence and testimony’, adding, ‘It is a continuous commentary on
manners and peculiar social and cultural conditions.’4 Importantly, ‘The literary creator has
the ability to identify with wide ranges of experience, and he has the trained capacity to
1
articulate through his fantasy the existential problems of his contemporaries’.5 Historians are
amongst those who share this view. Referring to Japanese writer Murasaki Shikibu (c1000
AD), Felipe Fernandez-Armesto remarked that, ‘Her powers of observation produced The
Tale of Genji, which has some claim to be the world’s first novel … a work of unexcelled
usefulness to historians, recalling faithfully the customs and values of a long-vanished
world’.6
Born in 1867, Bennett lived much closer to our times and many vestiges of his world survive
today. Nevertheless, his writings are of value to scholars for illuminating a period of rapid
technological and social change, including the ways in which goods and people were
transported from place to place. In examining the work of Bennett, this paper demonstrates
the value of literature as a source of historical evidence for the way people experienced life in
the past, and illustrates Bennett’s ability to evoke the feelings of men and women as they
travelled from place to place. For Bennett, travel is among life’s greatest pleasures, one that
was ‘not to be valued by the mile but by the quality’.7 While many scholars who turn to
literature for evidence make use of fiction, this paper examines Bennett’s journalistic and
autobiographical works as well as his novels and short stories in order to better understand
the experience of travel in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Included in this
discussion is the impact that developments in transport technology had on the landscape.
Bennett grew to manhood in Victorian lower middle class provincial society, having been
born in the industrial Potteries district where he lived until he was 21 years old. Most of his
works, however, were written and published after the death of Queen Victoria, but many of
his novels and short stories were set in the Victorian era. This was a period with which he
was directly familiar as a child and young man, and which lingered in the memories of his
family and friends. Moreover, the post-Victorian world which Bennett also portrayed in his fiction and non-fiction bore the indelible mark of social and technological developments of
2 the previous century. This can be no better demonstrated than in his observations on transport and travel. Steam-powered ships and locomotives, vehicles powered by petrol and electricity, even heavier than air flight all had their beginnings in the years when Victorian reigned and all developed rapidly during the first decades of the twentieth century. This transformed spatial patterns of land use, communications, flows of goods and people, and human behaviour. For many more people than before, travel became a source of pleasure, leading to an increase in writing on the subject. Travel literature became very popular in the nineteenth century, but travel writers tend to focus particularly on the more dramatic and exotic aspects of journeys they undertake. They commonly ignore the day-to-day experience of ordinary travellers, especially those whose movements take place within their home towns and regions.
Bennett was interested in travel of all kinds. He was, among other things, a travel writer in the usual sense of someone who wrote about his extensive travels abroad, but this essay focuses more on his descriptions of travel over shorter distances, particularly journeys within local areas undertaken for everyday purposes. Bennett’s fame rests mainly on his fiction and journalism, and his best known works are concerned with the Potteries district where he was born and grew up. His books and articles also reflect his interest in the other places in which he lived and which he visited on his travels. Bennett believed that ‘All literature is the expression of feeling, of passion, of emotion, caused by a sensation of the interestingness of life.’8 Hence, the value of Bennett’s work to historians of transport and travel lies in the author’s ability to evoke the spirit of his time, particularly through expressing the feelings of his characters as they went on their journeys. It is through their thoughts, as well as the author’s observations, that we learn how people experienced the effects of changing transport technology on their environment and way of life.
3
Bennett was born in Hanley, one of the six Staffordshire towns that, in 1910, federated to form what is now the city of Stoke-on-Trent. This area, commonly known as the Potteries because of its traditional major industry, is the Five Towns of Bennett’s fiction. In his books the author changes the names of his Potteries locations. For example, Stoke becomes the fictional Knype, Hanley Hanbridge, Burslem Bursley, Tunstall Turnhill, Longton Longbridge,
Cobridge Bleakridge, Newcastle Oldcastle, and Waterloo Road Trafalgar Road. At the age of
21 Bennett left home to live in London, later moving to France and Essex. In the early years of the twentieth century he became one of the most successful and acclaimed writers of the age, but his reputation in the literary world declined after the First World War. For decades after Virginia Wolf’s famous critical essay on Bennett, his novels and short stories were largely ignored by the literary cognoscenti.9 Among Woolf’s criticisms of Bennett was her accusation that the realist author gave too much emphasis to detailed description of people’s appearance and their environment, to the detriment, she felt, of the portrayal of character.
More recently, however, Bennett has again attracted serious attention from scholars and after a period of neglect by literary scholars, some have now come to Bennett’s defence. In the opinion of Kinley Roby, ‘There is no doubt that Bennett was a master of detail. At his best the minutiae, which is both texture and a context within the novels, takes on a vividness and an intensity generally found only in poetry.’10 Bennett’s writings often display his fascination with complex organizations and technical processes, such as grand hotels and factories. In his book Your United States: impressions of a first visit, Bennett provides details of the workings of a great ocean liner.11 The book also says much about transport on land as well as at sea, the author making perceptive observations on railway travel within and between
American cities, and on the traffic that he saw on the streets.
Bennett, transport and travel
4
The enormous increase in travel for both work and pleasure which occurred in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was made possible by advances in transport
technology during that period. Bennett recognized this and his works describe travel by
various means of transport at a time when steam power was being augmented and gradually
superseded by the harnessing of electricity and petrol fuelled internal combustion. Horse-
drawn vehicles remained important during his lifetime, however, even in the theatre of war.12
Bennett saw transport as one of the most fundamental aspects of human life. In his novel The
Glimpse, the hero suffers a heart attack followed by an out-of-body experience in which he has the following revelation:
And suddenly with a strange and disconcerting abruptness, I had a view of the
whole human race engaged in the business of moving matter from one place to
another. These creatures to whom I was now foreign and superior (in my fearful
solitude), seemed to exhaust themselves solely in this crude physical task. It was
not merely ships, railways, trams, omnibuses, cabs, lifts, and the post. It was
shops, mines, restaurants, water, light, drainage, – everything that was deemed
important in the assemblages of men. Nearly the entire contents of every
newspaper every day were devoted to this ridiculous question of moving matter
from one place to another; it constituted nearly the whole of human history. And
I was astonished that I had never before been struck by this huge, obvious fact.13
This idea may well have been in Bennett’s mind when he wrote the opening chapter of
Clayhanger, his better known novel published the year after The Glimpse. Close to his home
in Bursley, young Edwin Clayhanger observes two horse-drawn canal boats travelling in opposite directions, one vessel carrying a cargo of china clay brought from Cornwall, the other laden with earthenware manufactured locally and destined for distant markets.14 Edwin
wonders why clay is brought so far in order to be turned into crockery in this particular part
5 of England. The matter on the move referred to in The Glimpse clearly includes that which constitutes human beings, as is attested by the author’s reference to trams, omnibuses, cabs and lifts. The passage also illustrates Bennett’s ability to conceive the details of everyday life within the greater context of global activity.
Bennett’s literary world of transport ranges from the handcart, packhorse, horse-drawn carriage and bicycle to the canal boat, private yacht, river passenger steamer, ocean liner, railway train, steam and electric tram, motor car, omnibus, taxi, balloon and aeroplane. The experience of walking is also well represented in Bennett’s writing. Some of his pedestrians eventually become familiar with the passenger lift which transports them vertically in multi- storeyed buildings. This study draws on Bennett’s writings not only to trace changing ways of moving people, but, adopting a phenomenological approach, it seeks to evoke the lived world of the period under investigation. It is essentially humanistic, focusing ‘upon the individual’s experience of life, his or her values, attitudes and beliefs’.15
Wherever and however he travelled, Bennett was normally very conscious of his surroundings. ‘Travel makes observers of us all’, he wrote in The Author’s Craft.16 When describing places and landscapes the author was clearly aware of the different modes of transport that contributed to the scene and were part of the local way of life. Unlike Bennett, the characters in his fiction were not usually aware of their environment. At the beginning of his masterpiece The Old Wives’ Tale, a novel published in 1908, Bennett describes the
Staffordshire setting in which the two main protagonists, sisters Constance and Sophia, live largely unaware of their surroundings:
On every side the fields and moors of Staffordshire, intersected by roads and
lanes, railways, watercourses and telegraph lines, patterned by hedges,
ornamented and made respectable by halls and genteel parks, enlivened by
villages at the intersections, and warmly surveyed by the sun, spread out
6
undulating. And trains were rushing round curves in deep cuttings, and carts and
wagons trotting and jingling on the yellow roads, and long narrow boats passing
in a leisure majestic and infinite over the surface of the stolid canals … And on
the airy moors heath-larks played in the ineffaceable mule-tracks that had served
centuries before even the Romans thought of Watling Street.17
This literary impression of the Staffordshire landscape vividly illustrates how Bennett seamlessly integrates transport phenomena and history into his portrayal of the settings of his novels. The discussion below treats the subject in the following order: travel using one’s own energy on foot or bicycle, travel by road transport, by railway, by water, by air and by mixed modes of transport. Throughout the essay it is the way in which transport and travel are experienced rather than just the narrative of the journey and the description of the landscape that is being brought the reader’s attention.
Walking and cycling
Bennett’s novel Clayhanger, published in 1910, opens with the eponymous hero walking home at the end of his last day at school. The experience of that walk includes Edwin
Clayhanger’s thoughts about the life that lies ahead of him, as well as the author’s and the protagonist’s observations of the Potteries landscape where the action takes place. In truth, the author and Edwin are largely one and the same person, the story being based partly on
Bennett’s own youthful experience. According to one biographer, this walk between young
Bennett’s home and his school in Newcastle-under-Lyme was ‘in certain matters more instructive than the lessons which came at the end of it’.18 The first three chapters of the novel which describe Edwin’s walk home make frequent reference to the transportation history of the Potteries. Among the landscape features mentioned in the text are country field paths, winding roads dating from the days of pack horses, wagons and coaches, a straight toll road built during the Napoleonic wars, canals, railways, and urban streets.19 The landscape
7
image that Bennett creates reflects his careful historical and geographical research on the
region, as well as his youthful memories and more recent observations made during his brief
returns to the area in which he grew to adulthood. As he moved through that familiar
landscape, he was able to see it with the eyes of an insider, one who was born and grew up in
the place, and as an outsider, someone who had left home and settled far away.20 In the
opening chapters of Clayhanger we find both views, that of the local resident represented by
young Edwin, and that of the external observer, represented by the novel’s author.
As an adult, Bennett was a keen walker. He walked for exercise and pleasure, finding this
activity conducive to thought when engaged in writing, as he nearly always was. He was also
a cyclist during the 1890s and early years of the twentieth century when this activity became
popular. It was a time when developments in bicycle design and the introduction of
pneumatic rubber tyres together with road improvements made cycling more attractive.
Bennett’s journals frequently mention both of these activities, recording his observations and
thoughts as he travelled about by his own physical effort. Walking and cycling, alone or with his French wife Marguerite, were among the pleasures enjoyed by Bennett when the couple lived in Fontainebleau between 1908 and 1911. They walked and cycled in all kinds of weather, sometimes taking with them food and wine for roadside picnics, sometimes stopping in villages along the way for refreshment. Taking a break from his writing, Bennett would set out on foot undeterred by rain:
I walked 4 miles in 59 minutes this morning in the rain. And this afternoon I went
with Marguerite to Moret in pouring rain. A promenade on a thoroughly bad day in
autumn is the next best thing to a promenade on a fine late spring morning. I enjoy it
immensely. I enjoy splashing waterproof boots into deep puddles.21
Here is an example of someone revelling in the experience of direct contact with the
environment while on a walk. Another of Bennett’s walking companions was H G Wells.
8
While staying at Wells’s home in Kent Bennett recorded, ‘I walked about twelve miles with him today, and we had a bread-and-cheese and jam lunch at a little inn in a little village’.22
Apart from enjoying the countryside and conversation with his novelist friend, Bennett also used the time to think about his own writing and the demands of his publishers.
A clear idea of the way in which walking was both therapeutic and mentally stimulating for
Bennett can be gained from a journal entry written while he was staying in Sussex after his separation from his wife. ‘I heard definitely from Marguerite this morning that she would not agree to a divorce. Couldn’t work. I went out for a short walk, past the castle and through fields. The spectacle grew more and more lovely.’ Along the way, unexpected circumstances forced Bennett to walk further than he had intended, and he returned to his host’s country cottage, ‘tired but in much better health.’ Bennett adds, ‘Also I had picked up some ideas for my novel en route’ and that evening he managed to write 700 words.23 On foot or on a bicycle Bennett and the characters he draws remain in close contact with their immediate surroundings even when their thoughts are sometimes elsewhere. As I discuss later in this essay, technological advances in transportation increasingly separate travellers from the physical environment through which they move.
Roads and motorized transport
Whether walking or cycling, much of the journey is often on roads, a feature of the landscape that fascinated Bennett. His appreciation of the importance of roads is revealed in his observation that, ‘no man can comprehend the human aspect of a countryside until he has comprehended its roads’, reminding his 1920s readers that, ‘to-day roads have regained almost all the importance which they possessed before railways competed with them and beat them.’24
It was the rapid advancement of motorised road transport that led to the relative decline in the importance of railways. Readers of Bennett witness a sequence of change in public transport
9
from the horse-drawn coach to the electric tram. Oft-mentioned in his Five Towns fiction are
trams, road vehicles on rails originally drawn by horses and later powered by steam then
electricity. In Clayhanger Bennett briefly mentions ‘a couple of pair-horsed trams that ran on
lines’.25 The experience of this service is humorously described in The Old Wives’ Tale:
Incredible as it may appear, there was nothing but a horse- tram running between
Bursley and Hanbridge – and that only twice an hour, and between the other
towns no stage of any kind! … The driver rang a huge bell, five minutes before
starting, that could be heard from the Wesleyan Chapel to the Cock Yard, and then
after deliberations and hesitations the vehicle rolled off on its rails into unknown
dangers while passengers shouted good-bye. At Bleakridge it had to stop for the
turnpike, and it was assisted up the mountains of Leveson Place and Sutherland
Street (towards Hanbridge) by a third horse, on whose back was perched a tiny,
whip-cracking boy; that boy lived like a shuttle on the road between Leveson
Place and Sutherland street, and even in wet weather he was the envy of all other
boys. After half an hour’s perilous transit the car drew up solemnly in a narrow
street by the Signal [newspaper] office in Hanbridge, and the ruddy driver, having
revolved many times the polished iron handle of his sole brake, turned his
attention to his passengers in a calm triumph, dismissing them with a sort of
unsung doxology.26
The ‘mountains’ encountered on the route are Bennett’s ironic description of the low hills
traversed by the main road. The shuttle metaphor in this passage reflects the industrial age in
which the author lived, and it is interesting to note how this term for part of a weaving
machine was later applied to twentieth century transport and even space exploration.
Horse-drawn trams quickly gave way to mechanical vehicles on rails. We are introduced to the steam powered tram in the opening scene of Anna of the Five Towns where, on a hot,
10
sunny afternoon, ‘a steam-car was rumbling and clattering up Duck Bank attended by its
immense shadow’.27 In a later short story, ‘It was a mild but starless night. Trafalgar Road was silent save for the steam-car, which, with its load of revellers returning from Hanbridge – that centre of gaiety – slipped rumbling down the hill towards Bursley’.28 This change from
horse power to steam came with an increase in speed and frequency of service. The twice
hourly service by horse tram was replaced by ‘the new steam-cars’ which would complete the
journey between Burslem and Bleakridge ‘in three minutes or so, every quarter of an hour’.29
Speed and frequency were further increased when steam power was replaced by electricity,
the public transport system expanding so that a ‘hundred and twenty electric cars … now rush
madly bumping and thundering at twenty miles an hour through all the main streets of the
district!’30
As elsewhere in Britain, in the Potteries the tram was later superseded by the omnibus, itself
originating as a horse-drawn vehicle, soon to be powered by the petrol engine. Unlike the
tram, which is best described in Bennett’s Five Towns fiction, the omnibus occurs mainly in
his London writings. In Bennett’s novel The Roll Call, early one morning in 1903 a motor
cyclist riding westwards along Piccadilly encounters
thousands of people travelling in the opposite direction in horse-omnibuses and in a
few motor-omnibuses … They had fought, men and girls, for places in the crammed
vehicles; they had travelled from far lands such as Putney; they had been up for hours,
and … what they chiefly beheld in the Green Park was the endless lines of wayfarers
radiating from Victoria along the various avenues on the way, like themselves, to
offices, warehouses, and shops.31
Here we catch a glimpse of London’s vast commuter population in the early years of the twentieth century when the petrol engine is beginning to replace the horse as the major source of power for road vehicles. It was the development and improvement of new modes of
11 transport and the expansion of transportation networks that enabled and encouraged the growth of commuter suburbs.
Similar changes were occurring in England’s provincial cities, including Bennett’s Five
Towns where, ‘automobiles of the most expensive French and English makes fly dashingly along its hilly roads and scatter in profusion the rich black mud thereof’.32 Even as a wealthy successful author, Bennett continued to make much use of public transport, but he also became an enthusiastic motorist. He bought a series of motor cars, including a Lanchester, a
Model T Ford and a Rolls Royce. He learned to drive, but also employed a chauffeur. Motor cars feature prominently in many of Bennett’s novels and short stories. This was before the time of frequent roadside service stations, so it was wise to carry a can or two of petrol in the car in case the fuel ran out. To overlook this precaution might result in a long walk unless alternative transport could be found, as we read in one of his stories:
‘We can walk back to Turnhill and buy some petrol, some of us!’ snapped Harold.
‘That’s what we can do!’
‘Sithee,’ said Uncle Dan. ‘There’s the Plume o’ Feathers half-a-mile back. Th’
landlord’s a friend o’ mine. I can borrow his mare and trap, and drive to Turnhill
and fetch some of thy petrol, as thou calls it.’33
In town and country, old roads were being transformed in response to the new demands of traffic, and new ones constructed. Bennett was particularly impressed by the modern
Italian autostrada:
The autostrada or speedway between Milan and the lake districts has a surface as
good as the best English; and it is straight and level, and the price of it is roughly
a penny a mile, and you can travel on it as fast as your engine and your rashness
permit … The autostrada is a great time-saver. Its kilometre-stones flash by like
telegraph poles.34
12
Bennett became familiar with one of England’s major roads when, in 1900, he decided to live in the country and took a lease on Trinity Hall Farm, Hockliffe, Bedfordshire. The house still stands beside the A5 highway on the line of the ancient Roman Watling Street. This move was the inspiration for Bennett’s novel Teresa of Watling Street. Harshly criticised by
Bennett’s biographers and by the author himself, this ‘very bad novel’ has the merit of conveying an image of one of England’s major highways at the time when motor vehicles were beginning to replace the horse on British roads.35 Describing Watling Street, Bennett notes,
After sixty years of disuse, it had resumed its old position as a great highway
through the magnificence of England. The cyclist and the motorist had
rediscovered it, rejuvenating its venerable inns, raising its venerable dust, and
generally giving new vitality to the leviathan after its long sleep.36
Throughout the book are descriptions of roadside scenes and sounds with references to cuttings, embankments, fields, farms, houses, villages, towns, inns, chalk pits and other features of the local landscape. Here, ‘the Chiltern Hills stretched away in the far distance, bathed in limitless glad sunshine; and Watling Street ran white, dazzling, and serene, down the near slope, and up the hill towards Dunstable, curtained in the dust of rural traffic’.37
Travelling along this road could be monotonous, especially on
… the twelve miles of lonely and straight Watling Street that separates St. Albans
from Dunstable. On this interminable and monotonous stretch of road there are
only two villages; mile succeeds mile with a sort of dogged persistency, and the
nocturnal traveller becomes, as it were, hypnotized by the ribbon-like highway
that stretches eternally in front of him and behind him.38
Ancient though Watling Street was, developments in road construction and in the modes of transport that used roads meant that travel along it and highways like it increased the
13
separation of passengers from contact from their surroundings. For example, the cuttings and
embankments observed by Bennett were recent highway improvements made to reduce
gradients. This reduced travellers’ awareness of the physical character of the terrain through
which they were passing.
Railway travel
The separation of travellers from the places and landscapes they traversed on their journeys
increased with the development of the railways. The construction of these involved building
viaducts and embankments, excavating cuttings and tunnels, as well as laying smooth steel
tracks, all of which contributed to the separation of the traveller from the world outside the
carriage.
While residing at Hockliffe, Bennett used his bicycle and his horse drawn phaeton to get
about the local area but he chose the place partly because of its good railway access to
London. By the time Bennett was writing about motor travel on highways of modern
construction, railways had reached the peak of their development after a century of evolution
and expansion. Sociologist Ian Carter has made much use of literature in his study of
railways.39 An entire chapter of his book Railways and Culture in Britain is devoted to one
of Arnold Bennett’s least known novels, Accident. This Carter describes as ‘a more
penetrating, and more convincingly canonical, British “railway novel” than any competitor ever managed’, adding: ‘For that reason if for no other, this work ill-deserves oblivion’.40
Bennett clearly reveals his lifelong interest in railways when he states, ‘Railroads and trains
have always appealed to me’, acknowledging ‘I have often tried to express my sense of their
romantic savor’.41
Railway journeys begin and end at railway stations and Bennett’s first novel A Man From the
North, published in 1898, opens with a description of the wistful feelings of a provincial
youth watching the departure of the London train from his local station.42 In Clayhanger, a
14
successful Five Towns businessman is awed by London’s Victoria station where its
atmosphere of luxury and leisure ‘had none of the busy harshness of the Midlands’.43 Here
‘Edwin had the apologetic air of the provincial who is determined to be as good as anybody
else’.44 For a genteel visitor from the south of England, the experience of arrival at a Five
Towns railway station was very different:
Well, my impressions of the platform at Knype station were unfavourable. There was
dirt in the air; I could feel it at once on my skin. And the scene was shabby,
undignified, and rude … What I saw was a pushing, exclamatory, ill-dressed,
determined crowd, each member of which was bent on the realization of his own
desires by the least ceremonious means.45
How different this was from ‘unstrenuous, soft’ Victoria station where ‘Everybody [had] an
assured air of wealth and dominion … Everybody was well dressed …’46 The scene at
Knype station was not always hectic: ‘The platform as a whole was sparsely peopled; the
London train had recently departed, and the station was suffering from the usual reaction;
only a local train was signalled.’47 A few people lingered near a bookstall on the platform,
which reminds us that the growth of railway travel from the 1840s onwards greatly
encouraged the sale of books and newspapers.
At times the experience of catching a train can cause anxiety, particularly when there is an
important appointment to be kept. Bennett’s short story Catching the Train provides a vivid
account of this in the context of a freezing winter’s morning in the Five Towns.48 This tale also includes the hazards of travelling with heavy luggage, the fear of missed connections, and problems that arise when a train divides into two, with carriages going to different destinations. In this story we find one of the many references to Bradshaw that occur commonly in Victorian and later English literature, including Bennett’s fiction. An
15
invaluable source of information for the railway traveller in Britain, Bradshaw’s Railway
Guide was published monthly from 1839 to 1961.
Once aboard the train, Bennett’s characters experience their journeys in various ways, some
looking through the window at the passing scene, some reading, some conversing, others lost
in thought. ‘As the train rushed smoothly across the vast and rich plain of Middle England,
Leonora’s thoughts dwelt on the house at Hillport, on her skilled and sympathetic servants …
and on the calm and the orderliness and the high decency of everything.’49 Comfortably
settled in her railway carriage, Leonora was thinking about her home, scarcely aware that she
was being conveyed at high speed behind a powerful steam locomotive travelling along a
steel railed track. Schivelbusch notes that the transition from coach to railroad technology
reduced passengers’ sensory experience of their journey, partly because the railway track was
‘harder, smoother, more level, and straighter than any road before it’.50 Consequently, ‘As
the natural irregularities of the terrain that were perceptible on the old roads were replaced by
the sharp linearity of the railroad, the traveller felt that he lost contact with the landscape, and
surely experienced this most directly when going through a tunnel.’51
Train passengers felt as if they were in a different ‘sphere’ from that through which they were
travelling, and that ‘the railroad and the landscape through which it ran were in two separate
worlds’.52 Bennett described this experience perfectly when, recalling a railway journey
through France, he wrote, ‘But my thoughts were chiefly occupied with the idea of the train,
that luxurious complete entity – running through a country and ignoring it. I seldom had the least idea where the train was. Space, as a notion, had vanished for me. I might have been in the void.’53 With the advent of air travel, this feeling of detachment has become even more
common and intense among travellers.
As we are reminded in the story The Death of Simon Fuge, some travellers find railway
journeys boring: ‘For, well knowing from experience that I should suffer acute ennui in the
16 train, I had, when buying the Gazette at Euston, taken oath that I would not even glance at it till after Rugby; it is always the final hour of these railway journeys that is the nethermost hell.’54 No doubt the separation of the railway passenger from the train’s surroundings contributed to the boredom of the journey, but it also made the ride more comfortable, enabling travellers to engage in activities such as reading previously made difficult by the bumping and jolting commonly experienced with earlier forms of transport. Of course, many passengers found interest in the view from their railway coach, a moving landscape framed by the carriage window. In her discussion of Dickens’ Dombey and Son, Charlotte Mathieson notes the ‘New modes of perception afforded by the railway window’, observing that ‘The compartment window was a much bigger and smoother sheet of glass than that of the stagecoach and, when combined with the new speed of travel, this created an altogether new platform from which to view the world beyond.’55 Advances in the manufacture of glass as well as in railway technology contributed to the change in the experience of travel which
Victorian and later novelists described. Observed through the window of a speeding railway carriage, the landscape is seen as a panorama presented ‘as a vast succession of indiscriminate images [in which] all sense of dimension and depth is lost’.56 To the passenger looking out from the carriage, the pane of glass framed by the window’s edge becomes like a painted surface.
Accordingly, the view from the train is often described in aesthetically pleasing terms
… At the same time though, aesthetic delight represents a commodification of
perception: the idea of consumption is inherent in the railway panorama and the
picturesque view from the window is a resolutely artificial presentation of the
landscape presented for the entertainment of the traveller.57
Bennett provides examples of this. On a railway journey from the Five Towns to Devon,
Edwin Clayhanger spent some of the time
17
… looking curiously out of the carriage-window … While, in the heavenly air of the
September morning, the train was curving through Bickleigh Vale and the Valley of the
Plym and through the steeper valley of the Meavy up towards the first fastness of the
Moor, he had felt his body to be almost miraculously well and his soul almost
triumphant.58
For a visitor born in Devon and residing in London, the view from the train arriving in the
Five Towns was something utterly different. The southern passenger was shocked by, ‘the singular scenery of coal dust, potsherds, flame and steam, through which the train wound its way. It was squalid ugliness, but it was squalid ugliness on a scale so vast and overpowering that it became sublime.’59 Overseas, as well as in England, Bennett was acutely observant of the landscape while travelling by rail. On a train journey to Paris in October 1897 the young writer observed the changing scenery as he and his fellow passengers sped along the track.
At one stage Bennett had the impression of moving ‘through a flying sea of yellow leaves glinting in the sunlight.’ Later in the journey,
For many miles the landscape was bare, greyish and uninteresting. Then, as we
increased our distance from the sea southwards a change of temperature and of
atmosphere became more and more perceptible, until the warmth and brightness
made almost an English summer. Presently the character of the landscape altered.
Water was everywhere in large quiet pools bordered by trees delightfully tinted,
and we passed by picturesque towns with fine churches and wonderful crooked
white streets.
We entered Paris, as one enters London, by boring a way into the city through
ravines with windowed walls.60
Bennett’s experience of railway travel abroad was greatly expanded when he first visited
America in 1911. The book he wrote about this tour includes the author’s detailed
18 impressions of his journeys by rail across the United States. Among the things that struck him favourably was New York’s ‘Pennsylvania station … full of the noble qualities that fine and heroic imagination alone can give’, making it, in Bennett’s opinion, ‘the most majestic terminus in the world’.61 He was ‘impressed rather than charmed’ by the luxury ‘all-steel cars’ of the train he boarded, and disliked the low windows that made it ‘impossible to see the upper part of the thing observed (roofs, telegraph- wires, tree-foliage, hill-summits, sky) without bending the head and cricking the neck’.62 Much worse, for Bennett, was what he saw on the night train he took for his return journey from Washington: ‘I confess that I had not imagined anything so appalling as the confined, stifling, malodorous promiscuity of the
American sleeping-car, where men and women are herded together on shelves under the drastic control of an official aided by negroes.’63 Fortunately for Bennett, he was spared this discomfort, and enjoyed the luxury of a ‘state-room, or suite – for it comprised two apartments … a beautiful and aristocratic domain’.64 Bennett experienced more American railway luxury when he travelled from New York to Chicago on a train which had an observation car with a telephone, ‘the free supply of newspapers, the library of books, the typewriting-machine, and the stenographer by its side – all as promised … a dining-car, a smoking-car, and a barber-shop’.65 References to the typewriter and telephone remind the reader of the many world changing technological innovations that had occurred during
Bennett’s lifetime.
Travel by water transport
In order to visit America, Bennett had to travel by sea, for trans-Atlantic flights were not achieved until 1919. The first water transport that Bennett witnessed was that with which he was familiar in his native Potteries where canals played a vital role serving the local industries. While canals are landscape features that are often mentioned in Bennett’s Five
19
Towns fiction, their former use as passenger carriers is not found in his stories. The declining role of inland water passenger transport is noted elsewhere in his writings, however.
When his income from writing enabled him to live a more luxurious life, Bennett bought an ocean going yacht named Velsa, later selling this vessel and buying another which he named the Marie Marguerite after his wife. He also went on yacht cruises with opulent friends of his. He published accounts of his cruises in From the Log of the Velsa and Mediterranean
Scenes and yachting is frequently described in his fiction.66 Bennett’s fascination with water transport is evident in his writings that describe not only the canals with which he was familiar since childhood, but also throw light on the movement of goods and passengers on rivers and oceans at a time when sail was rapidly giving way to steam on the high seas.
In Bennett’s day the Thames was still an important highway for passenger traffic using river steamers, and references to this means of city transport occur in his London fiction. In The
Roll Call several pages are devoted to a description of a young couple’s river excursion from
Chelsea to Greenwich and back shortly before the First World War. On this river trip, ‘The shallow and handsome craft, flying its gay flags, crossed and re-crossed the river, calling at three piers in the space of a few minutes.’67 The gaiety of the steam boat’s appearance contrasts with the melancholy atmosphere created by Bennett who senses the imminent demise of this urban passenger service. At Chelsea
… it seemed impossible that any steamer should call at that forlorn and decrepit
platform that trembled under the straining of the water … all the piers were like
Chelsea Pier; all the pier-keepers had the air of castaways upon shaking islets. The
passengers on the steamer would not have filled a motor-bus, and they carried
themselves like melancholy adventurers who have begun to doubt the authenticity of
inspiration which sent them on a mysterious quest.68
20
Bennett notes the famous buildings and landmarks that were seen as the boat travels
downstream. In addition to the barges, tugs, pleasure craft and other vessels that passengers
see on the river, ‘Railway trains, cabs, coloured omnibuses, cyclists, and footfarers, mingled
in and complicated the scene. Then the first ocean-going steamer appeared, belittling all
else.’69
Bennett provides a picture of early twentieth-century ocean liner travel when he describes his experience of a trans-Atlantic crossing in 1911. The ship he sailed in, the Lusitania, becomes the Lithuania in his novel The Regent, but for a detailed description of the workings of the latest thing in luxury ocean travel and shipboard life, the reader may consult Bennett’s account of his American travels, Your United States.70 Bennett conveys something of his
wonder and excitement when he writes,
All was calm and warm and reassuring within the ship … I looked about as I lay,
and everything was still except a towel that moved gently, almost imperceptibly,
to and fro. Yet the towel had copied the immobility of the star. It alone did not
oscillate. Forty-five thousand tons were swaying; but not that towel. The sense
of actual present romance was too strong to let me read. I extinguished the light,
and listened in the dark to the faint straining noises of the enormous organism.71
From this passage readers gain little impression of the appearance and workings of an early
twentieth-century ocean liner, but they are allowed to share the novel experience of a
passenger who is making his first trans-Atlantic voyage on one of the technological wonders
of the age. Aboard this enormous vessel passengers are cocooned from the elements which
formerly played a major role in the experience of those who travelled by sea.
Aviation
By the time of Bennett’s first Atlantic crossing, aviation had made great progress, something
the author reflects in his writings, although there is no evidence to suggest that he ever flew.
21
In The Old Wives’ Tale and City of Pleasure we find references to passenger balloons;
zeppelins make a dramatic appearance in The Pretty Lady and, in Accident a private
aeroplane provides the means to travel rapidly from Newcastle to Aix-les- Bains.72
Developments in air transport after Bennett’s death further separated the traveller from the
environment traversed on the journey. It was during Bennett’s lifetime that aircraft became
significant in warfare and military use of aeroplanes is described in Bennett’s First World War
account Over There. This book also recounts experiences of travel by road and rail in
wartime France and Belgium.73
Journeys involving several modes of transport
Travel in much happier circumstances is vividly portrayed in a short story about a Five
Towns married couple going on holiday. Here we are given an example of a journey that
involves the use of several different modes of transport. The travellers also have to change
trains a couple of times on the journey to their destination – the Isle of Man. The journey starts with ‘A flat barrow at the door, a tin trunk and two bags on the barrow, and a somewhat ragged boy between the handles of the barrow!’74 Thus accompanied, the couple arrive at
Hanbridge railway station where they catch a local train which takes them to the nearest
mainline station. ‘When they arrived, after a journey of ten minutes, at Knype … they had to
change for Liverpool.’75 Again, ‘at Crewe … they had to change once more for Liverpool’.76
‘When it came in, the Liverpool train was crammed to the doors … The entire world seemed
to be going to Liverpool. It was uncomfortable, but it was magnificent. It was joy, it was
life.’77 On arrival in Liverpool, ‘they rattled and jolted and whizzed in an omnibus to
Prince’s Landing Stage [where] a great ship waited for them.’78 ‘Annie had never seen such
a thing’, and she marvelled at what she found on board – the ‘marble halls, colossal
staircases, bookshops, trinket shops, highly-decorated restaurants, glittering bars, and
cushioned drawing-rooms.’79 Astonished by these surroundings, Annie ‘was not surprised, a
22 little later, to see Prince’s Landing Stage sliding away from the ship, instead of the ship sliding away from Prince’s Landing Stage.’80 Here again, the reader is given an impression of what the passenger feels rather than an account of what an external observer witnesses.
Travellers observed
As Bennett’s account of Annie’s journey demonstrates, the author keenly observes his characters as they go on their journeys. We have already noted the behaviour of some of them – gazing through the window at the passing scene or reading to relieve boredom, for example. Of the many examples that can be found in Bennett’s works, the following selections taken from his journals serve to illustrate the author’s interest in the ways travellers behave:
Impressed again by the extraordinary self-consciousness of travellers. On the
platform at the Nord, another man and I tramping up and down the platform got
half-smothered in a cloud of malodorous steam. He could not help turning to me
as we emerged, to share his sensations with me by means of a gesture. Had he
not been on a journey he would have ignored my existence.81
On another rail journey,
There were three other grave solitary men in the compartment, and two girls got
in, one about 24 and the other about 17 or 18. After leave-taking at the station
they began to arrange themselves for the journey. Such a dropping of and picking
up of money, and disposing and redisposing of parcels, and downsettings and
uprisings! Such a contrast to the immobility of the grave solitary men. At last
they settled and began to read; their volumes were evidently both of a series, for
jeunes filles. But quite soon they began to rearrange themselves for leaving the
train, long before Fontainebleau, where they got out, and left the four grave
solitary men alone.82
23
One of those grave solitary men was, of course, Bennett himself, a keen student of life whose
perceptive observations enrich his writings.
Conclusion
A focused reading of Bennett’s works provides insights into the environmental and social
consequences of developments in transportation, particularly the experience of travel in the
century up to the author’s death in 1931. Based on his personal observations, he conveys to
the reader what it was like to travel by a variety of means, on land and water. His accounts
inform us about a wide range of travel experience, from walking and cycling to journeys
involving vehicles powered by horses, steam, petrol and electricity, and vessels ranging from
river boats and luxury yachts to ocean liners. Bennett conveys a vivid impression of the
impact of rapidly evolving transport technology on the changing human environment and on
people’s response to it. In a way that non-literary sources fail to do, Bennett enables us to share some of the emotion that contemporary people experienced when travelling for a variety of reasons on journeys short and long. Bennett also demonstrates how, with advances in transportation creating greater isolation from the surrounding environment, passengers become less aware of the landscapes and places through which they travel. This trend continued after Bennett’s death, and we now live in an age when journeys, even those across vast oceans and continents, may provide little travel experience other than that we encounter in the surroundings of airports and aircraft cabins.
As Coser himself acknowledged, creative literature is no substitute for systematically
acquired certified knowledge, but it is an invaluable resource that scientists as well as
scholars in the arts and humanities are well advised to explore. Students of transport and
travel discover insights into the emotional response of people who go on journeys of various
kinds, including those which are part of everyday life as well as those of a more exceptional
nature. Bennett, with the novelist’s sensitivity to human emotion, his eye for detail and his
24
comprehension of the broad environmental and social context, is an author whose works are
particularly valuable to scholars seeking to understand the effects of scientific and
technological innovation on the lives of those living in the place and at the time under
investigation.
Notes and References
1. Among the geographers who have drawn on the works of Bennett are E W Gilbert,
Douglas Pocock and Brian Hudson. See, for example, E W Gilbert, ‘The idea of the region,’
Geography, 45, 1960, pp 157–175; D C D Pocock, ‘The novelist’s image of the North’,
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol 4, 1979, pp 62–76; B. J. Hudson,
‘The geographical imagination of Arnold Bennett’, Transactions of the Institute of British
Geographers, vol 7, 1982, pp 365–379. Hudson has also discussed Bennett’s thoughts on landscape aesthetics and education; see B J Hudson, ‘Bennett’s Five Towns: a prospect- refuge analysis’, British Journal of Aesthetics, vol 33, 1993, pp 41–57; B J Hudson, ‘Arnold
Bennett and the pursuit of knowledge’, English Studies vol 98, 2017, pp 159–174. Aspects of modernity and modernism are explored by Robert Squillace in a book which examines a selection of Bennett’s novels; see R Squillace, Modernism, Modernity and Arnold Bennett
(Lewisburg : Bucknell University Press, 1997). Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale is one of two novels examined by Aileen Ribeiro in an essay on nineteenth century costume; see A Ribeiro,
‘Arnold Bennett, Edith Wharton and the “Minotaur of Time” ’, Costume vol. 44, 2010, pp
89–95. Aspects of business history as illustrated in a Bennett novel are examined in Andrew
Popp, ‘ “Though it be but a promise” : business probity in Arnold Bennett’s Anna of the Five
Towns’, Business History vol 48, 2006, pp 332–353. In the field of medicine, G D Perkin and
J M Schneck have published studies of Bennett’s works, particularly the novel Clayhanger and the author’s journals; see G D Perkin, ‘Arnold Bennett and medicine: with particular
25
reference to his description of dressing apraxia’, British Medical Journal Clinical Research
Edition, vol 283, 1981, pp 1666–8; J.M. Schneck , ‘Arnold Bennett, Clayhanger and
alzheimer’s disease’, American Journal of Psychiatry vol 150, 1993, p 1431. Another of
Bennett’s most famous novels was examined by a professor of law in M H Hoffheimer,
‘Observing capital punishment in Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale’, Mississippi Law
Journal vol 69, 1999, pp 441–453. Examples of research on the history of transport that draw on Bennett’s work include I Carter, ‘The lost idea of a train: looking for Britain’s railway novel’, Journal of Transport History, vol 21, 2000, pp 117–139; I Carter, Railways and Culture in Britain: the epitome of modernity (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2001); B J Hudson, ‘Arnold Bennett’s literary journey into World War I transport’, English
Literature in Transition 1880–1920, vol 59, 2016, pp 87–98; and B J Hudson, ‘Arnold
Bennett, transport and urban development’, Geography vol 101, 2016, pp 85–92
2. Arnold Bennett, Literary Taste: how to form it (New York: George H Doran, 1909), p 12
3. P G Adams, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983), p 279
4. L A Coser, ‘Introduction,’ in L A Coser (ed), Sociology Through Literature: an introductory reader (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall 1963), p 2
5. ibid, p 3
6. F Fernandez-Armasto, Millennium: a history of the last thousand years (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1996), p 27
7. Arnold Bennett, The Human Machine (New York: George H Doran, 1908), p 113
8. Bennett, Literary Taste, p 29
9. Virginia Woolf, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (London: Hogarth Press,1924)
10. Kinley E Roby, A Writer at War: Arnold Bennett, 1914–1918 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1972), p 17
26
11. Arnold Bennett, Your United States: impressions of a first visit (New York: George H
Doran, 1912). This book was published in London under the title Those United States.
12. B J Hudson, ‘Arnold Bennett’s literary journey into World War I transport’, English
Literature in Transition 1880–1920 vol 59, 2016, pp 87–98
13. Arnold Bennett, The Glimpse: an adventure of the soul (New York: George H Doran,
1909), pp 154–5
14. Arnold Bennett, Clayhanger (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954)
15. I Cook, ‘Consciousness and the novel: fact or fiction in the works of D.H. Lawrence’, in
D C D Pocock (ed) Humanistic Geography and Literature: essays on the experience of place
(London: Croom Helm; Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1981), p 66
16. Arnold Bennett, The Author’s Craft (New York; George H Doran, 1914), p 17
17. Arnold Bennett, The Old Wives’ Tale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954), p 18
18. R Pound, Arnold Bennett: a biography (London: William Heinemann, 1952), p 57
19. Bennett, Clayhanger, p 28
20. B J Hudson, ‘Arnold Bennett’s Five Towns landscape: internal and external vision’,
Journal of Cultural Geography vol 11, 1991, pp 21–30
21. Arnold Bennett, The Journals edited by F Swinnerton (Harmondsworth: Penguin ,1971),
pp 224–5
22. ibid
23. ibid, p 511
24. Arnold Bennett, ‘The place you live in’, The Royal Magazine vol 51, March 1924, p 452
25. Bennett, Clayhanger, p 29
26. Bennett, Old Wives’ Tale, p 27
27. Arnold Bennett, Anna of The Five Towns (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1936), p 15
27
28. Arnold Bennett, ‘Mary with the high hand’, in Tales of The Five Towns (London: Chatto
& Windus, 1941), p 81
29. Bennett, Clayhanger, p 28
30. Bennett, Old Wives’ Tale, p 28
31. Arnold Bennett, The Roll Call (New York: George H Doran, 1918), p 136
32. Arnold Bennett, ‘From one generation to another’ in The Grim Smile of The Five Towns
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1946), p 120. This is one of two stories in this collection that
feature automobiles. The other is titled ‘The nineteenth hat’.
33. ibid, p 125
34. Arnold Bennett, Journal 1929 (London: Cassell, 1930), p 80
35. M Drabble, Arnold Bennett: a biography (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1974), p 89
36. Arnold Bennett, Teresa of Watling Street: a fantasia on modern themes (London:
Methuen, 1904), pp 15–16
37. ibid, p 100
38. ibid, pp 136–7
39. Carter, ‘The lost idea of a train’; Carter, Railways and Culture
40. Carter, Railways and Culture, p 158; Arnold Bennett, Accident (London: Cassell, 1929)
41. Bennett, Your United States, p 99
42. Arnold Bennett, A Man from the North (New York: George H Doran, 1911)
43. Bennett, Clayhanger, p 436
44. ibid
45. Bennett, ‘The death of Simon Fuge’, in The Grim Smile, p 137
46. Bennett, Clayhanger, p 436
47. Arnold Bennett, ‘Half-a-Sovereign’, in The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories
(London: Methuen, 1912), p 260
28
48. Bennett, ‘Catching the train’, in The Matador, pp 150–163
49. Arnold Bennett, Leonora (London: Chatto & Windus, 1903), p 339
50. W Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: the industrialization of time and space, New
Edition (Berkeley: University of California Press,1986), p 22
51. ibid, p 23
52. ibid
53. Bennett, The Journals, p 86
54. Bennett, ‘The death of Simon Fuge’, p 134
55. C Mathieson, Mobility in the Victorian Novel: placing the nation (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2015), p 69
56. ibid
57. ibid
58. Arnold. Bennett, These Twain (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), pp 225–6
59. Bennett, ‘The death of Simon Fuge’, pp 139–140
60. Bennett, The Journals, p 37
61. Bennett, Your United States, pp 99–100
62. ibid, pp 101–2
63. ibid, p 103
64. ibid, p 105
65. ibid, Your United States, p 106
66. Arnold Bennett, From the Log of the Velsa (New York: Century Company, 1914); Arnold
Bennett, Mediterranean Scenes (London: Cassell, 1928)
67. Bennett, The Roll Call, pp 194–5
68. ibid
69. ibid, p 196
29
70. Arnold Bennett, The Regent (London: Methuen,1913); Bennett, Your United States
71. Bennett, Your United States, p 8
72. Bennett, Old Wives’ Tale; Bennett, Accident; Bennett, The Pretty Lady (New York:
George H Doran, 1918); Arnold Bennett, The City of Pleasure: a fantasia on modern themes
(New York: George H Doran, 1907)
73. Arnold Bennett, Over There: war scenes on the western front (New York: George H
Doran, 1915)
74. Bennett, ‘Under the clock’, in The Matador, p 130
75. ibid, p 131
76. ibid
77. ibid
78. ibid
79. ibid, p 132
80. ibid
81. Bennett, The Journals, p 229
82. ibid, p 145
30