Transport and Travel in the World of Arnold Bennett
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This may be the author’s version of a work that was submitted/accepted for publication in the following source: 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. This file was downloaded from: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/114466/ c 2017 The author and Railway & Canal Historical Society This work is covered by copyright. Unless the document is being made available under a Creative Commons Licence, you must assume that re-use is limited to personal use and that permission from the copyright owner must be obtained for all other uses. If the docu- ment is available under a Creative Commons License (or other specified license) then refer to the Licence for details of permitted re-use. It is a condition of access that users recog- nise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. If you believe that this work infringes copyright please provide details by email to [email protected] Notice: Please note that this document may not be the Version of Record (i.e. published version) of the work. Author manuscript versions (as Sub- mitted for peer review or as Accepted for publication after peer review) can be identified by an absence of publisher branding and/or typeset appear- ance. If there is any doubt, please refer to the published source. http:// www.rchs.org.uk/ Transport and travel in the world of Arnold Bennett 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.