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Xerox University Microfilms 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, Michigan 48108 75-3036 CROCKETT, James Larry, 1944- THE IRONIC VISION OF THE LONDON NOVELS OF ARNOLD BENNETT. The Ohio State University 1n cooperation with Miami (Ohio) University, Ph.D., 1974 Language and Literature, general Xerox University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Michigan 4B106 THE IRONIC VISION OF THE LONDON NOVELS OF ARNOLD BENNETT DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By James Larry Crockett, B.A. , M. A. The Ohio State University 1974 Reading Committee: Approved by James Kincaid Morris Beja John Muste TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION 1 Notes II. ' FIVE TOWNS WORKS 8 Notes 30 III. THE PRETTY LADY 32 Notes 76 IV. RICEYMAN STEPS 77 Notes , 121 V. LORD RAINGO 123 Notes 155 VI. IMPERIAL PALACE 156 Notes 230 VII. - CONCLUSION 232 BIBLIOGRAPHY I. Works of Arnold Bennett 235 II. Secondary Bibliography 240 INTRODUCTION Arnold Bennett's position and significance in English literature remain curiously unsolidified nearly forty-five years after his death. As author of one of the acknowledged m asterpieces of the realistic English novel, The Old Wives' Tale, he conventionally occupies a secure but deceptively limited place in the uncertain transitional phase of the novel between the great Victorians, whose reputations and significance are assured, and the masters of the novel in the i first half of the twentieth century. Even if he were universally granted to be a realistic novelist of the first rank, this too narrow pigeon-holing would guarantee him only a decidedly minor place in literature, since realists in general are presently considered second-rate. But the best of Bennett's work still rests uneasily within this too neat category. Even in the first phase of his literary output he is too protean to be written off so glibly and so inaccur ately. A commonplace of Bennett criticism, that he is simply photographic and reproduces details without artistic judgment, proves false even for those works for which this position is most often argued. The careful construction and subtle patterns of imagery and symbol in such "realistic" works as The Old Wives' Tale and the Clayhanger trilogy belie such an oversimplified view. Yet the admission that Bennett is more of a conscious artist than he has often been credited as being, and that most of his works do indeed include far more than a mindless reproduction of details, does not answer the question about Bennett's achievements in fiction. Throwing out inaccurate, but comfortable, assumptions does little to establish the real position and achievement of Arnold Bennett. Until recently Bennett was known only as a chronicler of a quite limited segment of life, whose works sadly lacked the re deeming control and technique that alone give narratives real literary merit. The opinion of Abel Che valley, writing in 1930, is typical; Chevalley states that only two of Bennett's works will survive; The Old Wives 1 Tale (1908) and the Clayhanger trilogy, consisting of Clayhanger (1910), Hilda Lessways (19H)» and These Twain (1915). * The last of these novels marks approximately the end of what is conventionally seen as Bennett's first period. The works mentioned by Chevalley, together with a few others, such as Anna of the Five Towns (1902) and The Price of Love (1914), .and some short stories, deal with a circumscribed area of the scene of Bennett’s childhood and youth in the provincial pottery-making district around Stoke-on-Trent. A glance at almost any older criticism of Bennett's fiction reveals the extent to which his name was linked with the Five Towns; the works of Bennett's first period were firmly entrenched in critical opinion as his only lasting achievements in fiction. But around 1916 Bennett for the most part abandoned the Five Towns as a setting for his works, and after this date he produced a number of novels that move from the industrial and provincial setting to the cosmopolitan setting of London. These works, though not until recently regarded as significant, reveal an extension and an opening up of his hitherto restricted subject matter, with no loss of artistic powers, control, or imaginative conception. Among earlier critics, only Georges Lafourcade dealt seriously with the later works; he ranked Riceyman Steps (1923) as "the most artistic" of Bennett's novels, superior to The Old Wives1 Tale "as far as style, psychology, and interest are concerned. " He men tions that the realism of The Pretty Lady (1918) and of Lord Raingo (1926) outstrips that of The Old Wives 1 Tale, whose epic proportions are "almost equalled by Imperial Palace" (1930). ^ A prominent feature of Bennett criticism of the last decade has been the recog nition that the second period of his work is indeed important. Walter F. Wright's Arnold Bennett: Romantic Realist^ has justi fiably given equal emphasis to the London works in a study of Bennett's overall philosophic and artistic development. In The Art of Arnold Bennett James G. Hepburn has tried to eliminate the 4 misconception that the Five Towns works are generally superior to the London novels and that both Bennett and his art declined after The Old Wives1 Tale or Clayhanger. ^ He makes two major points about the second phase of Bennett's work: . With The Old Wives' Tale Bennett attained a maturity that he never relinquished, producing during the rest of his life several works of approximately equal merit; and by and large his London novels are superior to his Five Towns novels. Even if one grants that Clayhanger and The Old Wives1 Tale are Bennett's very best novels, all the other novels that stand close to them in merit are London novels: Lord Raingo, Riceyman Steps, Imperial Palace, and The Pretty Lady. The weight lies with the second group. The general superiority of Bennett's London novels, along with other later works that do not deal with the Five Towns, is, to this critic quite clear. ^ Bennett's London novels have frequently been undervalued and misunderstood because of a failure to recognize the irony in their structure and particularly in their technique. Close examination of the irony in the best of the London works, however, reveals Bennetc in his second phase to be an accomplished and far more aware literary craftsman than has previously generally been recognized even by admirers of the Five Towns works. Bennett's late novels appear structureless and undirected only if the subtlety of the ironic juxtapositions within their plots and of the ironic language of the works is not admitted. A major intent of the novels is to present the contradictions and inconsistencies within the human 5 condition, to expose Illusions, and finally to deal with the most fundamental and ultimately unanswerable questions of existence. For this purpose irony is welt suited. Bennett's best novels contain the essential elements that distinguish all irony, which by nature involves two levels of perception:^ At the lower level is the situation either as it appears to the victim of irony . or as it is deceptively presented by the ironist. At the upper level is the situation as it appears to the observer or the ironist. The upper level need not be presented by the ironist; it need only be evoked by him or be present in the mind of the observer. Nor need it be more than a hint that the ironist does not quite see the situation as he has presented it at the lower level . or that the victim does not see the situation as it really is. These two levels are inevitably in opposition, taking the form of "contradiction, incongruity, or incompatibility.