Clayhanger
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Arnold Bennett
Title Page
Book I: His Vocation
1 The Last of a Schoolboy
2 The Flame
3 Entry Into the World
4 The Child-Man
5 Mr Shushions’s Tear Explained
6 In the House
7 Auntie Hamps
8 In the Shop
9 The Town
10 Free and Easy
11 Son and Father
12 Machinery
13 One Result of Courage
14 The Architect
15 A Decision
16 The Letter
17 End of a Struggle
Book II: His Love
1 The Visit
2 Father and Son After Seven Years
3 The New House
4 The Two Gardens
5 Clothes
6 Janet Loses Her Bet
7 Lane End House
8 The Family Supper
9 In the Porch
10 The Centenary
11 The Bottom of the Square
12 The Top of the Square
13 The Oldest Sunday-School Teacher
14 Money
15 The Insult
16 The Sequel
17 Challenge and Response
18 Curiosity
19 A Catastrophe
20 The Man
21 The Marriage
Book III: His Freedom
1 After a Funeral
2 The Conclave
3 The Name
4 The Victim of Sympathy
5 The Slave’s Fear
6 Keys and Cheques
7 Laid Aside
8 A Change of Mind
9 The Ox
10 Mrs Hamps as a Young Man
11 An Hour
12 Revenge
13 The Journey Upstairs
14 The Watch
15 The Banquet
16 After the Banquet
17 The Chain Broken
Book IV: His Start in Life
1 The Birthday Visit
2 Janet’s Nephew
3 Adventure
4 In Preston Street
5 The Bully
6 The Rendezvous
7 The Wall
8 The Friendship
9 The Arrival
10 George and the Vicar
11 Beginning of the Night
12 End of the Night
13 Her Heart
Copyright
ABOUT THE BOOK
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 test by challenges from Edwin’s domineering father, the stifling constraints of society, and an unusual young woman.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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 1903 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 (1910–18). 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.
ALSO BY ARNOLD BENNETT
Fiction
A Man from the North
The Grand Babylon Hotel
Anna of the Five Towns
The Gates of Wrath
Leonora
A Great Man
Teresa of Watling Street
Sacred and Profane Love
Tales of the Five Towns
Whom God Hath Joined
Hugo
The Grim Smile of the Five Towns
The Ghost
Buried Alive: A Tale of these Days
The Old Wives’ Tale
The Card
Helen with a High Hand
Hilda Lessways
The Matador of the Five Towns
The Regent
Paris Nights and Other Impressions of Places and People
The Price of Love
These Twain
The Pretty Lady
The Roll-Call
Mr Prohack
Riceyman Steps
Elsie and the Child
Lord Raingo
The Woman who Stole Everything and Other Stories
The Vanguard
Accident
Imperial Palace
Venus Rising from the Sea
Non-fiction
Journalism for Women
Fame and Fiction
How to Become an Author
The Reasonable Life
Literary Taste: How to Form It
How to Live on 24 Hours a Day
Mental Efficiency
Those United States
The Author’s Craft
Self and Self-Management
Things That Have Interested Me
The Human Machine
The Savour of Life
ARNOLD BENNETT
Clayhanger
BOOK I
His Vocation
1
The Last of a Schoolboy
I
EDWIN CLAYHANGER STOOD on the steep-sloping, red-bricked canal bridge, in the valley between Bursley and its suburb Hillport. In that neighbourhood the Knype and Mersey canal formed the western boundary of the industrialism of the Five Towns. To the east rose pitheads, chimneys, and kilns, tier above tier, dim in their own mists. To the west, Hillport Fields, grimed but possessing authentic hedgerows and winding paths, mounted broadly up to the sharp ridge on which stood Hillport Church, a landmark. Beyond the ridge, and partly protected by it from the driving smoke of the Five Towns, lay the fine and ancient Tory borough of Oldcastle, from whose historic Middle School Edwin Clayhanger was now walking home. The fine and ancient Tory borough provided education for the whole of the Five Towns, but the relentless ignorance of its prejudices had blighted the district. A hundred years earlier the canal had only been obtained after a vicious Parliamentary fight between industry and the fine and ancient borough, which saw in canals a menace to its importance as a centre of traffic. Fifty years earlier the fine and ancient borough had succeeded in forcing the greatest railway line in England to run through unpopulated country five miles off instead of through the Five Towns, because it loathed the mere conception of a railway. And now, people are inquiring why the Five Towns, with a railway system special to itself, is characterized by a perhaps excessive provincialism. These interesting details have everything to do with the history of Edwin Clayhanger, as they have everything to do with the history of each of the two hundred thousand souls in the Five Towns. Oldcastle guessed not the vast influences of its sublime stupidity.
It was a breezy Friday in July, 1872. The canal, which ran north and south, reflected a blue and white sky. Towards the bridge, from the north came a long narrow canal-boat roofed with tarpaulins; and towards the bridge, from the south came a similar craft, sluggishly creeping. The towing-path was a morass of sticky brown mud, for in the way of rain that year was breaking the records of a century and a half. Thirty yards in front of each boat an unhappy skeleton of a horse floundered its best in the quagmire. The honest endeavour of one of the animals received a frequent tonic from a bare-legged girl of seven who heartily curled a whip about its crooked large-jointed legs. The ragged and filthy child danced in the rich mud round the horse’s flanks with the simple joy of one who had been rewarded for good behaviour by the unrestricted use of a whip for the first time.
II
Edwin, with his elbows on the stone parapet of the bridge stared uninterested at the spectacle of the child, the whip, and the skeleton. He was not insensible to the piquancy of the pageant of life, but his mind was preoccupied with grave and heavy matters. He had left school that day, and what his eyes saw as he leaned on the bridge was not a willing beast and a gladdened infant, but the puzzling world and the advance guard of its problems bearing down on him. Slim, gawky, untidy, fair, with his worn black-braided clothes, and slung over his shoulders in a bursting satchel the last load of his school-books, and on his bright, rough hair a shapeless cap whose lining protruded behind, he had the extraordinary wistful look of innocence and simplicity which marks most boys of sixteen. It seemed rather a shame, it seemed even tragic, that this naïve, simple creature, with his straightforward and friendly eyes so eager to believe appearances, this creature immaculate of worldly experience, must soon be transformed into a man, wary, incredulous, detracting.
1 comment