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John Potter, Chairman of the Arnold Bennett Society, has written this introduction especially for the website:
Arnold Bennett's last Five Towns novel was published in 1916, though he continued to use the setting occasionally in short stories. His busy life in London in the worlds of the theatre and journalism; the strain of the Great War; his separation from his wife and subsequent liaison with Dorothy Cheston, combined with the deaths of his mother and most of his Potteries friends to weaken the ties which bound him to his birthplace. From the beginning he had used "foreign" backgrounds for some of his stories, always places which he knew well or had at least visited. It is not surprising that, living for more than thirty years in London, he placed many of his later works in and around the capital city. In 1923 Riceyman Steps was published. This, a book set in Clerkenwell, owed little to personal experience except perhaps that Bennett himself had once dabbled in book-dealing and the main character in the work runs a secondhand bookshop. The story is AB's third novel in which a miser is a major figure, and it is the masterly delineation of the main character and the lifelike and sympathetic treatment of the women involved which probably persuaded some critics to assess the book as equal to, if not greater than, The Old Wives' Tale.
Unlike the Five Towns stories, autobiography plays no part in Riceyman Steps, but in his customary fashion Bennett researched thoroughly the themes about which he intended to write. He walked the ground himself; but much of the historical topographical detail comes from Pink's History of Clerkenwell, a massive Victorian work which has recently been re-printed. To his own experience of misers in general, he added more from "Eugenie Grandet" and some facts from an 1850 publication, Merryweather's Lives and anecdotes of Misers, which he had picked up from an elderly, rather eccentric book-dealer in Southampton. But no amount of revamping of past history could account for the capable but impressionable Violet Arb and the incomparable and unconquerable Elsie, who as servant to the bookseller Henry Earlforward typifies utterly the sterling qualities of loyalty and kindness which existed and can still be found in the Cockney character. Within a year, Bennett returned to Elsie in a novella published in 1924 in a book entitled 'Elsie and the Child,' and Other Stories.
Henry Earlforward is not in the slightest way a nasty or vicious man, but he lives in a world of his own so narrow that there is really no room in it for anybody else. If he is guilty of anything it is the fact that he involves Violet in this world, with tragic consequences, simply because he sees in the act a way of satisfying the demands of the devil which drives his whole existence. The book is in effect a tragedy of the waste of human life in the unavoidable self-immolation of a man of talent doomed by his own unalterable genes. This tragedy is played out against a background of the meticulous detail which Virginia Woolf found so obnoxious in Bennett's work but which contributes so much that the impact of the story without it would have been greatly lessened.
Riceyman Steps is, to say the least, an unusual book. Only the individual reader can decide if it is also a great book, but few will put it down without a sense of the inexorability of the powers which influence human life and the crazy mixed-up composition of human nature generally.
© John Potter, 2002
A sample chapter of Riceyman steps is available on this website.
The full text can also be read online or downloaded free of charge. It is in XHTML format, like this page. Please note the file size is 314kb and it may take some time to open-up if you choose to read it online. Downloading for reading later may be the preferred option and this can be typically achieved by calling up an option box. If you have a mouse and it is configured for left click to select, right clicking the link may give you this option. Link to the full text of Riceyman steps.
Page created 12 March 2002 and last updated
12 March 2002
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