The Serious Business of Writing

Abstract

Arnold Bennett moved to London from the Potteries in 1889 at the age of twenty-two. For nine years before the publication of his first novel, A Man from the North, he worked first as a shorthand clerk in a law office, later as a journalist and editor of Woman. The fact that his first serious creativity, the period from 1895 to 1898 when he wrote A Man from the North and also started on his second novel, Anna of the Five Towns, was supported by various kinds of journalism not only provides early evidence of the kind of energy he was to display throughout his career but also of his irreverence for the exclusive literary categories which defined a writer as either popular or serious.1 Flexibility was always an important part of Bennett’s career; after 1900 when he gave up his editorship and began to support himself solely by his writing, he chose to exploit the popular market, quickly producing ‘potboilers’ in which he took little pride in order to support his more deeply meditated and ‘artistic’ work. When Bennett was criticised for wasting his talents writing this kind of sensational fiction, he appraised the possibilities he felt to be open to him in a pragmatic way: My desire is to be moving on, & I shall not remain at Woman a moment longer than I can help. But if I leave journalism, I must find something else. That something else is fiction. It dawns upon me that fiction is my forte. But if I continued to turn out psychological treaties like A Man from the North, I might earn some sort of a reputation, but I should not, most emphatically, earn a livelihood. Therefore I must do, to begin with, the kind of fiction that will sell… I don’t see that sensational fiction is any worse ‘pot-boiling’ than editing a weekly paper. And I know that I would vastly sooner do the fiction than the editing. It is nearer to my special faculty, and I can get real fun out of it.2 KeywordsLiterary WorldReading PublicAttractive WomanWeekly PaperOrdinary LivingThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.