Arnold Bennett

Enoch Arnold Bennett was born in Hanley on May 27th 1867, the eldest child of Enoch Bennett and his wife Sarah Ann. His father, who began his working life in the pottery trade, later qualified as a solicitor, and by 1881 the family was living at 205 Waterloo Road, Burslem. The census that year lists Arnold, then 13, with his brother Frank, his sisters Fannie, Emily and Tertia, and his youngest brother Septimus. Fannie was Frances Gertrude, known in the family as Sissie, who would marry Frank Beardmore.

Arnold was educated at the Middle School in Newcastle-under-Lyme and in 1885 joined his father’s office as a clerk. In 1888 he left the Potteries for London, where he worked as a solicitor’s clerk and began to write. He became assistant editor of the weekly magazine Woman in 1893 and its editor in 1896. His first novel, A Man from the North, appeared in 1898, and Anna of the Five Towns followed in 1902.

In 1902 he moved to Paris, where he lived for ten years. There, on July 4th 1907, he married Marie Marguerite Soulié, a Frenchwoman from Nègrepelisse, near Montauban, and wrote The Old Wives’ Tale (1908), usually reckoned his masterpiece. Clayhanger followed in 1910. These novels of the Potteries, which he called the ‘Five Towns’, made his name; his brother-in-law Frank’s business was in Fenton, the sixth town that Bennett left out.

During the First World War he worked for the government, and in 1918 he was in charge of British propaganda in France at the new Ministry of Information. He and Marguerite separated in 1921, though she never agreed to a divorce, and from 1922 he lived with the actress Dorothy Cheston, who took his name; their daughter Virginia was born in 1926. His later novels include Riceyman Steps (1923). He died of typhoid in London on March 27th 1931, and his ashes were buried in Burslem cemetery.

The Beardmore and Bennett families were closely tied. Arnold’s sister Sissie married Frank Beardmore in April 1897, so Arnold was uncle to Alan, Margaret, Roger and George Cedric. Frank and Sissie later called their Harrow house ‘Knype’, Bennett’s name for Stoke. Another sister, Tertia, married William Wood Kennerley, a Burslem friend of Arnold’s, and in 1921 Margaret was living with the Kennerleys in Putney. His brother Septimus married Maud Marsden, a sister of Sydney Marsden, who married Frank’s sister May.

Not every Beardmore admired Bennett. George Cedric, who published his first novel as Cedric Beardmore in 1931, remembered his uncle as “scoffing, clever, forever trying to teach his nearest and dearest better”, and in 1972 he and his wife Jean edited Bennett’s letters to Marguerite. George described Arnold Bennett in Love as ““easily the most distasteful book I have ever had to deal with.”

The Beardmores kept in touch with Marguerite long after the separation and Arnold’s death. She published her own memoir, My Arnold Bennett, in 1932, and spent her later years back in her home town of Nègrepelisse, near Montauban, at the Château de Lolière, where George’s daughter Tiffa remembers visiting “Tante Marguerite” as a child. In September 1954, just after her 80th birthday, she made her first visit to England for 23 years, staying with George in London and with the Kennerleys at Bognor Regis. On September 23rd George took her to the Potteries, where she was welcomed by the Lord Mayor, visited 205 Waterloo Road, which was being made into an Arnold Bennett museum, and saw her husband’s grave in Burslem cemetery. Photographs of the visit, including one of “Auntie Marguerite with Cedric”, survive in a scrapbook kept by Bennett’s niece Ruth, now in the University of Staffordshire’s Arnold Bennett archive. Writing to Ruth afterwards from the Kennerleys’ house, she signed herself “Marguerite Arnold Bennett” and gave her home as the Château de Lolière, Nègrepelisse. Marguerite died in 1960.