This is the author’s version of a work that was submitted/accepted for pub-lication in the following source:

Hudson, Brian(2017)Transport and travel in the world of Arnold Bennett.Journal of the Railway and Canal Historical Society, 39(230), pp. 130-142.

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1

Transport and travel in the world of Arnold Bennett

Brian Hudson

English novelist and journalist Arnold Bennett was one of the most famous and successful

writers of the early twentieth century. The literary works of this prolific author have been

used as source material by researchers from a remarkably wide range of academic and

professional backgrounds. His writings have been examined and discussed in published

books and papers on subjects that include geography, landscape aesthetics, nineteenth-century

costume, modernism, education, law, business, medicine and transport history.1 This essay

further explores Bennett’s writings on transport, examining the author’s descriptions of

journeys on land and water, mainly in England, but also in continental Europe and the USA.

The focus of this study is the experience of travel as it changed with the technological

innovations which facilitated the movement of people between and within towns and cities,

on journeys long and short.

As a writer and lover of books, Bennett believed that, ‘The aim of literary study is not to

amuse the hours of leisure, it is to awake oneself, it is to be alive, to intensify one’s capacity

for pleasure, for sympathy, and for comprehension. … It is to change utterly one’s relations

with the world. An understanding appreciation of the world, and it means nothing else.’2

Works of fiction offer much scope for gaining an understanding of the experience of travel,

for, as Adams argues, ‘prose fiction and the travel account have evolved together and are

heavily indebted to each other, and are often similar in both content and technique.’3 Over

half a century ago, sociologist Lewis Coser observed, ‘Literature, though it may be many

other things, is social evidence and testimony’, adding, ‘It is a continuous commentary on

manners and peculiar social and cultural conditions.’4 Importantly, ‘The literary creator has

the ability to identify with wide ranges of experience, and he has the trained capacity to

2

articulate through his fantasy the existential problems of his contemporaries’.5 Historians are

amongst those who share this view. Referring to Japanese writer Murasaki Shikibu (c1000

AD), Felipe Fernandez-Armesto remarked that, ‘Her powers of observation produced The

Tale of Genji, which has some claim to be the world’s first novel … a work of unexcelled

usefulness to historians, recalling faithfully the customs and values of a long-vanished

world’.6

Born in 1867, Bennett lived much closer to our times and many vestiges of his world survive

today. Nevertheless, his writings are of value to scholars for illuminating a period of rapid

technological and social change, including the ways in which goods and people were

transported from place to place. In examining the work of Bennett, this paper demonstrates

the value of literature as a source of historical evidence for the way people experienced life in

the past, and illustrates Bennett’s ability to evoke the feelings of men and women as they

travelled from place to place. For Bennett, travel is among life’s greatest pleasures, one that

was ‘not to be valued by the mile but by the quality’.7 While many scholars who turn to

literature for evidence make use of fiction, this paper examines Bennett’s journalistic and

autobiographical works as well as his novels and short stories in order to better understand

the experience of travel in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Included in this

discussion is the impact that developments in transport technology had on the landscape.

Bennett grew to manhood in Victorian lower middle class provincial society, having been

born in the industrial Potteries district where he lived until he was 21 years old. Most of his

works, however, were written and published after the death of Queen Victoria, but many of

his novels and short stories were set in the Victorian era. This was a period with which he

was directly familiar as a child and young man, and which lingered in the memories of his

family and friends. Moreover, the post-Victorian world which Bennett also portrayed in his

fiction and non-fiction bore the indelible mark of social and technological developments of

3

the previous century. This can be no better demonstrated than in his observations on

transport and travel. Steam-powered ships and locomotives, vehicles powered by petrol and

electricity, even heavier than air flight all had their beginnings in the years when Victorian

reigned and all developed rapidly during the first decades of the twentieth century. This

transformed spatial patterns of land use, communications, flows of goods and people, and

human behaviour. For many more people than before, travel became a source of pleasure,

leading to an increase in writing on the subject. Travel literature became very popular in the

nineteenth century, but travel writers tend to focus particularly on the more dramatic and

exotic aspects of journeys they undertake. They commonly ignore the day-to-day experience

of ordinary travellers, especially those whose movements take place within their home towns

and regions.

Bennett was interested in travel of all kinds. He was, among other things, a travel writer in

the usual sense of someone who wrote about his extensive travels abroad, but this essay

focuses more on his descriptions of travel over shorter distances, particularly journeys within

local areas undertaken for everyday purposes. Bennett’s fame rests mainly on his fiction and

journalism, and his best known works are concerned with the Potteries district where he was

born and grew up. His books and articles also reflect his interest in the other places in which

he lived and which he visited on his travels. Bennett believed that ‘All literature is the

expression of feeling, of passion, of emotion, caused by a sensation of the interestingness of

life.’8 Hence, the value of Bennett’s work to historians of transport and travel lies in the

author’s ability to evoke the spirit of his time, particularly through expressing the feelings of

his characters as they went on their journeys. It is through their thoughts, as well as the

author’s observations, that we learn how people experienced the effects of changing transport

technology on their environment and way of life.

4

Bennett was born in Hanley, one of the six Staffordshire towns that, in 1910, federated to

form what is now the city of Stoke-on-Trent. This area, commonly known as the Potteries

because of its traditional major industry, is the Five Towns of Bennett’s fiction. In his books

the author changes the names of his Potteries locations. For example, Stoke becomes the

fictional Knype, Hanley Hanbridge, Burslem Bursley, Tunstall Turnhill, Longton Longbridge,

Cobridge Bleakridge, Newcastle Oldcastle, and Waterloo Road Trafalgar Road. At the age of

21 Bennett left home to live in London, later moving to France and Essex. In the early years

of the twentieth century he became one of the most successful and acclaimed writers of the

age, but his reputation in the literary world declined after the First World War. For decades

after Virginia Wolf’s famous critical essay on Bennett, his novels and short stories were

largely ignored by the literary cognoscenti.9 Among Woolf’s criticisms of Bennett was her

accusation that the realist author gave too much emphasis to detailed description of people’s

appearance and their environment, to the detriment, she felt, of the portrayal of character.

More recently, however, Bennett has again attracted serious attention from scholars and after

a period of neglect by literary scholars, some have now come to Bennett’s defence. In the

opinion of Kinley Roby, ‘There is no doubt that Bennett was a master of detail. At his best

the minutiae, which is both texture and a context within the novels, takes on a vividness and

an intensity generally found only in poetry.’10 Bennett’s writings often display his fascination

with complex organizations and technical processes, such as grand hotels and factories. In

his book Your United States: impressions of a first visit, Bennett provides details of the

workings of a great ocean liner.11 The book also says much about transport on land as well as

at sea, the author making perceptive observations on railway travel within and between

American cities, and on the traffic that he saw on the streets.

Bennett, transport and travel

5

The enormous increase in travel for both work and pleasure which occurred in the late

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was made possible by advances in transport

technology during that period. Bennett recognized this and his works describe travel by

various means of transport at a time when steam power was being augmented and gradually

superseded by the harnessing of electricity and petrol fuelled internal combustion. Horse-

drawn vehicles remained important during his lifetime, however, even in the theatre of war.12

Bennett saw transport as one of the most fundamental aspects of human life. In his novel The

Glimpse, the hero suffers a heart attack followed by an out-of-body experience in which he

has the following revelation:

And suddenly with a strange and disconcerting abruptness, I had a view of the

whole human race engaged in the business of moving matter from one place to

another. These creatures to whom I was now foreign and superior (in my fearful

solitude), seemed to exhaust themselves solely in this crude physical task. It was

not merely ships, railways, trams, omnibuses, cabs, lifts, and the post. It was

shops, mines, restaurants, water, light, drainage, – everything that was deemed

important in the assemblages of men. Nearly the entire contents of every

newspaper every day were devoted to this ridiculous question of moving matter

from one place to another; it constituted nearly the whole of human history. And

I was astonished that I had never before been struck by this huge, obvious fact.13

This idea may well have been in Bennett’s mind when he wrote the opening chapter of

Clayhanger, his better known novel published the year after The Glimpse. Close to his home

in Bursley, young Edwin Clayhanger observes two horse-drawn canal boats travelling in

opposite directions, one vessel carrying a cargo of china clay brought from Cornwall, the

other laden with earthenware manufactured locally and destined for distant markets.14 Edwin

wonders why clay is brought so far in order to be turned into crockery in this particular part

6

of England. The matter on the move referred to in The Glimpse clearly includes that which

constitutes human beings, as is attested by the author’s reference to trams, omnibuses, cabs

and lifts. The passage also illustrates Bennett’s ability to conceive the details of everyday life

within the greater context of global activity.

Bennett’s literary world of transport ranges from the handcart, packhorse, horse-drawn

carriage and bicycle to the canal boat, private yacht, river passenger steamer, ocean liner,

railway train, steam and electric tram, motor car, omnibus, taxi, balloon and aeroplane. The

experience of walking is also well represented in Bennett’s writing. Some of his pedestrians

eventually become familiar with the passenger lift which transports them vertically in multi-

storeyed buildings. This study draws on Bennett’s writings not only to trace changing ways

of moving people, but, adopting a phenomenological approach, it seeks to evoke the lived

world of the period under investigation. It is essentially humanistic, focusing ‘upon the

individual’s experience of life, his or her values, attitudes and beliefs’.15

Wherever and however he travelled, Bennett was normally very conscious of his

surroundings. ‘Travel makes observers of us all’, he wrote in The Author’s Craft.16 When

describing places and landscapes the author was clearly aware of the different modes of

transport that contributed to the scene and were part of the local way of life. Unlike Bennett,

the characters in his fiction were not usually aware of their environment. At the beginning of

his masterpiece The Old Wives’ Tale, a novel published in 1908, Bennett describes the

Staffordshire setting in which the two main protagonists, sisters Constance and Sophia, live

largely unaware of their surroundings:

On every side the fields and moors of Staffordshire, intersected by roads and

lanes, railways, watercourses and telegraph lines, patterned by hedges,

ornamented and made respectable by halls and genteel parks, enlivened by

villages at the intersections, and warmly surveyed by the sun, spread out

7

undulating. And trains were rushing round curves in deep cuttings, and carts and

wagons trotting and jingling on the yellow roads, and long narrow boats passing

in a leisure majestic and infinite over the surface of the stolid canals … And on

the airy moors heath-larks played in the ineffaceable mule-tracks that had served

centuries before even the Romans thought of Watling Street.17

This literary impression of the Staffordshire landscape vividly illustrates how Bennett

seamlessly integrates transport phenomena and history into his portrayal of the settings of his

novels. The discussion below treats the subject in the following order: travel using one’s own

energy on foot or bicycle, travel by road transport, by railway, by water, by air and by mixed

modes of transport. Throughout the essay it is the way in which transport and travel are

experienced rather than just the narrative of the journey and the description of the landscape

that is being brought the reader’s attention.

Walking and cycling

Bennett’s novel Clayhanger, published in 1910, opens with the eponymous hero walking

home at the end of his last day at school. The experience of that walk includes Edwin

Clayhanger’s thoughts about the life that lies ahead of him, as well as the author’s and the

protagonist’s observations of the Potteries landscape where the action takes place. In truth,

the author and Edwin are largely one and the same person, the story being based partly on

Bennett’s own youthful experience. According to one biographer, this walk between young

Bennett’s home and his school in Newcastle-under-Lyme was ‘in certain matters more

instructive than the lessons which came at the end of it’.18 The first three chapters of the

novel which describe Edwin’s walk home make frequent reference to the transportation

history of the Potteries. Among the landscape features mentioned in the text are country field

paths, winding roads dating from the days of pack horses, wagons and coaches, a straight toll

road built during the Napoleonic wars, canals, railways, and urban streets.19 The landscape

8

image that Bennett creates reflects his careful historical and geographical research on the

region, as well as his youthful memories and more recent observations made during his brief

returns to the area in which he grew to adulthood. As he moved through that familiar

landscape, he was able to see it with the eyes of an insider, one who was born and grew up in

the place, and as an outsider, someone who had left home and settled far away.20 In the

opening chapters of Clayhanger we find both views, that of the local resident represented by

young Edwin, and that of the external observer, represented by the novel’s author.

As an adult, Bennett was a keen walker. He walked for exercise and pleasure, finding this

activity conducive to thought when engaged in writing, as he nearly always was. He was also

a cyclist during the 1890s and early years of the twentieth century when this activity became

popular. It was a time when developments in bicycle design and the introduction of

pneumatic rubber tyres together with road improvements made cycling more attractive.

Bennett’s journals frequently mention both of these activities, recording his observations and

thoughts as he travelled about by his own physical effort. Walking and cycling, alone or with

his French wife Marguerite, were among the pleasures enjoyed by Bennett when the couple

lived in Fontainebleau between 1908 and 1911. They walked and cycled in all kinds of

weather, sometimes taking with them food and wine for roadside picnics, sometimes stopping

in villages along the way for refreshment. Taking a break from his writing, Bennett would set

out on foot undeterred by rain:

I walked 4 miles in 59 minutes this morning in the rain. And this afternoon I went

with Marguerite to Moret in pouring rain. A promenade on a thoroughly bad day in

autumn is the next best thing to a promenade on a fine late spring morning. I enjoy it

immensely. I enjoy splashing waterproof boots into deep puddles.21

Here is an example of someone revelling in the experience of direct contact with the

environment while on a walk. Another of Bennett’s walking companions was H G Wells.

9

While staying at Wells’s home in Kent Bennett recorded, ‘I walked about twelve miles with

him today, and we had a bread-and-cheese and jam lunch at a little inn in a little village’.22

Apart from enjoying the countryside and conversation with his novelist friend, Bennett also

used the time to think about his own writing and the demands of his publishers.

A clear idea of the way in which walking was both therapeutic and mentally stimulating for

Bennett can be gained from a journal entry written while he was staying in Sussex after his

separation from his wife. ‘I heard definitely from Marguerite this morning that she would not

agree to a divorce. Couldn’t work. I went out for a short walk, past the castle and through

fields. The spectacle grew more and more lovely.’ Along the way, unexpected circumstances

forced Bennett to walk further than he had intended, and he returned to his host’s country

cottage, ‘tired but in much better health.’ Bennett adds, ‘Also I had picked up some ideas for

my novel en route’ and that evening he managed to write 700 words.23 On foot or on a

bicycle Bennett and the characters he draws remain in close contact with their immediate

surroundings even when their thoughts are sometimes elsewhere. As I discuss later in this

essay, technological advances in transportation increasingly separate travellers from the

physical environment through which they move.

Roads and motorized transport

Whether walking or cycling, much of the journey is often on roads, a feature of the landscape

that fascinated Bennett. His appreciation of the importance of roads is revealed in his

observation that, ‘no man can comprehend the human aspect of a countryside until he has

comprehended its roads’, reminding his 1920s readers that, ‘to-day roads have regained

almost all the importance which they possessed before railways competed with them and beat

them.’24

It was the rapid advancement of motorised road transport that led to the relative decline in the

importance of railways. Readers of Bennett witness a sequence of change in public transport

10

from the horse-drawn coach to the electric tram. Oft-mentioned in his Five Towns fiction are

trams, road vehicles on rails originally drawn by horses and later powered by steam then

electricity. In Clayhanger Bennett briefly mentions ‘a couple of pair-horsed trams that ran on

lines’.25 The experience of this service is humorously described in The Old Wives’ Tale:

Incredible as it may appear, there was nothing but a horse- tram running between

Bursley and Hanbridge – and that only twice an hour, and between the other

towns no stage of any kind! … The driver rang a huge bell, five minutes before

starting, that could be heard from the Wesleyan Chapel to the Cock Yard, and then

after deliberations and hesitations the vehicle rolled off on its rails into unknown

dangers while passengers shouted good-bye. At Bleakridge it had to stop for the

turnpike, and it was assisted up the mountains of Leveson Place and Sutherland

Street (towards Hanbridge) by a third horse, on whose back was perched a tiny,

whip-cracking boy; that boy lived like a shuttle on the road between Leveson

Place and Sutherland street, and even in wet weather he was the envy of all other

boys. After half an hour’s perilous transit the car drew up solemnly in a narrow

street by the Signal [newspaper] office in Hanbridge, and the ruddy driver, having

revolved many times the polished iron handle of his sole brake, turned his

attention to his passengers in a calm triumph, dismissing them with a sort of

unsung doxology.26

The ‘mountains’ encountered on the route are Bennett’s ironic description of the low hills

traversed by the main road. The shuttle metaphor in this passage reflects the industrial age in

which the author lived, and it is interesting to note how this term for part of a weaving

machine was later applied to twentieth century transport and even space exploration.

Horse-drawn trams quickly gave way to mechanical vehicles on rails. We are introduced to

the steam powered tram in the opening scene of Anna of the Five Towns where, on a hot,

11

sunny afternoon, ‘a steam-car was rumbling and clattering up Duck Bank attended by its

immense shadow’.27 In a later short story, ‘It was a mild but starless night. Trafalgar Road

was silent save for the steam-car, which, with its load of revellers returning from Hanbridge –

that centre of gaiety – slipped rumbling down the hill towards Bursley’.28 This change from

horse power to steam came with an increase in speed and frequency of service. The twice

hourly service by horse tram was replaced by ‘the new steam-cars’ which would complete the

journey between Burslem and Bleakridge ‘in three minutes or so, every quarter of an hour’.29

Speed and frequency were further increased when steam power was replaced by electricity,

the public transport system expanding so that a ‘hundred and twenty electric cars … now rush

madly bumping and thundering at twenty miles an hour through all the main streets of the

district!’30

As elsewhere in Britain, in the Potteries the tram was later superseded by the omnibus, itself

originating as a horse-drawn vehicle, soon to be powered by the petrol engine. Unlike the

tram, which is best described in Bennett’s Five Towns fiction, the omnibus occurs mainly in

his London writings. In Bennett’s novel The Roll Call, early one morning in 1903 a motor

cyclist riding westwards along Piccadilly encounters

thousands of people travelling in the opposite direction in horse-omnibuses and in a

few motor-omnibuses … They had fought, men and girls, for places in the crammed

vehicles; they had travelled from far lands such as Putney; they had been up for hours,

and … what they chiefly beheld in the Green Park was the endless lines of wayfarers

radiating from Victoria along the various avenues on the way, like themselves, to

offices, warehouses, and shops.31

Here we catch a glimpse of London’s vast commuter population in the early years of the

twentieth century when the petrol engine is beginning to replace the horse as the major source

of power for road vehicles. It was the development and improvement of new modes of

12

transport and the expansion of transportation networks that enabled and encouraged the

growth of commuter suburbs.

Similar changes were occurring in England’s provincial cities, including Bennett’s Five

Towns where, ‘automobiles of the most expensive French and English makes fly dashingly

along its hilly roads and scatter in profusion the rich black mud thereof’.32 Even as a wealthy

successful author, Bennett continued to make much use of public transport, but he also

became an enthusiastic motorist. He bought a series of motor cars, including a Lanchester, a

Model T Ford and a Rolls Royce. He learned to drive, but also employed a chauffeur. Motor

cars feature prominently in many of Bennett’s novels and short stories. This was before the

time of frequent roadside service stations, so it was wise to carry a can or two of petrol in the

car in case the fuel ran out. To overlook this precaution might result in a long walk unless

alternative transport could be found, as we read in one of his stories:

‘We can walk back to Turnhill and buy some petrol, some of us!’ snapped Harold.

‘That’s what we can do!’

‘Sithee,’ said Uncle Dan. ‘There’s the Plume o’ Feathers half-a-mile back. Th’

landlord’s a friend o’ mine. I can borrow his mare and trap, and drive to Turnhill

and fetch some of thy petrol, as thou calls it.’33

In town and country, old roads were being transformed in response to the new demands

of traffic, and new ones constructed. Bennett was particularly impressed by the modern

Italian autostrada:

The autostrada or speedway between Milan and the lake districts has a surface as

good as the best English; and it is straight and level, and the price of it is roughly

a penny a mile, and you can travel on it as fast as your engine and your rashness

permit … The autostrada is a great time-saver. Its kilometre-stones flash by like

telegraph poles.34

13

Bennett became familiar with one of England’s major roads when, in 1900, he decided to live

in the country and took a lease on Trinity Hall Farm, Hockliffe, Bedfordshire. The house still

stands beside the A5 highway on the line of the ancient Roman Watling Street. This move

was the inspiration for Bennett’s novel Teresa of Watling Street. Harshly criticised by

Bennett’s biographers and by the author himself, this ‘very bad novel’ has the merit of

conveying an image of one of England’s major highways at the time when motor vehicles

were beginning to replace the horse on British roads.35 Describing Watling Street, Bennett

notes,

After sixty years of disuse, it had resumed its old position as a great highway

through the magnificence of England. The cyclist and the motorist had

rediscovered it, rejuvenating its venerable inns, raising its venerable dust, and

generally giving new vitality to the leviathan after its long sleep.36

Throughout the book are descriptions of roadside scenes and sounds with references to

cuttings, embankments, fields, farms, houses, villages, towns, inns, chalk pits and other

features of the local landscape. Here, ‘the Chiltern Hills stretched away in the far distance,

bathed in limitless glad sunshine; and Watling Street ran white, dazzling, and serene, down

the near slope, and up the hill towards Dunstable, curtained in the dust of rural traffic’.37

Travelling along this road could be monotonous, especially on

… the twelve miles of lonely and straight Watling Street that separates St. Albans

from Dunstable. On this interminable and monotonous stretch of road there are

only two villages; mile succeeds mile with a sort of dogged persistency, and the

nocturnal traveller becomes, as it were, hypnotized by the ribbon-like highway

that stretches eternally in front of him and behind him.38

Ancient though Watling Street was, developments in road construction and in the modes of

transport that used roads meant that travel along it and highways like it increased the

14

separation of passengers from contact from their surroundings. For example, the cuttings and

embankments observed by Bennett were recent highway improvements made to reduce

gradients. This reduced travellers’ awareness of the physical character of the terrain through

which they were passing.

Railway travel

The separation of travellers from the places and landscapes they traversed on their journeys

increased with the development of the railways. The construction of these involved building

viaducts and embankments, excavating cuttings and tunnels, as well as laying smooth steel

tracks, all of which contributed to the separation of the traveller from the world outside the

carriage.

While residing at Hockliffe, Bennett used his bicycle and his horse drawn phaeton to get

about the local area but he chose the place partly because of its good railway access to

London. By the time Bennett was writing about motor travel on highways of modern

construction, railways had reached the peak of their development after a century of evolution

and expansion. Sociologist Ian Carter has made much use of literature in his study of

railways.39 An entire chapter of his book Railways and Culture in Britain is devoted to one

of Arnold Bennett’s least known novels, Accident. This Carter describes as ‘a more

penetrating, and more convincingly canonical, British “railway novel” than any competitor

ever managed’, adding: ‘For that reason if for no other, this work ill-deserves oblivion’.40

Bennett clearly reveals his lifelong interest in railways when he states, ‘Railroads and trains

have always appealed to me’, acknowledging ‘I have often tried to express my sense of their

romantic savor’.41

Railway journeys begin and end at railway stations and Bennett’s first novel A Man From the

North, published in 1898, opens with a description of the wistful feelings of a provincial

youth watching the departure of the London train from his local station.42 In Clayhanger, a

15

successful Five Towns businessman is awed by London’s Victoria station where its

atmosphere of luxury and leisure ‘had none of the busy harshness of the Midlands’.43 Here

‘Edwin had the apologetic air of the provincial who is determined to be as good as anybody

else’.44 For a genteel visitor from the south of England, the experience of arrival at a Five

Towns railway station was very different:

Well, my impressions of the platform at Knype station were unfavourable. There was

dirt in the air; I could feel it at once on my skin. And the scene was shabby,

undignified, and rude … What I saw was a pushing, exclamatory, ill-dressed,

determined crowd, each member of which was bent on the realization of his own

desires by the least ceremonious means.45

How different this was from ‘unstrenuous, soft’ Victoria station where ‘Everybody [had] an

assured air of wealth and dominion … Everybody was well dressed …’46 The scene at

Knype station was not always hectic: ‘The platform as a whole was sparsely peopled; the

London train had recently departed, and the station was suffering from the usual reaction;

only a local train was signalled.’47 A few people lingered near a bookstall on the platform,

which reminds us that the growth of railway travel from the 1840s onwards greatly

encouraged the sale of books and newspapers.

At times the experience of catching a train can cause anxiety, particularly when there is an

important appointment to be kept. Bennett’s short story Catching the Train provides a vivid

account of this in the context of a freezing winter’s morning in the Five Towns.48 This tale

also includes the hazards of travelling with heavy luggage, the fear of missed connections,

and problems that arise when a train divides into two, with carriages going to different

destinations. In this story we find one of the many references to Bradshaw that occur

commonly in Victorian and later English literature, including Bennett’s fiction. An

16

invaluable source of information for the railway traveller in Britain, Bradshaw’s Railway

Guide was published monthly from 1839 to 1961.

Once aboard the train, Bennett’s characters experience their journeys in various ways, some

looking through the window at the passing scene, some reading, some conversing, others lost

in thought. ‘As the train rushed smoothly across the vast and rich plain of Middle England,

Leonora’s thoughts dwelt on the house at Hillport, on her skilled and sympathetic servants …

and on the calm and the orderliness and the high decency of everything.’49 Comfortably

settled in her railway carriage, Leonora was thinking about her home, scarcely aware that she

was being conveyed at high speed behind a powerful steam locomotive travelling along a

steel railed track. Schivelbusch notes that the transition from coach to railroad technology

reduced passengers’ sensory experience of their journey, partly because the railway track was

‘harder, smoother, more level, and straighter than any road before it’.50 Consequently, ‘As

the natural irregularities of the terrain that were perceptible on the old roads were replaced by

the sharp linearity of the railroad, the traveller felt that he lost contact with the landscape, and

surely experienced this most directly when going through a tunnel.’51

Train passengers felt as if they were in a different ‘sphere’ from that through which they were

travelling, and that ‘the railroad and the landscape through which it ran were in two separate

worlds’.52 Bennett described this experience perfectly when, recalling a railway journey

through France, he wrote, ‘But my thoughts were chiefly occupied with the idea of the train,

that luxurious complete entity – running through a country and ignoring it. I seldom had the

least idea where the train was. Space, as a notion, had vanished for me. I might have been in

the void.’53 With the advent of air travel, this feeling of detachment has become even more

common and intense among travellers.

As we are reminded in the story The Death of Simon Fuge, some travellers find railway

journeys boring: ‘For, well knowing from experience that I should suffer acute ennui in the

17

train, I had, when buying the Gazette at Euston, taken oath that I would not even glance at it

till after Rugby; it is always the final hour of these railway journeys that is the nethermost

hell.’54 No doubt the separation of the railway passenger from the train’s surroundings

contributed to the boredom of the journey, but it also made the ride more comfortable,

enabling travellers to engage in activities such as reading previously made difficult by the

bumping and jolting commonly experienced with earlier forms of transport. Of course, many

passengers found interest in the view from their railway coach, a moving landscape framed

by the carriage window. In her discussion of Dickens’ Dombey and Son, Charlotte Mathieson

notes the ‘New modes of perception afforded by the railway window’, observing that ‘The

compartment window was a much bigger and smoother sheet of glass than that of the

stagecoach and, when combined with the new speed of travel, this created an altogether new

platform from which to view the world beyond.’55 Advances in the manufacture of glass as

well as in railway technology contributed to the change in the experience of travel which

Victorian and later novelists described. Observed through the window of a speeding railway

carriage, the landscape is seen as a panorama presented ‘as a vast succession of

indiscriminate images [in which] all sense of dimension and depth is lost’.56 To the passenger

looking out from the carriage, the pane of glass framed by the window’s edge becomes like a

painted surface.

Accordingly, the view from the train is often described in aesthetically pleasing terms

… At the same time though, aesthetic delight represents a commodification of

perception: the idea of consumption is inherent in the railway panorama and the

picturesque view from the window is a resolutely artificial presentation of the

landscape presented for the entertainment of the traveller.57

Bennett provides examples of this. On a railway journey from the Five Towns to Devon,

Edwin Clayhanger spent some of the time

18

… looking curiously out of the carriage-window … While, in the heavenly air of the

September morning, the train was curving through Bickleigh Vale and the Valley of the

Plym and through the steeper valley of the Meavy up towards the first fastness of the

Moor, he had felt his body to be almost miraculously well and his soul almost

triumphant.58

For a visitor born in Devon and residing in London, the view from the train arriving in the

Five Towns was something utterly different. The southern passenger was shocked by, ‘the

singular scenery of coal dust, potsherds, flame and steam, through which the train wound its

way. It was squalid ugliness, but it was squalid ugliness on a scale so vast and overpowering

that it became sublime.’59 Overseas, as well as in England, Bennett was acutely observant of

the landscape while travelling by rail. On a train journey to Paris in October 1897 the young

writer observed the changing scenery as he and his fellow passengers sped along the track.

At one stage Bennett had the impression of moving ‘through a flying sea of yellow leaves

glinting in the sunlight.’ Later in the journey,

For many miles the landscape was bare, greyish and uninteresting. Then, as we

increased our distance from the sea southwards a change of temperature and of

atmosphere became more and more perceptible, until the warmth and brightness

made almost an English summer. Presently the character of the landscape altered.

Water was everywhere in large quiet pools bordered by trees delightfully tinted,

and we passed by picturesque towns with fine churches and wonderful crooked

white streets.

We entered Paris, as one enters London, by boring a way into the city through

ravines with windowed walls.60

Bennett’s experience of railway travel abroad was greatly expanded when he first visited

America in 1911. The book he wrote about this tour includes the author’s detailed

19

impressions of his journeys by rail across the United States. Among the things that struck

him favourably was New York’s ‘Pennsylvania station … full of the noble qualities that fine

and heroic imagination alone can give’, making it, in Bennett’s opinion, ‘the most majestic

terminus in the world’.61 He was ‘impressed rather than charmed’ by the luxury ‘all-steel

cars’ of the train he boarded, and disliked the low windows that made it ‘impossible to see the

upper part of the thing observed (roofs, telegraph- wires, tree-foliage, hill-summits, sky)

without bending the head and cricking the neck’.62 Much worse, for Bennett, was what he

saw on the night train he took for his return journey from Washington: ‘I confess that I had

not imagined anything so appalling as the confined, stifling, malodorous promiscuity of the

American sleeping-car, where men and women are herded together on shelves under the

drastic control of an official aided by negroes.’63 Fortunately for Bennett, he was spared this

discomfort, and enjoyed the luxury of a ‘state-room, or suite – for it comprised two

apartments … a beautiful and aristocratic domain’.64 Bennett experienced more American

railway luxury when he travelled from New York to Chicago on a train which had an

observation car with a telephone, ‘the free supply of newspapers, the library of books, the

typewriting-machine, and the stenographer by its side – all as promised … a dining-car, a

smoking-car, and a barber-shop’.65 References to the typewriter and telephone remind the

reader of the many world changing technological innovations that had occurred during

Bennett’s lifetime.

Travel by water transport

In order to visit America, Bennett had to travel by sea, for trans-Atlantic flights were not

achieved until 1919. The first water transport that Bennett witnessed was that with which he

was familiar in his native Potteries where canals played a vital role serving the local

industries. While canals are landscape features that are often mentioned in Bennett’s Five

20

Towns fiction, their former use as passenger carriers is not found in his stories. The declining

role of inland water passenger transport is noted elsewhere in his writings, however.

When his income from writing enabled him to live a more luxurious life, Bennett bought an

ocean going yacht named Velsa, later selling this vessel and buying another which he named

the Marie Marguerite after his wife. He also went on yacht cruises with opulent friends of

his. He published accounts of his cruises in From the Log of the Velsa and Mediterranean

Scenes and yachting is frequently described in his fiction.66 Bennett’s fascination with water

transport is evident in his writings that describe not only the canals with which he was

familiar since childhood, but also throw light on the movement of goods and passengers on

rivers and oceans at a time when sail was rapidly giving way to steam on the high seas.

In Bennett’s day the Thames was still an important highway for passenger traffic using river

steamers, and references to this means of city transport occur in his London fiction. In The

Roll Call several pages are devoted to a description of a young couple’s river excursion from

Chelsea to Greenwich and back shortly before the First World War. On this river trip, ‘The

shallow and handsome craft, flying its gay flags, crossed and re-crossed the river, calling at

three piers in the space of a few minutes.’67 The gaiety of the steam boat’s appearance

contrasts with the melancholy atmosphere created by Bennett who senses the imminent

demise of this urban passenger service. At Chelsea

… it seemed impossible that any steamer should call at that forlorn and decrepit

platform that trembled under the straining of the water … all the piers were like

Chelsea Pier; all the pier-keepers had the air of castaways upon shaking islets. The

passengers on the steamer would not have filled a motor-bus, and they carried

themselves like melancholy adventurers who have begun to doubt the authenticity of

inspiration which sent them on a mysterious quest.68

21

Bennett notes the famous buildings and landmarks that were seen as the boat travels

downstream. In addition to the barges, tugs, pleasure craft and other vessels that passengers

see on the river, ‘Railway trains, cabs, coloured omnibuses, cyclists, and footfarers, mingled

in and complicated the scene. Then the first ocean-going steamer appeared, belittling all

else.’69

Bennett provides a picture of early twentieth-century ocean liner travel when he describes his

experience of a trans-Atlantic crossing in 1911. The ship he sailed in, the Lusitania, becomes

the Lithuania in his novel The Regent, but for a detailed description of the workings of the

latest thing in luxury ocean travel and shipboard life, the reader may consult Bennett’s

account of his American travels, Your United States.70 Bennett conveys something of his

wonder and excitement when he writes,

All was calm and warm and reassuring within the ship … I looked about as I lay,

and everything was still except a towel that moved gently, almost imperceptibly,

to and fro. Yet the towel had copied the immobility of the star. It alone did not

oscillate. Forty-five thousand tons were swaying; but not that towel. The sense

of actual present romance was too strong to let me read. I extinguished the light,

and listened in the dark to the faint straining noises of the enormous organism.71

From this passage readers gain little impression of the appearance and workings of an early

twentieth-century ocean liner, but they are allowed to share the novel experience of a

passenger who is making his first trans-Atlantic voyage on one of the technological wonders

of the age. Aboard this enormous vessel passengers are cocooned from the elements which

formerly played a major role in the experience of those who travelled by sea.

Aviation

By the time of Bennett’s first Atlantic crossing, aviation had made great progress, something

the author reflects in his writings, although there is no evidence to suggest that he ever flew.

22

In The Old Wives’ Tale and City of Pleasure we find references to passenger balloons;

zeppelins make a dramatic appearance in The Pretty Lady and, in Accident a private

aeroplane provides the means to travel rapidly from Newcastle to Aix-les- Bains.72

Developments in air transport after Bennett’s death further separated the traveller from the

environment traversed on the journey. It was during Bennett’s lifetime that aircraft became

significant in warfare and military use of aeroplanes is described in Bennett’s First World War

account Over There. This book also recounts experiences of travel by road and rail in

wartime France and Belgium.73

Journeys involving several modes of transport

Travel in much happier circumstances is vividly portrayed in a short story about a Five

Towns married couple going on holiday. Here we are given an example of a journey that

involves the use of several different modes of transport. The travellers also have to change

trains a couple of times on the journey to their destination – the Isle of Man. The journey

starts with ‘A flat barrow at the door, a tin trunk and two bags on the barrow, and a somewhat

ragged boy between the handles of the barrow!’74 Thus accompanied, the couple arrive at

Hanbridge railway station where they catch a local train which takes them to the nearest

mainline station. ‘When they arrived, after a journey of ten minutes, at Knype … they had to

change for Liverpool.’75 Again, ‘at Crewe … they had to change once more for Liverpool’.76

‘When it came in, the Liverpool train was crammed to the doors … The entire world seemed

to be going to Liverpool. It was uncomfortable, but it was magnificent. It was joy, it was

life.’77 On arrival in Liverpool, ‘they rattled and jolted and whizzed in an omnibus to

Prince’s Landing Stage [where] a great ship waited for them.’78 ‘Annie had never seen such

a thing’, and she marvelled at what she found on board – the ‘marble halls, colossal

staircases, bookshops, trinket shops, highly-decorated restaurants, glittering bars, and

cushioned drawing-rooms.’79 Astonished by these surroundings, Annie ‘was not surprised, a

23

little later, to see Prince’s Landing Stage sliding away from the ship, instead of the ship

sliding away from Prince’s Landing Stage.’80 Here again, the reader is given an impression

of what the passenger feels rather than an account of what an external observer witnesses.

Travellers observed

As Bennett’s account of Annie’s journey demonstrates, the author keenly observes his

characters as they go on their journeys. We have already noted the behaviour of some of

them – gazing through the window at the passing scene or reading to relieve boredom, for

example. Of the many examples that can be found in Bennett’s works, the following

selections taken from his journals serve to illustrate the author’s interest in the ways travellers

behave:

Impressed again by the extraordinary self-consciousness of travellers. On the

platform at the Nord, another man and I tramping up and down the platform got

half-smothered in a cloud of malodorous steam. He could not help turning to me

as we emerged, to share his sensations with me by means of a gesture. Had he

not been on a journey he would have ignored my existence.81

On another rail journey,

There were three other grave solitary men in the compartment, and two girls got

in, one about 24 and the other about 17 or 18. After leave-taking at the station

they began to arrange themselves for the journey. Such a dropping of and picking

up of money, and disposing and redisposing of parcels, and downsettings and

uprisings! Such a contrast to the immobility of the grave solitary men. At last

they settled and began to read; their volumes were evidently both of a series, for

jeunes filles. But quite soon they began to rearrange themselves for leaving the

train, long before Fontainebleau, where they got out, and left the four grave

solitary men alone.82

24

One of those grave solitary men was, of course, Bennett himself, a keen student of life whose

perceptive observations enrich his writings.

Conclusion

A focused reading of Bennett’s works provides insights into the environmental and social

consequences of developments in transportation, particularly the experience of travel in the

century up to the author’s death in 1931. Based on his personal observations, he conveys to

the reader what it was like to travel by a variety of means, on land and water. His accounts

inform us about a wide range of travel experience, from walking and cycling to journeys

involving vehicles powered by horses, steam, petrol and electricity, and vessels ranging from

river boats and luxury yachts to ocean liners. Bennett conveys a vivid impression of the

impact of rapidly evolving transport technology on the changing human environment and on

people’s response to it. In a way that non-literary sources fail to do, Bennett enables us to

share some of the emotion that contemporary people experienced when travelling for a

variety of reasons on journeys short and long. Bennett also demonstrates how, with advances

in transportation creating greater isolation from the surrounding environment, passengers

become less aware of the landscapes and places through which they travel. This trend

continued after Bennett’s death, and we now live in an age when journeys, even those across

vast oceans and continents, may provide little travel experience other than that we encounter

in the surroundings of airports and aircraft cabins.

As Coser himself acknowledged, creative literature is no substitute for systematically

acquired certified knowledge, but it is an invaluable resource that scientists as well as

scholars in the arts and humanities are well advised to explore. Students of transport and

travel discover insights into the emotional response of people who go on journeys of various

kinds, including those which are part of everyday life as well as those of a more exceptional

nature. Bennett, with the novelist’s sensitivity to human emotion, his eye for detail and his

25

comprehension of the broad environmental and social context, is an author whose works are

particularly valuable to scholars seeking to understand the effects of scientific and

technological innovation on the lives of those living in the place and at the time under

investigation.

Notes and References

1. Among the geographers who have drawn on the works of Bennett are E W Gilbert,

Douglas Pocock and Brian Hudson. See, for example, E W Gilbert, ‘The idea of the region,’

Geography, 45, 1960, pp 157–175; D C D Pocock, ‘The novelist’s image of the North’,

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol 4, 1979, pp 62–76; B. J. Hudson,

‘The geographical imagination of Arnold Bennett’, Transactions of the Institute of British

Geographers, vol 7, 1982, pp 365–379. Hudson has also discussed Bennett’s thoughts on

landscape aesthetics and education; see B J Hudson, ‘Bennett’s Five Towns: a prospect-

refuge analysis’, British Journal of Aesthetics, vol 33, 1993, pp 41–57; B J Hudson, ‘Arnold

Bennett and the pursuit of knowledge’, English Studies vol 98, 2017, pp 159–174. Aspects of

modernity and modernism are explored by Robert Squillace in a book which examines a

selection of Bennett’s novels; see R Squillace, Modernism, Modernity and Arnold Bennett

(Lewisburg : Bucknell University Press, 1997). Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale is one of two

novels examined by Aileen Ribeiro in an essay on nineteenth century costume; see A Ribeiro,

‘Arnold Bennett, Edith Wharton and the “Minotaur of Time” ’, Costume vol. 44, 2010, pp

89–95. Aspects of business history as illustrated in a Bennett novel are examined in Andrew

Popp, ‘ “Though it be but a promise” : business probity in Arnold Bennett’s Anna of the Five

Towns’, Business History vol 48, 2006, pp 332–353. In the field of medicine, G D Perkin and

J M Schneck have published studies of Bennett’s works, particularly the novel Clayhanger

and the author’s journals; see G D Perkin, ‘Arnold Bennett and medicine: with particular

26

reference to his description of dressing apraxia’, British Medical Journal Clinical Research

Edition, vol 283, 1981, pp 1666–8; J.M. Schneck , ‘Arnold Bennett, Clayhanger and

alzheimer’s disease’, American Journal of Psychiatry vol 150, 1993, p 1431. Another of

Bennett’s most famous novels was examined by a professor of law in M H Hoffheimer,

‘Observing capital punishment in Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale’, Mississippi Law

Journal vol 69, 1999, pp 441–453. Examples of research on the history of transport that

draw on Bennett’s work include I Carter, ‘The lost idea of a train: looking for Britain’s

railway novel’, Journal of Transport History, vol 21, 2000, pp 117–139; I Carter, Railways

and Culture in Britain: the epitome of modernity (Manchester: Manchester University Press,

2001); B J Hudson, ‘Arnold Bennett’s literary journey into World War I transport’, English

Literature in Transition 1880–1920, vol 59, 2016, pp 87–98; and B J Hudson, ‘Arnold

Bennett, transport and urban development’, Geography vol 101, 2016, pp 85–92

2. Arnold Bennett, Literary Taste: how to form it (New York: George H Doran, 1909), p 12

3. P G Adams, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel (Lexington: University Press

of Kentucky, 1983), p 279

4. L A Coser, ‘Introduction,’ in L A Coser (ed), Sociology Through Literature: an

introductory reader (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall 1963), p 2

5. ibid, p 3

6. F Fernandez-Armasto, Millennium: a history of the last thousand years (New York: Simon

& Schuster, 1996), p 27

7. Arnold Bennett, The Human Machine (New York: George H Doran, 1908), p 113

8. Bennett, Literary Taste, p 29

9. Virginia Woolf, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (London: Hogarth Press,1924)

10. Kinley E Roby, A Writer at War: Arnold Bennett, 1914–1918 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana

State University Press, 1972), p 17

27

11. Arnold Bennett, Your United States: impressions of a first visit (New York: George H

Doran, 1912). This book was published in London under the title Those United States.

12. B J Hudson, ‘Arnold Bennett’s literary journey into World War I transport’, English

Literature in Transition 1880–1920 vol 59, 2016, pp 87–98

13. Arnold Bennett, The Glimpse: an adventure of the soul (New York: George H Doran,

1909), pp 154–5

14. Arnold Bennett, Clayhanger (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954)

15. I Cook, ‘Consciousness and the novel: fact or fiction in the works of D.H. Lawrence’, in

D C D Pocock (ed) Humanistic Geography and Literature: essays on the experience of place

(London: Croom Helm; Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1981), p 66

16. Arnold Bennett, The Author’s Craft (New York; George H Doran, 1914), p 17

17. Arnold Bennett, The Old Wives’ Tale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954), p 18

18. R Pound, Arnold Bennett: a biography (London: William Heinemann, 1952), p 57

19. Bennett, Clayhanger, p 28

20. B J Hudson, ‘Arnold Bennett’s Five Towns landscape: internal and external vision’,

Journal of Cultural Geography vol 11, 1991, pp 21–30

21. Arnold Bennett, The Journals edited by F Swinnerton (Harmondsworth: Penguin ,1971),

pp 224–5

22. ibid

23. ibid, p 511

24. Arnold Bennett, ‘The place you live in’, The Royal Magazine vol 51, March 1924, p 452

25. Bennett, Clayhanger, p 29

26. Bennett, Old Wives’ Tale, p 27

27. Arnold Bennett, Anna of The Five Towns (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1936), p 15

28

28. Arnold Bennett, ‘Mary with the high hand’, in Tales of The Five Towns (London: Chatto

& Windus, 1941), p 81

29. Bennett, Clayhanger, p 28

30. Bennett, Old Wives’ Tale, p 28

31. Arnold Bennett, The Roll Call (New York: George H Doran, 1918), p 136

32. Arnold Bennett, ‘From one generation to another’ in The Grim Smile of The Five Towns

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1946), p 120. This is one of two stories in this collection that

feature automobiles. The other is titled ‘The nineteenth hat’.

33. ibid, p 125

34. Arnold Bennett, Journal 1929 (London: Cassell, 1930), p 80

35. M Drabble, Arnold Bennett: a biography (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1974), p 89

36. Arnold Bennett, Teresa of Watling Street: a fantasia on modern themes (London:

Methuen, 1904), pp 15–16

37. ibid, p 100

38. ibid, pp 136–7

39. Carter, ‘The lost idea of a train’; Carter, Railways and Culture

40. Carter, Railways and Culture, p 158; Arnold Bennett, Accident (London: Cassell, 1929)

41. Bennett, Your United States, p 99

42. Arnold Bennett, A Man from the North (New York: George H Doran, 1911)

43. Bennett, Clayhanger, p 436

44. ibid

45. Bennett, ‘The death of Simon Fuge’, in The Grim Smile, p 137

46. Bennett, Clayhanger, p 436

47. Arnold Bennett, ‘Half-a-Sovereign’, in The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories

(London: Methuen, 1912), p 260

29

48. Bennett, ‘Catching the train’, in The Matador, pp 150–163

49. Arnold Bennett, Leonora (London: Chatto & Windus, 1903), p 339

50. W Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: the industrialization of time and space, New

Edition (Berkeley: University of California Press,1986), p 22

51. ibid, p 23

52. ibid

53. Bennett, The Journals, p 86

54. Bennett, ‘The death of Simon Fuge’, p 134

55. C Mathieson, Mobility in the Victorian Novel: placing the nation (Basingstoke: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2015), p 69

56. ibid

57. ibid

58. Arnold. Bennett, These Twain (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), pp 225–6

59. Bennett, ‘The death of Simon Fuge’, pp 139–140

60. Bennett, The Journals, p 37

61. Bennett, Your United States, pp 99–100

62. ibid, pp 101–2

63. ibid, p 103

64. ibid, p 105

65. ibid, Your United States, p 106

66. Arnold Bennett, From the Log of the Velsa (New York: Century Company, 1914); Arnold

Bennett, Mediterranean Scenes (London: Cassell, 1928)

67. Bennett, The Roll Call, pp 194–5

68. ibid

69. ibid, p 196

30

70. Arnold Bennett, The Regent (London: Methuen,1913); Bennett, Your United States

71. Bennett, Your United States, p 8

72. Bennett, Old Wives’ Tale; Bennett, Accident; Bennett, The Pretty Lady (New York:

George H Doran, 1918); Arnold Bennett, The City of Pleasure: a fantasia on modern themes

(New York: George H Doran, 1907)

73. Arnold Bennett, Over There: war scenes on the western front (New York: George H

Doran, 1915)

74. Bennett, ‘Under the clock’, in The Matador, p 130

75. ibid, p 131

76. ibid

77. ibid

78. ibid

79. ibid, p 132

80. ibid

81. Bennett, The Journals, p 229

82. ibid, p 145