Anna of the Five Towns was the first of Arnold Bennett’s novels to be set in the pottery towns of Staffordshire. Through six novels published between 1902 and 1918 he gives a realistic picture of life, industry, religion and love in England’s industrial heartland at the turn of the 20th century.
It’s rather depressing but if you’ve read any of Elizabeth Gaskell’s novels set in another English industrial heartland, you’ll know what to expect.
There’s a lot of hard toil and labour; sickness; poverty and religious fervour in communities living in the shadow of huge industrial enterprises.
The entire landscape was illuminated and transformed by these unique pyrotechnics of labour atoning for its grime, and dull, weird sounds, as of the breathings and sighings of gigantic nocturnal creatures, filled the enchanted air.
The Anna of Anna of the Five Towns is a young woman who plays housekeeper to her widowed father Titus Tellwright, and stand-in mother to her young sister Agnes.
Titus is a despicable figure. He treats Anna as a scivvy, expecting his meals to be served “with absolute precision” every day and subjecting her to severe criticism over the smallest error. His life revolves around money — earning it, watching it grow and avoiding spending it unless absolutely essential. He’s considered a man of great wealth in the community but none of the income from all his business interests ever finds its way into new clothes for Anna or treats for Agnes.
Titus’s idea of charity is to count every farthing twice and still make others feel they owe him something. When Anna reaches her 21st birthday for example, she learns she has come into an inheritance from her mother, enhanced further through wise investments by her father. She’s now worth the vast amount of £50,000 but any joy Anna might have felt is undercut by Titus’s attitude:
“He gave her the income as he would have given her a stick or a stone — something that was his, and that remained his, though she might use it.”
Bennett makes clear that even when money changes hands, power doesn’t. Titus’s “gift” is really another way to keep his daughter under his thumb — a transaction disguised as generosity.
During the course of the novel Anna’s eyes are opened to the full extent of her father’s mercenary motives in all his relationships and his little regard for people’s well being. The novel’s most heartbreaking scenes when Anna visits the poor Price family, tenants of her father’s houses. She’s torn between pity and duty, knowing her father expects her to collect rent from people who can barely feed themselves. Bennett’s line about Titus’s brand of “charity” is one of the most damning in the book:
He exacted from them the uttermost farthing, and then gave them a guinea at Christmas for their virtue in paying.
It’s a perfect summary of the moral bookkeeping of the Five Towns — where goodness is measured in shillings and kindness comes with a receipt. Bennett later sums up the whole community’s attitude in one sharp sentence:
It was a place where good works were done by subscription, and sin was measured in shillings.
This is a world where money and class rule almost everything: family, faith, and even love. The rich perform virtue as a kind of social investment. They give to appear respectable, not out of empathy.
Anna is meant to stand above all of this yet Bennett doesn’t completely let her off the hook. When Anna herself tries to help the Prices, she feels a pang that spoils her good deed:
“Her heart was warm, but she felt the chill of superiority.”
Bennett’s message seems to be that the class system contains an inherent trap: even genuine compassion is warped by the power money creates.
Anna of the Five Towns is a slow novel, inching its way to a quiet yet emphatic act of rebellion. Having read another of Bennett’s novels, The Old Wives’ Tale, I knew to expect precision and detail about clothing, weather conditions and geography.
This one has even greater levels of detail with Bennett prose approaching almost documentary precision about the clanging factories; religious sermons and rare outings to the seaside. At times, the level of detail overwhelms the narrative — did we really need five pages detailing all the stages involved in transforming clay into bowls, plates and jugs? I can see now why Virginia Woolf believed that Bennett’s focus on surface details came at the expense of a deep psychological exploration into the consciousness of his characters.
Is it worth reading Anna of the Five Towns? Overall I’d say yes because it offers an interesting picture about the influence of wealth on society and how hard it can be to do the right thing. But it could have been an even stronger book if Bennett had only reigned back on his love of detail.