Arnold Bennett - CLAYHANGER

Arnold Bennett

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musaicumbooks@okpublishing.info2017 OK Publishing ISBN 978-80-272-3375-5

Book i. His Vocation. Book i His Vocation. Table of Contents

1 The Last of a Schoolboy. Chapter One. The Last of a Schoolboy. Table of Contents Edwin Clayhanger stood on the steep-sloping, red-bricked canal bridge, in the valley between Bursley and its suburb Hillport. In that neighbourhood the Knype and Mersey canal formed the western boundary of the industrialism of the Five Towns. To the east rose pitheads, chimneys, and kilns, tier above tier, dim in their own mists. To the west, Hillport Fields, grimed but possessing authentic hedgerows and winding paths, mounted broadly up to the sharp ridge on which stood Hillport Church, a landmark. Beyond the ridge, and partly protected by it from the driving smoke of the Five Towns, lay the fine and ancient Tory borough of Oldcastle, from whose historic Middle School Edwin Clayhanger was now walking home. The fine and ancient Tory borough provided education for the whole of the Five Towns, but the relentless ignorance of its prejudices had blighted the district. A hundred years earlier the canal had only been obtained after a vicious Parliamentary fight between industry and the fine and ancient borough, which saw in canals a menace to its importance as a centre of traffic. Fifty years earlier the fine and ancient borough had succeeded in forcing the greatest railway line in England to run through unpopulated country five miles off instead of through the Five Towns, because it loathed the mere conception of a railway. And now, people are inquiring why the Five Towns, with a railway system special to itself, is characterised by a perhaps excessive provincialism. These interesting details have everything to do with the history of Edwin Clayhanger, as they have everything to do with the history of each of the two hundred thousand souls in the Five Towns. Oldcastle guessed not the vast influences of its sublime stupidity. It was a breezy Friday in July 1872. The canal, which ran north and south, reflected a blue and white sky. Towards the bridge, from the north came a long narrow canal-boat roofed with tarpaulins; and towards the bridge, from the south came a similar craft, sluggishly creeping. The towing-path was a morass of sticky brown mud, for, in the way of rain, that year was breaking the records of a century and a half. Thirty yards in front of each boat an unhappy skeleton of a horse floundered its best in the quagmire. The honest endeavour of one of the animals received a frequent tonic from a bare-legged girl of seven who heartily curled a whip about its crooked large-jointed legs. The ragged and filthy child danced in the rich mud round the horse’s flanks with the simple joy of one who had been rewarded for good behaviour by the unrestricted use of a whip for the first time.

2 The Flame. Chapter Two. The Flame. Table of Contents The various agencies which society has placed at the disposal of a parent had been at work on Edwin in one way or another for at least a decade, in order to equip him for just this very day when he should step into the world. The moment must therefore be regarded as dramatic, the first crucial moment of an experiment long and elaborately prepared. Knowledge was admittedly the armour and the weapon of one about to try conclusions with the world, and many people for many years had been engaged in providing Edwin with knowledge. He had received, in fact, “a good education”—or even, as some said, “a thoroughly sound education;” assuredly as complete an equipment of knowledge as could be obtained in the county, for the curriculum of the Oldcastle High School was less in accord with common sense than that of the Middle School. He knew, however, nothing of natural history, and in particular of himself, of the mechanism of the body and mind, through which his soul had to express and fulfil itself. Not one word of information about either physiology or psychology had ever been breathed to him, nor had it ever occurred to any one around him that such information was needful. And as no one had tried to explain to him the mysteries which he carried about with him inside that fair skin of his, so no one had tried to explain to him the mysteries by which he was hemmed in, either mystically through religion, or rationally through philosophy. Never in chapel or at Sunday school had a difficulty been genuinely faced. And as for philosophy, he had not the slightest conception of what it meant. He imagined that a philosopher was one who made the best of a bad job, and he had never heard the word used in any other sense. He had great potential intellectual curiosity, but nobody had thought to stimulate it by even casually telling him that the finest minds of humanity had been trying to systematise the mysteries for quite twenty-five centuries. Of physical science he had been taught nothing, save a grotesque perversion to the effect that gravity was a force which drew things towards the centre of the earth. In the matter of chemistry it had been practically demonstrated to him scores of times, so that he should never forget this grand basic truth, that sodium and potassium may be relied upon to fizz flamingly about on a surface of water. Of geology he was perfectly ignorant, though he lived in a district whose whole livelihood depended on the scientific use of geological knowledge, and though the existence of Oldcastle itself was due to a freak of the earth’s crust which geologists call a “fault.”

3 Entry into the World.

4 The Child-man.

5 Mr. Shushions’s Tear Explained.

6 In the House.

7 Auntie Hamps.

8 In the Shop.

9 The Town.

10 Free and Easy.

11 Son and Father.

12 Machinery.

13 One Result of Courage.

14 The Architect.

15 A Decision.

16 The Letter.

17 End of a Struggle.

Book ii. His Love.

1 The Visit.

2 Father and Son After Seven Years.

3 The New House.

4 The Two Gardens.

5 Clothes.

6 Janet Loses Her Bet.

7 Lane End House.

8 The Family Supper.

9 In the Porch.

10 The Centenary.

11 The Bottom of the Square.

12 The Top of the Square.

13 The Oldest Sunday-school Teacher.

14 Money.

15 The Insult.

16 The Sequel.

17 Challenge and Response.

18 Curiosity.

19 A Catastrophe.

20 The Man.

21 The Marriage.

Book iii. His Freedom.

1 After a Funeral.

2 The Conclave.

3 The Name.

4 The Victim of Sympathy.

5 The Slave’s Fear.

6 Keys and Cheques.

7 Laid Aside.

8 A Change of Mind.

9 The Ox.

10 Mrs. Hamps as a Young Man.

11 An Hour.

12 Revenge.

13 The Journey Upstairs.

14 The Watch.

15 The Banquet.

16 After the Banquet.

17 The Chain Broken.

Book iv. His Start In Life.

1 The Birthday Visit.

2 Janet’s Nephew.

3 Adventure.

4 In Preston Street.