Bennett

ARNOLD BENNETT (1867 - 1931)

The hero of The Roll Call (1918), the fourth of the fine Clayhanger tetralogy is an architect who receives a commission in what can only be Newcastle by the description below, but the city is never named and the book makes no use of Newcastle as a setting:

'As the line curved, came the view of the city beneath its delicate canopy of mist. The city was built on escarpments, on ridges, on hills, and sagged here and there into great hollows. The serrated silhouette of it wrote romance upon the sky, and the contours of the naked earth beyond lost themselves grandly in the mystery of the north... It contained an immense quantity of interesting architecture of various periods, which could not be appreciated a glance. It was a hoary place. It went back to the Romans and further. Its fragmentary walls had survived through seven centuries, its cathedral through six, its chief churches through five. It had the most perfect Norman keep within two hundred miles... The Victorian-Edwardian age had added museums, law-courts, theatres; such astonishing modernities as swimming-baths, power-houses, joint-stock banks, lending libraries and art schools; and whole monumental streets and squares from the designs of a native architect [John Dobson A.M.] without whose respectable name no history of British architecture could be called complete.'

Bennett writes of 'the sense of its huge adventurous, corporate life, continuous from century to century. It had known terrible battles, obstinate sieges, famines, cholera, a general conflagration... It had fiercely survived them all. It was a city passionate and highly vitalised.'

Bennett divides the city fathers of the time into 'wire-pullers, axe-grinders, vain nincompoops, honest mediocrities, and the handful who combined honesty with sagacity, and sagacity with strength.'

Myers Literary Guide:	The North-East
ARNOLD BENNETT (1867 - 1931) The hero of The Roll Call (1918), the fourth of the fine Clayhanger tetralogy is an architect who receives a commission in what can only be Newcastle by the description below, but the city is never named and the book makes no use of Newcastle as a setting: 'As the line curved, came the view of the city beneath its delicate canopy of mist. The city was built on escarpments, on ridges, on hills, and sagged here and there into great hollows. The serrated silhouette of it wrote romance upon the sky, and the contours of the naked earth beyond lost themselves grandly in the mystery of the north... It contained an immense quantity of interesting architecture of various periods, which could not be appreciated a glance. It was a hoary place. It went back to the Romans and further. Its fragmentary walls had survived through seven centuries, its cathedral through six, its chief churches through five. It had the most perfect Norman keep within two hundred miles... The Victorian-Edwardian age had added museums, law-courts, theatres; such astonishing modernities as swimming-baths, power-houses, joint-stock banks, lending libraries and art schools; and whole monumental streets and squares from the designs of a native architect [John Dobson A.M.] without whose respectable name no history of British architecture could be called complete.' Bennett writes of 'the sense of its huge adventurous, corporate life, continuous from century to century. It had known terrible battles, obstinate sieges, famines, cholera, a general conflagration... It had fiercely survived them all. It was a city passionate and highly vitalised.' Bennett divides the city fathers of the time into 'wire-pullers, axe-grinders, vain nincompoops, honest mediocrities, and the handful who combined honesty with sagacity, and sagacity with strength.'
Return to Index	On to next Author