Arnold Bennett

The Old Wives' Tale (1908) Arnold Bennett

Arnold Bennett was born on 27 May 1867, in Hanley, Staffordshire, now a constituent part of Stoke-on-Trent, but then an independent town. He was the eldest child of the three sons and three daughters of Enoch Bennett (1843-1902) and his wife Sarah Ann, née Longson (1840-1914). Enoch Bennett's early career had been one of mixed fortunes: after an unsuccessful attempt to run a business making and selling pottery, he set up as a draper and pawnbroker in 1866. Four years later his father died, leaving him some money, with which he articled himself to a local law firm; in 1876 he qualified as a solicitor. The Bennetts were staunch Wesleyans, musical, cultured and sociable. Enoch Bennett had an authoritarian side, but it was a happy household, although a mobile one: as Enoch's success as a solicitor increased, the family moved, within the space of five years, to four different houses in Hanley and the neighbouring Burslem. From 1877 to 1882 Bennett's schooling was at the Wedgwood Institute, Burslem, followed by a year at a grammar school in Newcastle-under-Lyme. He was good at Latin and better at French; he had an inspirational headmaster who gave him a love for French literature and the French language that lasted all his life. He did well academically and passed Cambridge University examinations that could have led to his becoming an undergraduate, but his father had other plans. The Old Wives' Tale is a novel by Arnold Bennett, first published in 1908. It deals with the lives of two very different sisters, Constance and Sophia Baines, following their stories from their youth, working in their mother's draper's shop, into old age.