Anna of the Five Towns

I had never read a word by Arnold Bennett before recently tackling ANNA OF THE FIVE TOWNS (1902). I read it because I was about to teach an adult education course "Young Rudyard Kipling," and a Kipling expert said that ANNA OF THE FIVE TOWNS would provide great background on a part of England important to the the Kiplings. *** How so? Because Rudyard's very, very gifted father, John Lockwood Kipling (1837 - 1911) as a young man worked as an artist in the ceramic industry of Northern Staffordshire, "the Potteries," where author Bennett himself had grown up and where he set so many of his tales. And all the scholarly claims for atmospherics and social life of ANNA OF THE FIVE TOWNS regarding "the Potteries" proved true. *** Read this novel if you want a sense of English Methodism in the 19th Century, a reformed religion working hard to save sinners in a smoke-enveloped industrial area of Britain. Bennett brought the puritanical side of the religion of John Wesley to life. But in the novel, primitive Methodism seems joyless, barely charitable and notably supportive of some very selfish industrialists' life styles. Still, we see people of the Five Towns making lives for themselves outside work and family within a bustling, well-organized, non-spontaneous world of religious revivals, Methoist sewing-circles, church services, catechism classes and church picnics. *** We also see utterly unwitting heroine 21 year old Anna Tellwright on her birthday being told by her miserly Methodist father that she has inherited via her mother a fortune worth 50,000 pounds. He makes over all the ownership papers to Anna who, we fear by novel's end, will automatically through the likely coming marriage to another greedy industrialist, Mynors, hand over the only thing (wealth) that makes her independent in male-dominated England. We all know mousy people, but deep-down agnostic Anna's supreme virtue or weakness is meekness and unresisting subjection to her father. I found this very hard to accept, but so it goes in ANNA OF THE FIVE TOWNS. *** Anna was 21. She could have moved out of her widowed father's home, got her own lawyer and left Staffordshire altogether. Did this enter her mind? Not that I noticed. Her feeble efforts to befriend her fellow beaten down men go nowhere in the face of her father's greedy instructions on how not to spend her own money. All in all, I am glad that Rudyard Kipling's Methodist father got away from those Potteries, though he had met Rudyard's lively Methodist mother Alice Macdonald in those parts. Bombay was a much better place for the author of KIM to have been born than any of the Five Towns (in reality Six Towns which grew into Staffordshire's one city of Stoke-on-Trent). A good read. -OOO-