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Bennett (ENOCH ARNOLD English novelist)

(ENOCH) ARNOLD, English novelist and playwright, who has won a high and distinctive place in modern fiction. He was born at Hanley, England, May 27, 1867. He was at first inclined to follow law as a profession, but abandoned this for journalism, becoming editor of "Woman" in 1896. But his creative instinct sought expression in fic. tion, to which he devoted himself after 1900. His first two novels made no deep impression, but a veritable sensation was produced by the first of his stories of the pottery district of North Staffordshire, "Anna of the Five Towns" (1902). This was followed at intervals until 1912 by six other books of the same type, all dealing with the "Five Towns" and in many cases involving the same characters. On a limited scale, it was like the "Comédie Humaine" of Balzac. With marvelous ability Bennett takes the dull, monotonous lives of various classes in an English factory district and shows the strength and fierceness at times of the elemental passions beneath the drab exteriors. As Trollope was the historian par excellence of the life that went on in ecclesiastical towns, so Bennett registers the currents of existence in the manufacturing centers, which to so many writers seem destitute of all romance.

In his fecundity, too, he resembles Trollope, and over 30 novels have been written by him, all of them marked in varying degrees by literary distinction. He has also written several plays that have attained success, most notable of which is "Milestones" (1912). During the World War he has written many articles bearing on widely differing phases of the conflict.