ABSTRACT
On Friday 27 October 1899, a day on which the London newspapers were full of reports on the second Boer War that had begun a little over a fortnight earlier, Arnold Bennett boarded a train in London bound for Torquay. He was escaping the city for a long weekend sojourn with his friend the dramatist-writer, Eden Phillpotts. This weekend, as shown elsewhere, was something of a watershed in Bennett’s practice, who recorded how his creativity started to develop when in the companionship of Phillpotts. This chapter aims to return to the long weekend to understand more fully its significance to the development of Arnold Bennett’s writing routine or what can be termed his ‘writingscape’. His writingscape was strongly determined by the affordances of his social world; the responsibilities of work, the demands of family and the expectations of friends meant that Bennett had to make opportunities for writing, squeezing it in and cutting it short according to the rhythms of his life.
