ABSTRACT
‘The suburbs’, asserts a character in Arnold Bennett's first novel, A Man From the North (1898), ‘even Walham Green and Fulham, are full of interest for those who can see it’. He invites the novel's hero – and, by implication, the reader – to look at the average surburban street. Though the roofs form ‘two horrible, converging straight lines … beneath there is character, individuality enough to make the greatest book ever written’. One should look at the varying indications supplied by bad furniture seen through curtained windows, observe the fluttering blind,
examine the enervated figures of women reclining amidst flowerpots on narrow balconies.… In all these things there is character and matter of interest, – truth waiting to be expounded. How many houses are there in Carteret Street? Say eighty. Eighty theatres of love, hate, greed, tyranny, endeavour; eighty separate dramas always unfolding, intertwining, ending, beginning – … Why … there is more character within a hundred yards of this chair than a hundred Balzacs could analyse in a hundred years. 1
