ABSTRACT
A passage in Arnold Bennett’s journal for 15 June 1896 describes the aged male inmates of the Fulham Road workhouse. ‘Strange that the faces of most of them afford no vindication of the manner of their downfall to pauperdom! I looked in vain for general traces either of physical excess or of moral weakness’ (1932, I, p. 10). Armed with the mandate of naturalism, Bennett looks for evidence of degeneracy, but cannot find any. The faces shows signs of wear and tear, not monstrosity. Bennett’s fiction was to avoid naturalism by confining itself to wear and tear, by not seeking any ‘vindication’ of biomedical theory. This chapter will describe his achievement, and relate it to the emergence of a new fictional territory, far removed from the Fulham Road, about which he had much to say: the suburb.
