“She would have liked to say something about love and economy…” – Dorothy Whipple Takes on Arnold Bennett

Dress pattern from 1930, 

from the endpapers of Persephone Books' edition of High Wages

“Everything was covered in 1913; it was a discreet age” observes Jane Carter, the intrepid heroine of Dorothy Whipple’s lively and nimble novel High Wages (1930), set in a dress and drapery shop in Tidsley, a fictional town of the British Midlands. This early realist work by Whipple (1893-1966) seeks to uncover the age a bit, particularly with regard to the lives of young working women in the crucible of a small town setting where classes must inevitably intersect.

When we meet 17-year-old Jane it is 1912, and she has just spotted a notice in the window of Chadwick’s haberdashery. The job, as a live-in sales girl, offers a chance at independence and escape from a suffocating home. In Whipple’s rags-to-better-rags story, spanning ten years that form an understated parenthesis around World War I, Jane’s ingenuity, attunement to innovation and fundamental sense of justice take her from shop-girl drudgery to successful small business owner. Along the way, Jane must deal with an exploitative employer, leering London vendors, snooty upper crust matrons and the scions of their families, who assume women of Jane’s station exist solely for their amusement. Jane’s chief companions along this voyage include the faithful and enamored Wilfrid, a poet and worker at the free library; Jane’s dull, shop-girl roommate Maggie, who assumes Wilfrid to be her own boyfriend; the Chadwick’s poor cleaning girl, Lily; Noel, a wealthy young man who keeps crossing increasingly entwining paths with Jane; and a lonely but jovial client, Mrs. Briggs, who herself has crossed from the lower class to the upper by way of marriage and who bankrolls Jane’s business and takes her on a lark to Blackpool - a welcome breath of air and light in this claustrophobic novel. I don't think I'm giving too much away here; I found High Wages’ chief interest to lie outside of its somewhat conventional plot. 

One might imagine an edition of the novel illustrated with the pieces of clothing that parade through it as though on an invisible catwalk, but Whipple is even more attuned to the businessof fashion. She positions her work at the cusp of a small revolution in capitalist mercantilism, which was just beginning to place a high value on marketing. For clothiers, this meant attention to window displays and interior aesthetics as well as the necessity of adapting to the new phenomenon of ready-mades. For customers, such changes spurred the development of modern consumerism. Some of Whipple’s keenest observations limn the manner in which her provincial customers, whose days rarely offer more than household chores, card games and gossip, needlessly buy fashionable attire in order to fill the vacuum of their lives, a prescient exploration of a world in which material goods and desire were becoming increasingly and deliberately entangled.

Much of High Wages is devoted to uncovering the social and economic lives of such provincial women. As a child Jane “often wished the front of a row of houses would fall down and allow her to see what was going on in all the rooms at once,” and her abiding interest in others provides intimate glimpses into these conditions. Though she manages to bob up and down across class lines, her sympathies clearly lie with the downtrodden. She essentially rescues Mrs. Briggs from domestic isolation and the condescension with which those born into the upper-class treat this interloper. Jane’s generosity of spirit and sensitivity to human weakness extends even with those incapable or unwilling to accept it, such as when she tries to assuage Maggie, blindly convinced Jane is trying to steal away Wilfrid, and in scenes with Lily, who fairly worships Jane but is unable to leave an abusive relationship with a drunk. Even Jane’s mounting intolerance of Tidsley’s insularity (“You were so known. If, in absence of mind, you walked in to a lamp-post, the fishmonger knew”) is tempered by an affection for such “an ugly place, a small place, a dirty place,” which happens to be home: “it also meant a great deal to her. She knew it in all its aspects.” The indignities Jane faces in such an environment, though, accumulate into an advocacy for herself and the women around her, leading her to rebel against class injustices, patriarchal attitudes, and - in a transgressive relationship – even marriage, a confining institution in which she sees unhappy people remaining simply because “its’s so hideous getting out.”

Whipple pulls off a remarkable balancing act between the sensitivity she expresses through Jane and the critical eye she casts about her. She can bring a devastating, nearly Caroline Blackwood level of acerbic humor to her descriptions of her small town, small-minded characters: 

Mr. and Mrs. Chadwick went to church on Sunday morning; Mr. Chadwick in his morning-coat, his two scallops of hair showing like the wings of a bird that had got imprisoned under his bowler hat; Mrs. Chadwick in a toque like a humble relation of Mrs. Greenwood’s; she carried before her a round muff like a hedgehog, and another strip of hedgehog bristled round her flat, creased face.

Maggie flounced along in a frock printed all over with large flowers; she looked like something upholstered, and ate caramels without pause.

Customers were often strange creatures; so incredibly confidential. Miss Parsons, for instance, disclosing her life’s sorrow – the hairs on her legs. She had refused an offer of marriage because of these hispid limbs. All her life she was condemned to virginity because of them. Rather prim, thought Jane. She wondered if Guy de Maupassant would have made a tale out of it. A woman resisting temptation with inexplicable virtue; the reasons to be revealed in the last line with dramatic effect: ‘Ses jambes étaient couvertes de poils.’

One of the most surprising aspects of High Wagesis the degree to which it engages another Midlands author, Arnold Bennett, to whose work Whipple’s novel could be considered a companion volume. Bennett is everywhere in High Wages. Early in the book, Jane is seen reading The Old Wives’ Tale, and Whipple even names a minor character after Bennett. Bennett shows up again in the architectural conception of Chadwick’s shop, which closely echoes that of the shop in The Old Wives’ Tale, and in Jane’s observations on the industry of the area. A description of a train trip Jane takes to Manchester could have come right out of Anne of the Five Towns:

She could see the occupants of the first-class carriages playing cards, or fallen into unlovely sleep. They did well to avert their eyes from the landscape they had made. They had made it; but they could not, like God, look and see that it was good. Monstrous slag-heaps, like ranges in a burnt-out hell; stretches of waste land rubbed bare into the gritty earth; parallel rows of back-to-back dwellings; great blocks of mill buildings, the chimneys belching smoke as thick and black as eternal night itself; upstanding skeletons of wheels and pulleys. Mills and mines; mills and mines all the way to Manchester, and the brick, the stone, the grass, the very air deadened down to a general drab by the insidious filter of soot…But Jane, Lancashire born and bred, did not find it depressing. It was no feeble, trickling ugliness, but a strong, salient hideousness that was almost exhilarating.

Taking Bennett’s similarly conflictual expressions of distaste and affection for the Midlands, Whipple fleshes them out in a literary treatment that seems both homage and riposte. At one low point, Jane adopts Bennett’s advice to read Marcus Aurelius, whose aphorisms fall significantly short of addressing the array of problems she faces, and Whipple’s novel suggests that while the author admired Bennett’s work, she may also have seen it as skirting the very real issues that working women in the region faced. 

I found a great deal more to recommend High Wages, and I’ll just note a few of these. For one thing, there’s a huge amount of literature in this novel. In the first chapters, Jane is smitten by the word when Wilfrid recites a poem. She readily accepts his offer to supply her with books, devouring Bennett of course, but also works by H. G. Wells, Algernon Swinburne, John Galsworthy and others of the age. She reads Shakespeare, Jane Austen’s Emmaand Marguerite Audoux’s “perfect thing” Marie Claire (a book which, not coincidentally, was first published in English with an introduction by Bennett). Jane also references the literary tastes of her well-to-do clients, who rarely aspire higher than Marie Corelli or fashion magazines. 

The language in High Wages is also tremendously entertaining (at least to a Yank reader). An automobile is a “mangle.” Home-made cakes at a party include “rock-buns, jumbles, parkin.” Jane refers to a large nose as having “bubukles and welks.”  A woman’s hat is a  “fascinator” (a term new to me but apparently still in use). Some memorable nomenclature also comes from the Cockney accent of Lily, who calls Jane’s perfume “odyclone,” and from Jane’s clients: “Mrs. Thomas called underclothes ‘neathies.’ ‘Neathies!’ said Jane. ‘Lord!’” 

While High Wages is primarily focused on women, commerce and provincialism, it’s also very much concerned with World War I and its aftermath. Whipple shows us Tidsley’s young men departing for battle, the women volunteering at local hospitals, hints of deprivation. Mrs. Chadwick, for example, sneaks into the shop-girls’ butter allocations, using a razor blade to pare off slices to add flavor to her own insipid soups. Wilfrid, who reluctantly goes off to war and returns not quite the same person, is almost emblematic of the whole conflict, and Jane’s own attitude towards the war is summed up in a violent thought she has that the only way to stop the killing “was for more men, for every man to go out and kill.” Ultimately, the war lends High Wages a dark cast; despite the work’s humor and sparkle, it is not particularly optimistic. 

But small matter – the engaging High Wages serves as a great introduction to yet another member of that remarkable group of terrific mid-century female British comic writers. Kudos to Persephone Books for bringing it back into circulation. 


I learned of the Persephone Readathon at the Dwell in Possibility blog just after finishing High Wages; please check out posts on other Persephone Press books appearing there now through September 30, 2018

Jean Giono and Arnold Bennett, Together at Last: Two Group Reading Announcements

I'm happy to announce two upcoming group reading events and hope that others will join in for one or both.


First, in the final week of May, Dorian of the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau blog and I will co-host a group read of Jean Giono's short novel, Hill (or Colline, for those of you who might want to read it in the original French). I've been eager to return to Giono, and thus jumped at Dorian's suggestion that we read this together. Hill has just been issued in English translation by New York Review Books, and as it's only about 100 pages long, you know you can read it by the week of May 24-31, when we'll start posting commentaries.

Second, and also stemming from a suggestion by Dorian late last year that followed on my year-end appreciation of two Arnold Bennet novels I'd read, we will take up Bennett's best-known work, The Old Wives' Tale, in late July. This one's some 600 pages longer than Hill, but if it's anything like the Bennett books I read last year, it promises to be a highly amusing ride. We'll announce a specific date as we get closer to July. 

If you're interested in joining for either or both of these group reads, please let us know!

Arnold Bennett: Anna of the Five Towns

The Potteries (source: www.thepotteries.org)

What a waste not to have read Arnold Bennett until now. Whatever ill-informed impression I might have had concerning the writer vanished in reading Anna of the Five Towns (1902), the first of Bennett’s several novels set in his home region of the Potteries, that string of North Midlands towns (six actually, but Bennett thought five a more poetic number) that fill a valley famous as the center of Britain’s ceramics industry.

The story is ostensibly simple. Anna Tellwright, a schoolteacher who shares a home with her young sister Agnes and miserly father Ephraim, is wooed by a fellow teacher, Henry Mynors, at around the same time her father bequeaths to her a surprising fortune built on shrewd investment in and exploitation of the region’s numerous pottery works.  Maintenance of the fortune involves calling a debt on a factory teetering on the abyss, complicating Anna’s moral sentiments as well as those she has for Willie Price, humble son of the factory’s owner. A brief respite from these pressures is provided to Anna by a fortnight’s sojourn on the Isle of Man, in a chapter that is itself an island surrounded by Bennett’s affectionate but critical portrait of life in the Potteries.

Like many novels of its time, Anna of the Five Towns thematically addresses the social, economic and moral disposition of its society and in particular the limited opportunities for women. The novel is unusually attuned to economics, explicitly questioning the mechanics of capitalism, “This mysterious begetting of money by money.” Anna, as the troubled, conscientious daughter of a profiteer, serves as a counterweight to such monetary obsessions: “the arrival of money out of space, unearned, unasked, was a disturbing experience, affecting her as a conjuring trick affects a child.” Though heir to vast wealth, Anna can use it only as dictated by her father, who’s comfortable with her dunning his debtors but parsimonious in allowing her money even for household expenses. Frustration at her status appears in her awareness of Henry Mynors’ relative freedoms: “She envied every man…men were not fettered like women.” A marriage to Mynors promises a partial way out, but at an expense: “Anna would marry into freedom, but Agnes would remain the serf. Anna had noticed that in families the youngest, petted in childhood, was often sacrificed in maturity.”

Though the language used to relate Anna’s efforts to escape her fate is often tranquil, almost ambling, the efforts themselves have a wild, reckless edge. At a religious revival, Anna cannot commit to the “conversion” experience expected by those around her. Rather, in constant doubt as to how she, a teacher, could be “allowed to have charge of a class of immortal souls,” she remains suspended in religious skepticism. The subject of conversion is quietly and deliberately abandoned. Even more audaciously, Anna involves herself in a hazardous deception amounting to fraud. The capacity to shock also appears in the novel’s dark turn at the end, when the narrator, with a fiercely indignant frankness, pillories the human agents within the machinery of economic ruination.

Anna of the Five Towns feels slightly askew in relation to other realist novels of its time. It’s as though Bennett has refused to let go of the dominant form of the late 19^th century novel and, where others had begun to abandon the structure for more modern constructions, instead simply moved his modern sensibilities into the novel’s old Victorian home. For this reason, the narrative - and the unspoken thoughts of Anna, straining against the limits of her society - feel slightly wrong-sized, like Lewis Carroll’s Alice grown too big for the house. Something is odd, off, shifted.

This is apparent in the narrative’s complicated relationship with the materiality of Victorian culture, most notably in a remarkable scene when Henry Mynors first accompanies Anna to the Tellwright home, where they find themselves alone in the kitchen. The romantic moment the reader expects is interrupted by the omniscient narrator’s almost comically plopping an old oak dresser into the scene, describing it at length then moving onto other objects (“a catalogue of furniture,” the narrator calls it, just as the reader is thinking the same thing). The dollhouse-like setting inspires Mynors to call the kitchen “the nicest room I know,” and then to add (sly Bennett), “It wants only the mistress in a white apron to make it complete. Do you know, when I came in here the other night, and you were siting at the table there, I thought the place was like a picture.” Pictures and photographs figure throughout Anna of the Five Towns, as though to underscore the novelist’s self-conscious depiction of reality.

Another unusual element of Anna of the Five Towns is Bennett’s off-handed depiction, sometimes subtle, sometimes not, concerning the toxic Potteries environment. The narrator drops hints of wilted flowers, the courage of wearing white amid so much soot, the fires and choking pollution from the factories. As Anna gazes out the window towards “clear stretches of sky” with “thick-studded clusters of stars brightly winking,” below her, across the fields

…long fires of burning ironstone glowed with all the strange colours of decadence. The entire landscape was illuminated and transformed by these unique pyrotechnics of labour atoning for its grime, and dull, weird sounds, as of the breathings and sighings of gigantic nocturnal creatures, filled the enchanted air. It was a romantic scene, a romantic summer night, but… 

This is one of the earliest novels I’ve read in which the environmental degradation of industry features prominently, though less as a subject in itself than as noisy background, adding to the novel’s off-kilter quality. The disconnect between setting and tone is apparent in the pleasantries and courtships that go on placidly, almost pastorally, among citizens enveloped in smoke.

Irony in Bennett takes many forms – one often wonders whether he is playfully pulling the reader’s leg – but it can be withering. When Henry Mynors shows Anna around “the banks,” where the reader learns in granular detail of the various stages of the ceramics manufacturing process, the narrator drops in elements of the social organization and working conditions of the factory:

The paintresses form the noblesse of the banks. Their task is a light one, demanding deftness first of all, they have delicate fingers, and enjoy a general reputation for beauty: the wages they earn may be estimated from their finery on Sundays. They come to business in cloth jackets, carry dinner in little satchels; in the shop they wear white aprons, and look startlingly neat and tidy. Across the benches over which they bend their coquettish heads gossip flies and returns like a shuttle; they are the source of a thousand intrigues, and one or other of them is continually getting married or omitting to get married. On the bank they constitute ‘the sex.’ An infinitesimal proportion of them, from among the branch know as ground-layers, die of lead-poisoning – a fact which adds pathos to their frivolous charm.

That last line might be Evelyn Waugh. Bennett’s subtlety is acute enough that a footnote to this passage in the edition I read appears to miss the laden irony of “infinitesimal” and suggests Bennett is being “a little sanguine” here about a local industry where lead-poisoning deaths exceeded a thousand over a two year period. But Bennett ends many passages with a similarly sarcastic flourish, usually aimed at an economic element in social relations.

These barbs are sharpest in the novel’s attacks on complacency regarding the human toll of capital and industry. Here is Bennett’s narrator describing the beginning of an inquest into the economically-driven suicide that rocks the town:

People were talking in groups on the broad steps in and in the vestibule. All knew of the calamity, and had received from it a new interest in life. The town was aroused as if from a lethargy. Consternation and eager curiosity were on every face. Those who arrived in ignorance of the event were informed of it in impressive tones, and with intense satisfaction to the informer; nothing of equal importance had happened in the society for decades.

There’s little to redeem such matters. The reader’s sympathies, run through the novel’s “good” main character, can’t entirely take hold. Anna, though better than the society around her, is inadequately perspicacious, too entrapped by social demands to escape them, with a timidity that keeps her enmeshed in the smoke and fiduciary concerns of the Five Towns. When even the heroine of the book is unable to surmount  “all the pretences by which society contrives to tolerate itself,” one is left with an almost cynical pessimism. Or rather, one might be, were it not for the charming, modern oddity of this novel, the richness with which it depicts its world, a generous, often piercing humor, and a discernible sense of an astute, playful writer having a great deal of fun without losing sight of what’s important. I’ll be reading more.