Rare Books and Manuscripts

The Gift of Charles T. Butler

"At noon precisely I finished my first novel," Arnold Bennett wrote in his journal for 15 May 1896. Thirty-five years later, at the time of his death, the noted British author had written nearly one hundred works, including novels, travel narratives, plays, essays, reviews, and a journal. Thanks to Charles T. Butler, a generous benefactor of Penn State Hazleton and of Rare Books and Manuscripts, part of Bennett's literary canon, including books and manuscripts, is available for research in the Special Collections Library of the University Libraries, in addition to another collection of Arnold Bennett's letters and literary manuscripts. Mr. Butler, whose father, Dr. La Fayette Butler, assembled the materials, gave the collection to the University Libraries in 1982.

Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) was a versatile writer, a lifelong book reviewer, journalist, playwright, travel writer, and occasional watercolorist. But his true gift was fiction. Functioning brilliantly as a premier realist, Bennett wrote works such as Buried Alive and The Card, which were still being made into films years after his death. In his best work, he created a series of novels and tales dealing with people in the five towns of his native Staffordshire, England's "black country," where the chimneys of the pottery factories churned smoke into the air for generations. His finest writing is to be found in The Old Wives' Tale (1908) and Clayhanger (1910).

Other excellent novels or stories appeared from time to time, but much of his work functioned on a commercial level for which he made no apologies, merely stating that he was "not an author but a writing man." Bennett's work is not exactly forgotten, but he had the misfortune of being bested by modernity, and he was somewhat unjustly set up as an opponent to art by Virginia Woolf in her anti-realist essay, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (1924). A realist he was, but he appreciated James Joyce and likened reading Ulysses to the experience of a general who just barely contains a revolution.

He was shy and affected with a stammer. He had a lifelong sense that money counted, and he counted every penny. Rare Books and Manuscripts' Arnold Bennett collection contains his own history of his articles purchased throughout his life, with the prices realized for each piece. He at times wrote over half a million words a year. None of these commercial works was completely bad; some were indeed pedestrian, but he always worked conscientiously. This collection in its many volumes represents a tireless writer, never less than skillful, and on a few occasions much more than that.

In addition to his printed work (including special signed, limited editions), the collection contains much material that is unique, including six watercolors—among the few existing works in that medium by Bennett. Of special literary significance is the author's correspondence with his agent, J. B. Pinker, who was a friend of D. H. Lawrence, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and many other notable writers. This voluminous file contains over eight thousand pages of correspondence written between 1903 and 1930. Bennett's personal file of letters to and from his publisher, G. H. Doran, the draft of the novel Lord Raingo (written in minuscule script) galleys of other works, and a ledger in which Bennett recorded his personal bibliography and record of receipts over much of his career are also included. The manuscript of the play Flora, a libretto for Anthony and Cleopatra, and several hundred books, articles, and works by and about the author complete a collection acclaimed by scholars and researchers as the finest on Bennett outside the British Isles. In all, there are over two hundred items in the collection, and perhaps ten thousand pages of correspondence and manuscripts.

Bennett has been compared to Hardy and to Charlotte Brontë, not for the facile nature of his popular writing but for the harshly observed works he wrote on the English midlands, an area he can claim as his own creation. Staffordshire was his Dorset, and its shopkeepers and potters live out their lives in humdrum fashion, but Bennett transforms their near-wretched lives in ways unfailingly of interest to the reader. Bennett even at his best is wary of sentiment, but his convincing and truthful characterizations, told in well-constructed tales, are all he needs. Whether he will ever have a revival is questionable, but anyone who reads The Old Wives' Tale or his late novel Riceyman Steps will not forget the deceptively simple chronicle of the long life and eventual death of two sisters or the compelling cupidity of a miserly bookseller.

The collection has been used by distinguished Penn State professors Stanley Weintraub and the late Warren Smith, and by Kinley Roby, whose Penn State doctoral dissertation on Bennett was later published by the Louisiana State University Press as A Writer at War: Arnold Bennett, 1914-1918.

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