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Abstract
Noting the increasing interest amongst business historians in the socio-cultural dimensions of business, this article presents a reading of Arnold Bennett's early twentieth-century novel Anna of the Five Towns. The purpose of the article is both to explore the evidential value of cultural representations, such as the novel, in relation to issues currently to the fore in business history, such as trust, and also to act as a means through which to examine some of the biases and assumptions present in the literature. Thus the article speaks also to issues of historiography.
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Lucy Newton for her criticisms and encouragement at a critical juncture. Further useful comments were provided by the referees for this journal, by participants in a workshop in Trust and Reputation, University of Reading, November 2003, by audience members at the Association of Business Historian's Annual Conference, University of Nottingham, June, 2004 and the audience at a seminar in the Department of History, University of Birmingham, March 2005.
Notes
1 Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit. For a refutation of Wiener's many critics see; Farnie, “The Wiener Thesis Vindicated.”
2 See, for example, Pearson, “Moral Hazard and the Assessment of Insurance Risk,” 1–35.
3 This analysis is not restricted to historical perspectives but is coming to the fore in a range of both academic and popular discourses around society and economics. See, most obviously, Fukuyama, Trust.
4 Boyce and Lepper, “Assessing Information Quality Theories,” 85–120.
5 Casson, “The Economics of Trust,” 105–124. For an empirical application of the postulates developed by Casson, see Popp, “Trust in an Industrial District,” 29–53.
6 Jeremy, for example, claims that if Casson is right that trust reduces transaction costs then ‘religious and ethnic minorities have non-economic network advantages which could translate into lower costs and swifter transactions.’ Jeremy, “Introduction,” 18. Elsewhere, however, Jeremy also notes that whilst ‘The inculcation of values appropriate to business, and the opportunity to enter additional networks and markets (church-related), suggest that Methodism could promote rather than hinder business success … probing individual careers and episodes with the approach of “dense description,” as pursued by Clifford Geertz and the social anthropologists, may be as far as historians can presently go.’ Jeremy, “Late Victorian and Edwardian Methodist Businessmen,” 79.
7 Bennett, Anna, 108. The edition used throughout is published by J.M. Dent, and as well as a scholarly introduction contains three very interesting pieces of journalism by Bennett (“The Potteries: A Sketch,” “Clay in the Hands of the Potter” and “My Religious Experience”), appendices respectively on people and places in the novel and their relation to historical characters and locations and its treatment of Methodism, and an essay on Bennett and his critics.
8 Preston, “Appendix 2.”
9 Indeed, the story can be mined from other angles of relevance to business history, including female investors, for example, and business and gender more generally; see Maltby and Rutterford, ‘“She Possessed her Own Fortune.’” This article in fact opens with a quotation from Anna.
10 There is of course a considerable literature on the intersections of economics, business and religion. See Jeremy, Religion, Business and Wealth, and Jeremy, Business and Religion in Britain.
11 Bennett, Anna, 50.
12 Ibid.
13 Wilson, British Business History, 50; Popp, Business Structure, 44.
14 Bennett, Anna, 49 and 65.
15 Ibid., 30.
16 Hanley Borough Rate Book, 1882.
17 Popp, Business Structure, 43.
18 Bennett, Anna, 35. Most of Chapter 8 of the novel, “On the Bank,” comprises a tour of Mynors' works, as good an introduction to a potbank of the time as any journalism or history. This gives a further sense of Mynors' business, his ‘works was acknowledged to be one of the best, of its size, in the district – a model, three-oven bank, and it must be remembered that of the hundreds of banks in the Five Towns the vast majority are small, like this; the large manufactory with its corp of jacket-men … is the exception. Mynors paid three hundred pounds a year in rent, and produced nearly three hundred pounds worth of work a week. He was his own manager, and there was only one jacket-man on the place, a clerk at eighteen shillings,’ 94–95.
19 Bennett, Anna, 107–108.
20 Ibid., 161.
21 Ibid., 163–164.
22 Casson, “An Economic Approach,” 30.
23 Ibid.
24 Bennett, Anna, 29–30 (emphases added). Anna's investments comprise amongst others: 500 £10 shares in Toft End Colliery and Brickworks (‘They paid ten per cent last year’), £10,200 of ordinary stock in North Staffordshire Railway Company, £8,500 consolidated stock in the Five Towns Waterworks Company Limited (‘That's a tit-bit lass’) and Norris's Brewery Limited, 600 ordinary £10 share (‘Twenty per cent … Twenty per cent regular’), p.29. It is interesting that whilst Ephraim's investments are concentrated in the local economy they are not in its staple manufacture.
25 Staber, “Social Embeddedness,” 148.
26 Bennett, Anna, 49–50.
27 Tellwright is certainly not above manipulating his position, see how he forces Mynors to agree to a rate of return of six per cent on Anna's investment. Mynors ‘was taken at a disadvantage. Mr Tellwright, with unscrupulous cleverness, had utilized the effect on Mynors of his daughter's presence to regain a position from which the younger man had definitely ousted him a few days before. Mynors was annoyed but he gave no sign of his annoyance. “Very well,” he said at length.’ Ibid., 66.
28 An important exception is Casson, who places considerable emphasis on leadership within regional business networks. See, “An Economic Approach.”
29 Bennett, Anna, 49. Tellwright was not alone in refusing to take Mynors' proposal on trust; subjective and objective assessments of reputation and virtue were, wherever possible used in conjunction. For this in bank lending see Newton, “Trust and Virtue in English Banking,” 177–199.
30 Hudson, The Genesis of Industrial Capital.
31 Wilson, British Business History, 52.
32 This was certainly a feature common to many failures in the nineteenth century, including some of the most celebrated. For the collapse of Overend, Gurney and Co. in 1866 see Cookson, “Quaker Networks,” 155–173.
33 The Pottery Gazette, 1890. For an earlier period see, Weatherill, “Capital and Credit in the Pottery Industry,” 243–258.
34 The Pottery Gazette, February 1893, 160. Edwin James Drew Bodley was the son of Edward Fisher Bodley, the father having commenced business in 1862. Stuart, People of the Potteries, 39.
35 The Pottery Gazette, January 1883, 62.
36 “An Unfair Advantage” was part of a collection of Potteries-set short stories first published in 1912.
37 Bennett, “An Unfair Advantage,” 264–265.
38 Ibid., 271. As we already know, Peake stands to lose £350. There are very strong parallels here between Bennett's language and that used by the Pottery Gazette to report the failure of Messrs. Fenton and Sons of Hanley in 1899, the ‘chief point of interest is the amount of the firm's indebtedness to the bank. One would say that there are few manufacturers in the district with persuasive powers sufficient to get an overdraft of nearly thirty thousand pounds from their bank manager – a class of beings more ready to strain at gnats than to swallow camels.’ The Pottery Gazette, March 1899, 329. Complaints about ‘ruinous’ trade also abounded in the trade press at the time when the story is set. Bennett clearly remained a student of the industry after he left for London. Indeed, he returned to the Potteries several times in order to conduct research specifically for Anna.
39 Pearson, “Moral Hazard,” 2.
40 Sabel and Zeitlin, “Historical Alternatives to Mass Production,” 154.
41 Casson, “An Economic Approach,” 29.
42 The relationship between Peake and Blackhurst is one in which reputation and respect, largely on the basis of business, is important, Peake telling Blackhurst that ‘if there's anyone in Bursley that I should have liked to oblige, it's you. We've had business dealings, you and me, for many years now, and I fancy we know one another. I've the highest respect for you, and if you'll excuse me saying so, I think you've some respect for me.’ Bennett, “An Unfair Advantage,” 273.
43 Jeremy notes how ‘pious mid-Victorians adopted systematic alms giving in proportion to their means and income. Giving was to be careful, regular, calculated, treated with the same prudent respect as commercial accounts. Indeed, the Charity Organisation Society warned against indiscriminate and impetuous beneficence. Among the Wesleyans spontaneous giving and the publicising of donations were familiar before the 1890s.’ Jeremy, “Late Victorian and Edwardian Methodist Businessmen,” 80.
44 Bennett, “An Unfair Advantage,” 274. Bennett's journal (24 Dec. 1899) recounts the following tale from the Potteries. ‘Thomas Arrowsmith called on John Beardmore for a subscription to the Burslem Wesleyan Chapel. Beardmore declined to contribute, and explained how he was losing money on all hands and had in fact had a very hard year. He went to such lengths of pessimism that Arrowsmith at last interrupted. “If things are so bad as that, Mr Beardmore,” he said, “we'll have a word of prayer,” and without an instant's hesitation he fell on his knees. Beardmore began to stamp up and down the room. “None o' that nonsense,” he shouted. “None o' that nonsense. Here's half sovereign for ye”.’ Swinnerton, ed., Arnold Bennett: The Journals, 63.
45 It is worth noting the very considerable parallels between Mynors' position and role within the Chapel and those of confectionery manufacturer John Makintosh, explored by Jeremy. In both fact and fiction we find emphasis on institutions and activities, such as Sunday School and a constant round of revivals, bazaars and other fund-raising events. Nonetheless, that does not mean we need to uncritically accept Jeremy's claim that ‘there are reasons for assuming that [Makintosh's] chapel background was causatively linked to his business behaviour at some points.’ Jeremy, “Chapel in a Business Career,” 102.
46 In this there is, undeniably, much of Bennett's personal attitude to the religion into which he was born. He wrote; ‘I will not say that I flouted the dogma of the Wesleyan Methodist sect. I suppose that I passively accepted it. But my acceptance of it had no emotional quality.’ Bennett, “My Religious Experience,” 210.
47 Bennett paints Ephraim as once very active in the cause, but adds that even then ‘he did these things as routine, without skill and without enthusiasm, because they gave him an unassailable position within the central group of the society. He was not, in fact, much smitten with either the doctrinal or spiritual side of Methodism. His chief interest lay in [its] fiscal schemes of organization.’ Bennett, Anna, 20.
48 Ibid., 154.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid., 154 and 156.
51 Anderson argues that it is possible to discern four genres of public reactions to suicide in the nineteenth century: the sad, the wicked, the strange and the comic. She argues that the public had been ‘continually invited to see those who took their own lives as fellow human beings and to feel for them “loving not loathing” … In real life, as in fiction, the response most commonly expected to suicide was evidently pity … the sad suicide was by far the most common.’ Anderson, Suicide, 214–216. It is argued that Titus Price's suicide fell into the sad genre.
52 Bennett, Anna, 157. Methodism seems to have been relatively uncensorious with regard to suicide, for example its ministers ‘had been freed from the burial rubric as early as 1786’. Anderson, Suicide, 276.
53 Ibid., 158.
54 Ibid., 70. As Margaret Drabble notes in her biography of Bennett ‘the suicide of Titus Price is clearly based on real local events; in this case, on an amalgam of three deaths which must have been widely discussed’. These were the suicides of Henry Wilkinson, headmaster of Swan Bank Wesleyan Day School in Burslem, on 26 June 1878, of Sampson Bennett, grocer and cousin to Bennett's father, on 13 December 1889 and finally of Councillor A.J. Wilkinson on 12 May 1891; Drabble, Arnold Bennett, 74. An inquest into the suicide of Henry Wilkinson noted that the deceased, who had at one time been confined in a mental asylum, was ‘much annoyed at being informed a short-time ago by the managers of the school that he must either resign or have more assistance. A settled conviction that he would be discharged and disgrace his family settled upon him’. The jury returned a verdict of ‘Suicide during a state of temporary insanity.’ Evening Sentinel, 3 July 1878, 3. Initial reports of the suicide of Sampson Bennett averred that there was ‘no motive assigned for the rash act’, Evening Sentinel, 14 December 1889, 3. However, a report of the inquest noted that it ‘appeared that the deceased has been unwell for some months, and the jury found that he committed suicide while of unsound mind, and also passed a vote of condolence with the family in their deep sorrow, which was supported by the Coroner.’ Evening Sentinel, 17 December 1889, 3. Anderson notes that such sympathetic treatment of the families of suicides, at a time when the act was still illegal, was frequently to be found amongst nineteenth-century juries.
55 Periodization may be significant here, for Jeremy notes that whilst ‘Evangelical men in business … in the early Victorian era accepted [a] moral interpretation of economic behaviour … The evangelicals lost their battle after the 1860s … By the 1890s [approximately the date at which Anna was set] there was a self-evident gap between religion and ethics, on one side, and economics and business, on the other.’ Jeremy, “Introduction,” 21.
56 Bennett, Anna, 50.
57 Sabel and Zeitlin, ‘Historical Alternatives to Mass Production’; Fukuyama, Trust.
58 Harrison, “Industrial Districts,” 478. For a full critique of the social embeddedness concept in the context of the Potteries, see Popp, Business Structure.
59 Carnevali, ‘“Malefactors and Honourable Men,”’ 206–207.
60 Anderson lends support to the sense that the effect striven for by Bennett was far from one of ‘sensation’. She notes, for example, that many late nineteenth-century suicides involved in financial misfortunes ‘believed that they would never succeed in collecting the monies due to them and so would be “ruined” – a foreboding which seems to have been almost as frequent in real life as in fiction.’ Anderson, Suicide, 184.
61 Anderson also attests directly to Bennett's essential truthfulness, and in a context related to suicide, noting how both his (in a short story entitled “The Pretty Lady”) and Dickens' (Bleak House) portrayals of coroners' inquests ‘surely demonstrates how accurately each author could convey the texture of collective experience’. Anderson, Suicide, 259. It is interesting to note the following entry from Bennett's journal, dated 18 April 1899. ‘Today I sat on a Coroner's Jury at Fulham and heard four cases, including one suicide through religious mania. I was struck by several things: the decency of people in general; the commonsense and highly-trained skill of the coroner; the dramatic quality of sober facts. In two instances the deceased persons had died from causes absolutely unconnected with the sober symptoms. Thus a woman who had brought on a miscarriage and died, had died from heart disease; the sinister influence of the ugliness amidst which the lower classes carry on their lives; the enormous (as it were) underground activity of the various charitable and philanthropic agencies which spread themselves like a network over London. It would seem that nothing could happen, among a certain class of society, without the cognizance of some philanthropic agency; the dullness and conscientiousness of a jury; the absolute thoroughness with which suspicious deaths are inquired into.’ Swinnerton, ed., Arnold Bennett: The Journals, 58.
62 Hepburn, ed., Letters Vol. 2, 90; Flower, ed., Journals, Vol. 1, 46–47.
63 Thus Bennett wrote to his friend Sturt on 15 February 1900: ‘But I am absorbed in the Potteries just now: a great place, sir, and full of plots. My father's reminiscences have livened me up considerably.’ Hepburn, ed., Letters, 130.
64 Bennett in fact described Boulton as ‘a lone and wonderful genius’. William Henry Boulton, Tertia Bennett's fiancé was drowned on a family holiday in Barmouth. Stuart, People of the Potteries, 42.
65 Preston, “Appendix 2,” 241.
66 For further detail of correspondences between Bennett's fiction and the real world of the Potteries, see Preston, “Appendix 1,” 232–238: ‘The identification of Dean with Mynors is, however, far from certain. Bennett, in “Clay in the Hands of the Potter”, describes how he ‘never felt any curiosity concerning the great staple industry … until I was twenty-nine or thirty, when I wanted some information about it for a novel [Anna] … when at last I did put myself to the trouble of visiting and comprehending a modern manufactory – it belonged to one of my uncles, and he was very proud of his new machinery – the gateway of romance was opened to me’ (203). Both Edmund Leigh, of the firm Burgess and Leigh, and Ezra Bourne have been suggested as Bennett's potting uncle.
67 These claims may not do too much violence to Bennett's intentions. Thus in a letter to his friend George Sturt, written during the period in which Bennett was working on early drafts of Anna, Bennett argued that ‘I have known all along that a novel must have a purpose; to look at the matter from another side, it must “expose” some aspect of existence in which the author is deeply interested. But it mustn't be didactic – at least it must only teach in the same way as experience teaches.’ Letter to George Sturt, dated 31 January 1897 in Hepburn, ed., Letters, 75.
68 Bennett, Anna, 89.
69 Preston, “Introduction,” xxxvi.
70 See, in particular, Thompson, Gentrification and the Enterprise Culture.
71 Casson, “An Economic Approach,” 20–21.
72 Bennett, Anna, 157.