Episode in Room 222, The

Enoch Arnold Bennett was born on the 27th May 1867 in Hanley, one of the six towns that formed the Potteries and that later joined together to become Stoke-On-Trent. After passing entrance examinations for Cambridge University his solicitor father instead decided that he should work for him, unpaid, in his thriving office. In the evenings the young Bennett wrote or studied and one skill he developed was Pitman’s shorthand which gave him entrance to a position as a clerk at a solicitor’s office in London. From there followed various jobs but none seemed to be able to ignite his career as a full-time author. By 1903 he had moved to live in Paris; he was 35, unmarried and keen to settle into his new life. In 1908 he published his first remarkable novel; ‘Clayhanger’, that drew on his earlier life in the Potteries. A prolific writer he was able to deliver very fine works but also write many that were described as ‘potboilers’. Despite this disclaimer many were lapped up by an audience eager for his prose and helped turn him into the most financially successful author of the times. As the First World War drew to a close, he was appointed to run the Ministry of Information. During the 1920s he was reputedly the highest paid literary journalist in the land and continued to write novels, plays and short stories. Arnold Bennett died in his flat at Chiltern Court on the 27th March 1931, from typhoid after drinking water in France on his last holiday. He was 63.