Early Life
Bennett was born in a modest house in Hanley in the Potteries district of Staffordshire. Hanley is one of a conurbation of six towns which were joined together at the beginning of the 20th century as Stoke-on-Trent. Enoch Bennett, his father, qualified as a solicitor in 1876, and the family moved to a larger house between Hanley and Burslem. Bennett was educated locally in Newcastle-under-Lyme.
Bennett was employed by his father but the working relationship failed. Bennett found himself doing jobs such as rent-collecting which were uncongenial. He also resented the low pay; it is no accident that the theme of parental miserliness is important in his novels. In his spare time he was able to do a little journalism, but his breakthrough as a writer came after he had moved from the Potteries. At the age of 21, he left his father's practice and went to London as a solicitor's clerk.
Read more about this topic: Arnold Bennett
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“We passed the Children’s Bureau bill calculated to prevent children from being employed too early in factories.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit,—not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)