Abstract
In Arnold Bennett’s first novel, A Man from the North, published in 1898, the sardonic Mr Aked tells the hero, Richard Larch, an aspiring young writer very like Bennett himself, that a novelist may find all the drama he needs in the life and character of any single London street. Twenty-five years later, in Riceyman Steps, Bennett fully realised the aesthetic potential of a dreary Clerkenwell square. But Mr Aked’s advice was as much descriptive of a current mode as prescriptive of a future fiction, for the London street, usually of a dreary kind, was already well established in the 1890s as an appropriate setting for realistic narrative. Arthur Morrison had followed up his Tales of Mean Streets (1895) with A Child of the Jago (1896), a grim report on violence in an East End slum block. Somerset Maugham began his career as storyteller with Liza of Lambeth (1897), the action of which, except for one scene, transpires entirely on and in a rowdy Vere Street, ‘leading out of Westminster Bridge Road’. Richard Whiteing’s No. 5 John Street, which appeared a year after A Man from the North, has been virtually forgotten, apart from an occasional mention alongside the Morrison and the Maugham in histories of English realism.1 Yet it still, I believe, deserves attention not only as one slum-street novel among others, but also as a late-Victorian social and political satire of broader import, remarkable for its own qualities of intelligence, originality and wit.
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Notes
Whiteing is discussed briefly, with some inaccuracies, in William C. Frierson, L’Influence du naturalisme français sur les romaniciers anglais de 1885 à 1900 (Paris: Giard, 1925) pp. 218–27, and again (with errors uncorrected) in Frierson, The English Novel in Transition, 1885–1940 ( Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1942 ) pp. 93–8. Holbrook Jackson mentions him in The Eighteen Nineties (1913: repr. London: Pelican Books, 1939) p. 36: ‘Richard Whiteing, veteran journalist, but unknown to the public by name, suddenly became something like famous by the publication of No. 5 John Street, in the last year of the decade.’ I have found no recent references to Whiteing.
Richard Whiteing, The Island, or An Adventure of a Person of Quality (London: Longman, 1888), reissued with new subtitle (The Adventures of a Person of Quality), two new chapters and some other changes ‘to make it more truly of its time’ (with American spellings) (New York: Century, 1899). Citations to The Island throughout this chapter are from the 1899 edition.
W. E. Henley, ‘Liza’, London Types (London: Heinemann, 1898 ). The volume contains thirteen of Henley’s ‘quatorzains’, each boldly illustrated in colour by William Nicholson.
For a succinct review of the Greenwich Observatory affair, see Eloise Knapp Hay, The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1963) pp. 220–5. The fictional anarchists of the 1890s scarcely resembled Henry James’s sensitive Hyacinth Robinson in The Princess Casamassima (1886), nor the scholarly theorist Prince Kropotkin in real life of the time.
Donald D. Stone distinguishes relevantly between French ‘realism’ and the English sort, where the novelist evinces more active sympathy with his protagonists. See his essay ‘The Art of Arnold Bennett’, Robert Kiely (ed.), Modernism Reconsidered (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1983) pp. 17–45.
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© 1989 John Clubbe and Jerome Meckier
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Buckley, J.H. (1989). The View from John Street: Richard Whiteing’s Social Realism. In: Clubbe, J., Meckier, J. (eds) Victorian Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09553-7_6
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