Aesthetics for Everyman: Arnold Bennett’s Evening Standard Columns

Abstract

When Lord Beaverbrook bought the Evening Standard in 1923, Arnold Bennett was quick to write congratulating him and offering his advice. Bennett’s assertion that the Standard is ‘the only evening paper that appeals even a little to educated people, and it ought to be made to appeal a great deal more to them than it does’ was the opinion of a successful journalist.¹ That same year Bennett, the successful novelist, acknowledged the commercial viability of the paper in his Riceyman Steps, when he has the Earlforwards’s servant, Elsie, fail to buy a copy: ‘ “I couldn’t get no paper, ’m” ’, Elsie explained ‘ “ . . . it isn’t the Evening Standard – it’s the Star. They were all sold out, ’m” ’.² Beaverbrook, for his part, welcomed Bennett’s enthusiastic interest in his new venture. The two men’s friendship had grown steadily since May 1918 when Beaverbrook appointed Bennett Director of British Propaganda in France. Bennett believed that his powerful friend should now use his money to create a paper able to appeal to, and influence the opinion of, a wide readership:

I should have that whole paper well written […] Books, pictures, theatres and music are none of them well done at present. There is a great interest springing up in architecture, but I don’t know any London paper that attempts to touch it.

I don’t think itmatters […] what your policy is, if only it is adhered to and is brilliantly explained. I can see a Standard that every welleducated person would have to read, if only for pleasure, but it is not the present Standard.³