Potted Histories

Category: literature

  • English as She is Sometimes Written

    Alfred James Caddie was born in Norbury, Derbyshire, but by 1895 he was the chief librarian of the Stoke-on-Trent Free Libraries, from which position he offered up this short amusing essay on the bizarre requests that members of the public sometimes made for reading matter.

    ‘It is said, that a short time ago one of those simpletons who sometimes bother the librarians of our Free Libraries made the following request: ” I don’t recollect the title of the book I want, but there was a remarkable passage in the last chapter which I should recollect if I saw it again.” Amusing as this was, it is not the only laughable request a librarian meets with. Most days peculiar customers are to be met with, who get the names of authors jumbled up in an unrecognisable mass in their efforts to convince us that they are thoroughly au fait with current literature. Only a few days ago a customer came along with the order to supply him with one of “Rye Arrocks ” books. Now not being certain whether any author had at some remote period sported so poetic a name, I questioned the young fellow as to which he thought was the best of Rye Arrocks works, and was very much astonished to hear that “King Solomon’s Mines” was about his best. How that young man managed to convert Mr Rider Haggard’s well-known name to “Rye Arrocks” it is hard to understand. But there, he did not stand alone for long, no; we soon had a brace of him, the request being for one of “Rider Haddock’s.” Whether Finnon or otherwise was not stated.

    Some people seem to have a very hazy notion as to what is, and what is not, a novel; at least so it struck me when a young lady came for a book by Miss Braddon, “as her father would not allow her to read any more novels ” she added! Varied as are the requests we constantly meet with it is not often that we get called upon to supply intoxicating drinks, but once upon a time, it was a busy Saturday night, and everybody was laying in their store of reading for the week end, in came a sturdy little chap somewhere about twelve years of age, and in a voice choking with the remains of a stick of peppermint rock demanded ” two o’Scotch.” The rest of the customers looked round horror struck, and seemed quite upset, until I found out that this innocent little beggar only wanted two of Sir Walter Scott’s works.

    In sending boys or girls to change their books borrowers frequently send a note, which is sometimes written on a dirty greasy bit of paper in a style that puzzles one very much to read. A piece torn from the paper in which the week’s bacon or candle has been wrapped in seems to be a popular and fashionable style of stationery for Saturday evenings, but this we don’t at all mind; our difficulties are not with the paper— oh, dear no—its the composition, spelling, and punctuation that causes the trouble. Just examine the following dainty little note: —”Have you any more shan Don Bells Book if not pleese To send me somethin Like thoese.” The capitals are not mine, no this is exactly as it was written. The lady who had composed this had evidently, at some period in her wild career through literature read William Black’s ” Shandon Bells,” and this was the only impression it made on the reader’s intellect.

    The following came sailing in one day during the hot June weather, and certainly did not tend to calm our troubled feelings. You will observe from the tone of the letter that the writer knows something of English Literature, and is not to be got rid of with anything; her order is not boiled clown to a mere request for a Mrs. Wood or a Miss Braddon. No, she brings her superior intellect to bear on the important business of choosing literary tit-bits. She seems to know quite well that there are other books besides those written by the abovementioned ladies, and out she trots her little list: —-” Not a Novel (this takes a line all to itself, and makes a kind of heading to the rest), “Pies send the Widow mhakes herself at Home, all Within is lark (dark?) as Night Twopenny postman I am a Sinner Viler than you all.” There! how does that seem to affect the brain? One would like to send several widows who are in the habit of making themselves at home, if the address of those desirous of accommodating them could be found. She cordially admits being a sinner even worse than the old twopenny postmen. But there, she has a redeeming quality after all, and boldly declares that she will not have a novel. Imagine my sorrow at having to admit that our Library was in such an incomplete state that we did not possess a single copy of any of the important, and no doubt interesting, works mentioned by her. After a great deal of thought and care I took the liberty of sending a book of my own selection, with the hope that my choice would not be too much for her superior intellect.

    “Pleas send Sum of Mrs. Wood or Lady Hourly” (the cannibal, does the writer of this order imagine we deal in human flesh?), “or the Granford Do Argosy authors of the Heir of Redelyffe.” This was too much for a poor sorrowing librarian. I cried, we all cried. What terrible crime had we been guilty of that this severe punishment should be cast upon us? Could this horrible mixture emanate from the pen of a human being? Nay, some foul fiend, thirsting for gore, must be at the 189 root of this. Away with it to the fire, lest we break down utterly.

    As in most Free Libraries, Mrs. Henry Wood’s ” East Lynne ” is a popular book here, and the variations in title it is made to assume are, to say the least of them, sometimes troublesome. The other day a lady sent in a list of books, the first item on which was ” Eastle Inn.” But that is not quite the extent of her ability as a list maker, for it is followed up with this arrangement: —” Lady Ordley Sectret (Lady Audleys Secret) what past in the Sick Man Chamber The Mystary of the Handsome Cab any of them will do.” Certainly my dear friend, any of them ought to do. Why they are enough to paralyse the strongest intellect.

    Just examine the delicious array of capitals in all these compositions. What waste, what utter waste. Think of the wear and tear on the intellect in arranging them so beautifully at most unexpected corners. They remind one of the dainty little fairy lamps that are placed round trees and shrubs for illumination. In fact we can only do justice to the manuscripts by calling them illuminated. None but an adept in the art can place them in such unusual spots, and can so utterly disregard the laws of punctuation.

    But to give another instance of a strange transformation of ” East Lynne.” The paper on which it is written is evidently torn from a rent book, and bears signs of greasy finger marks; this is the inscription: “He selen.” Now, I ask you in common fairness, how was I to translate this; what did this person require? It was received in February last, and after battling with the problem for some weeks I took the liberty of asking the gentleman who had written it what it meant. When he enlightened me I indulged in a sigh of happy relief, to know that it was nothing worse.

    One of the most singular notes that ever reached me was the following: —” Mazerine two plese.” It is written on the back of on old play-bill. Now when this came slamming along, my first thought was one of great joy, Ah! thought I to myself, here is a student, his study is bibliography, we must help him. Surely he wants to see a copy of the celebrated fifteenth century ” Mazarin ” Bible. I fancied I saw him deeply immersed in the study of early printed books, a craving comes upon him to see a specimen of the period. He thinks of the Library; a hasty note is written and he anxiously awaits the return of his messenger. That’s what I thought; but oh! the sad awakening to plain matter of fact. How my castles came tumbling about my head, and with what grief was I stricken to know the whole truth. All he wanted, and all he hoped for, was a magazine in two volumes known as the ” Argosy,” but sometimes pronounced ” Agresy ” by my readers.

    The last of my collection of these curiosities is about the most difficult of the lot to decipher. At first sight it looks as if a fly had been crawling across the paper after a matutinal bath in the inkwell. Each letter seems to sport an air of independence, and trys to look as if the rest did not concern him in the least, and that he alone contained the whole secret of the plot. However, I got to work on this artistic puzzle, and here is the result: —” Lady Ordley secret or The days of Dick turpin or the mystr of hamstone cab or any other book.” Mark the utter disregard as to what this borrower would, or would not read; ” or any other book.” Happy thought; revenge; I’ll send him copies of all the lists I have given you and ask him to select something himself from them. It will probably kill him, but it won’t matter, he deserves whatever the result may be. Why should he worry me with his horribly dangerous mixture?’

    Reference: ‘English as She is Sometimes Written’ from Staffordshire Knots, published c 1895, pp 186-190.

  • Birth of a Fictional Landscape

    The statue of Arnold Bennett. Stoke-on-Trent’s most famous literary figure, situated outside the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, Hanley.

    In 1898, A Man from the North, the first novel by a then unknown author named E. A. Bennett was published. It was the story of a young man who had arrived in London keen to set himself up as a writer and though readers at the time would not know it, the novel was largely autobiographical, Arnold Bennett himself had arrived in London from the Potteries and found work editing a women’s magazine and he penned the novel in hopes of breaking into the serious literary market.

    In truth the book was something of a failure, but it laid the groundwork for the stories that Bennett is still best remembered for. A Man from the North is largely set in the capital, but when the protagonist takes a journey back home for a funeral, the reader is given a brief glimpse of the curious parochial industrial landscape in ‘the north’ that the hero had escaped from. The towns he mentions are Bursley (Burslem) ‘the mother town’, Turnhill (Tunstall) ‘the northern outpost’ or ‘The bailiwick of Turnhill’ and Knype (Stoke-upon-Trent) that housed the train station and boasted the paramount local football team. Though not named as such until his next novel came out four years later, this is the first glimpse we get of ‘The Five Towns’, Bennett’s fictional version of the Potteries he had grown up in.

    That next novel was Anna of the Five Towns, published in 1902, in which the list of Bennett’s fictional pottery towns was expanded upon with the inclusion of Hanbridge (Hanley) ‘the Chicago of the Five Towns’ as Bennett described the commercial centre in one of his short stories, and Longshaw (Longton) the grittiest and most industrialised of the towns. Missing from this list, of course is Fenton ‘the town Arnold Bennett forgot’. In fact he did not forget Fenton, he simply felt that euphonically ‘The Five Towns’ sounded better than ‘The Six Towns’ and he adapted his topography accordingly.

    As the list of novels and short stories Bennett had published grew, so too did the make-believe landscape they were set in. There were some smaller Five Towns settlements like Bleakridge (Cobridge), Shawport (Longport), Hillport (Porthill) or Sneyd (Trentham), while beyond the borders lay Oldcastle (Newcastle) and Axe (Leek). Looking inward, Burslem saw many of its streets and buildings renamed or repurposed in Bennett’s fictional Bursley. Here Swan Bank became Duck Bank, Waterloo Road became Trafalgar Road, Nile Street was changed to Aboukir Street, The Leopard Inn became The Tiger and the George Hotel was renamed The Dragon. These were just some some of the numerous thoroughfares and locations frequented by the likes of Edwin Clayhanger and Hilda Lessways, Anna Tellwright and Willie Price, Simon Fuge, Denry Machin, the Countess of Chell, Constance and Sophia Baines and a host of other local fictional characters.

    Three of the plaques on The Bursley Trail

    In honour of the fictional landscape Bennett created, a number of buildings and sites around Burslem and elsewhere now form part of ‘The Bursley Trail’ and carry blue plaques presented by the Arnold Bennett Society, which identify their literary counterparts.

    Reference: See the novels of Arnold Bennett, notably A Man from the North, Anna of the Five Towns, The Old Wives Tale, the Clayhanger Trilogy, The Card, and the short story collections Tales of the Five Towns, Grim Smile of the Five Towns, The Matador of the Five Towns.

  • Dickens, the Dodo and the Dinner Plate

    On 1 April 1852, the writer Charles Dickens wrote a letter to his wife Kate informing her ‘We think of going on tonight from Birmingham to Stoke upon Trent.’  Despite worries about the trains, it seems that he and a travelling companion arrived in Stoke the next morning. Here after gazing with some fascination at the town before him, the famous author (who at the time was also writing up weekly instalments of his longest book, Bleak House) spent a few hours at the Spode factory which was at that period owned by W. T. Copeland.

    Dickens started his tour of Copeland’s works by watching a thrower and his attendant swiftly and skilfully fashion a breakfast set for his amusement, watched jiggerers and pressers making bowls and basins and saw Parian statuettes being produced in moulds. He then explored the factory kilns, seeing the saggars being stacked prior to firing and mused on the constant cycle of heating and cooling that accompanied the manufacture of pottery. This was followed by visits to see transferers and decorators at work, producing willow pattern wares or fancier stuff, before moving on to the dipping shop for glazing and then to the placers carefully loading the ware into the appropriate saggers prior to them being loaded into the kilns he had seen earlier. Dickens seems to have enjoyed his tour and it was doubtless a thrill for the workers at the Copeland works to meet, albeit briefly, one of the biggest celebrities of the Victorian age and show him their own impressive skills. Armed with all he had seen and imbibing a good working knowledge of the history and process of pottery making, Charles Dickens moved on the next day to Stafford.

    Compared to the grime and industry of the Potteries that evidently spoke to his imagination, Dickens was bored with Stafford and rather rude about the place, ‘it is as dull and dead a town as any one could desire not to see’ he wrote tartly. He lodged at the Swan Inn, which he disparagingly nicknamed ‘the Dodo’ and where he apparently seemed doomed to spend a very dull evening indeed. According to the tale he told, though, he chanced to look at the bottom of a plate and saw the name ‘COPELAND’, which set him to musing on the previous day’s events. Employing a literary conceit, he then let the plate ‘remind’ him of all he had seen at Copeland’s pot bank, telling the story outlined above as a journey through its creation. The plate’s ‘recollections’ got Dickens through the evening, so he claimed, though one might suppose that he was actually quite busy putting his recollections down on paper. His clever bit of writing, ‘A Plated Article’, was published in the magazine Household Words, on 24 April 1852. 

  • News and a Narrowboat

    On 1 September 1939, Tom Rolt and his wife Angela were travelling along the Trent and Mersey canal aboard their narrowboat, Cressy. Arriving at Trentham Bridge to take on some fuel they were hailed by a boatman at the tiller of a passing barge, who told them that Germany had invaded Poland. That day they passed through the Potteries, and the Harecastle Tunnel on into Cheshire, where two days later they heard the announcement that war had been declared.

    Rolt, a future campaigner for preservation of Britain’s neglected canal system and one of the founders of the Inland Waterways Association, later wrote a lyrical account of their journey entitled Narrow Boat, which sparked a post-war resurgence of interest in this by-then woefully neglected transport network. A traditionalist at heart, Rolt was dismissive of many of the towns and cities they passed through, but devoted two short chapters to their brief passage through the Potteries. His appreciation of the area and its people stemmed from the fact that he had some years earlier partially served his engineering apprenticeship at Messrs Kerr, Stuart and Co, locomotive engineers in Stoke.

    Reference: L.T.C. Rolt, Narrow Boat pp. 115-129; Landscape With Canals, p.3.

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