Arnold Bennett is perhaps one of those names who is more remembered than read nowadays, though I know there is a very active Arnold Bennett Society that always seems to notice when I review one of his books. Hello! And I have read a small number of them now – Buried Alive, The Old Wives’ Tale, A Great Man. Now I can add Riceyman Steps (1923) which was given to me by my friend Simon when he was sorting out his late mother’s library.
Riceyman Steps is, I discovered, a real flight of steps in London – though without that name, I believe. George has done a lovely blog post, retracing the different places that are featured in the novel – but what I can’t quite understand, either from contemporary or contemporaneous photos, is the ‘tiny open space (not open to vehicular traffic) which was officially included in the title Riceyman Steps’. In the novel, this space is home to various domestic residences and, more importantly to the plot, a second-hand bookshop and a confectioner’s.
The bookseller is a man with extraordinary name Henry Earlforward, a man heading towards middle age whose abiding passions are running his bookshop and economy. His every move is motivated by saving pennies, whether that be underpaying the maid who comes to clean or in ensuring fires are only lit in rooms which absolutely cannot do without them. At the same time, he is not avaricious. He is content to make a profit on a book – to sell for two shillings something that cost him one, even if he suspects it is worth ten times as much. His miserliness is combined with a sense of decency.
His thoughts, as the novel opens, are also occupied with the woman who runs the confectioner’s. As Bennett’s witty narrative mentions, it is only some rather unloved chocolates in a display case that make the shop warrant the name ‘confectioner’s’; it is otherwise rather a standard corner shop, though I don’t think the term would have been used then. Mrs Arb is a widow of about Earlforward’s age, and they have in common the services of the maid Elsie.
For much of Riceyman Steps, this is a rather sweet novel of middle-aged love. Neither is demonstrative, and you get the sense that either of them would have managed quite well if romance had never knocked at their door – but, together, their straightforward competence finds something quite lovely kindling. Their admiration for each other begins with a recognition of the other’s good sense of economy. It never gets to any great belting passion – but it does lead to one of the more touching marriages that I’ve read in fiction. Mrs Arb moves into the bookshop – as does Elsie, now that she can be the live-in maid for a married couple – and life continues.
I love any descriptions of bookshops, perhaps particularly from this period. Much like the opening pages of Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell, I enjoy the shorthand of early 20th-century authors telling you who customers are. And I also love Bennett’s affectionately wry glances at the house of a bookseller who, in his bachelor days, had allowed the stock to run rather wild. Even his bath is filled with books.
Mrs Arb had to step over hummocks of books in order to reach the foot of the stairs. The left-hand half of every step of the stairs was stacked with books – cheap editions of novels in paper jackets, under titles such as ‘Just a Girl’, ‘Not Like Other Girls’, ‘A Girl Alone’. Weak but righteous and victorious girls crowded the stairs from top to bottom, so that Mrs Arb could scarcely get up. The landing also was full of girls. The front-room on the first floor was, from the evidence of its furniture, a dining-room, though not used as such. The massive mahogany table was piled up with books, as also the big sideboard, the mantelpiece, various chairs. The floor was carpeted with books. Less dust in the den below, but still a great deal. The Victorian furniture was ‘good’; it was furniture meant to survive revolutions and conflagrations and generations; it was everlasting furniture; it would command respect through any thickness of dust.
Bennett is out of fashion, but I think his prose is wonderful – he gives all those details that Woolf mocked him for in ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, but he also has a dry sense of humour, and a genuine affection for the people he’s created. I enjoy him most when he sees their foibles but wishes them well, and as a god he dispenses small joys and small agonies equally.
The agonies get greater as the novel progresses, and I would have preferred something that didn’t veer quite so dramatic. But it is a drama that stems from his characters’ weaknesses – specifically their pecunious natures. The good sense that brought them together also threatens to pull them apart when it is taken to extremes. It’s a shame – for me, at least – that Riceyman Steps couldn’t just have been a sweet novel about a couple finding compatibility later in life than they might have imagined. Perhaps that wouldn’t have been as popular at the time. But there is enough of that in the novel, and of a depiction of a corner of London at a specific time, to relish and enjoy before hearts start beating faster and trouble enters this particular version of unshowy paradise.
