Anna of the Five Towns
by Arnold Bennett
- Used
- good
- Hardcover
- Condition
- Good
- Seller
-
Goring-by-Sea, West Sussex, United Kingdom
Payment Methods Accepted
About This Item
Methuen and Co, 1927. Hardcover. Good. 1927. 254 pages. No dust jacket. Green cloth with gilt lettering. Pages and binding are presentable with no major defects. Minor issues present such as mild cracking, inscriptions, inserts, light foxing, tanning and thumb marking. Overall a good condition item. Boards have mild shelf wear with light rubbing and corner bumping. Some light marking and tanning.
Synopsis
Anna of the Five Towns is a novel by Arnold Bennett, first published in 1902 and one of his best-known works.
Reviews
On Dec 9 2012, Feeney said:
I had never read a word by Arnold Bennett before recently tackling ANNA OF THE FIVE TOWNS (1902). I read it because I was about to teach an adult education course "Young Rudyard Kipling," and a Kipling expert said that ANNA OF THE FIVE TOWNS would provide great background on a part of England important to the the Kiplings. *** How so? Because Rudyard's very, very gifted father, John Lockwood Kipling (1837 - 1911) as a young man worked as an artist in the ceramic industry of Northern Staffordshire, "the Potteries," where author Bennett himself had grown up and where he set so many of his tales. And all the scholarly claims for atmospherics and social life of ANNA OF THE FIVE TOWNS regarding "the Potteries" proved true. *** Read this novel if you want a sense of English Methodism in the 19th Century, a reformed religion working hard to save sinners in a smoke-enveloped industrial area of Britain. Bennett brought the puritanical side of the religion of John Wesley to life. But in the novel, primitive Methodism seems joyless, barely charitable and notably supportive of some very selfish industrialists' life styles. Still, we see people of the Five Towns making lives for themselves outside work and family within a bustling, well-organized, non-spontaneous world of religious revivals, Methoist sewing-circles, church services, catechism classes and church picnics. *** We also see utterly unwitting heroine 21 year old Anna Tellwright on her birthday being told by her miserly Methodist father that she has inherited via her mother a fortune worth 50,000 pounds. He makes over all the ownership papers to Anna who, we fear by novel's end, will automatically through the likely coming marriage to another greedy industrialist, Mynors, hand over the only thing (wealth) that makes her independent in male-dominated England. We all know mousy people, but deep-down agnostic Anna's supreme virtue or weakness is meekness and unresisting subjection to her father. I found this very hard to accept, but so it goes in ANNA OF THE FIVE TOWNS. *** Anna was 21. She could have moved out of her widowed father's home, got her own lawyer and left Staffordshire altogether. Did this enter her mind? Not that I noticed. Her feeble efforts to befriend her fellow beaten down men go nowhere in the face of her father's greedy instructions on how not to spend her own money. All in all, I am glad that Rudyard Kipling's Methodist father got away from those Potteries, though he had met Rudyard's lively Methodist mother Alice Macdonald in those parts. Bombay was a much better place for the author of KIM to have been born than any of the Five Towns (in reality Six Towns which grew into Staffordshire's one city of Stoke-on-Trent). A good read. -OOO-
(Log in or Create an Account first!)
Details
- Bookseller
- World of Rare Books (GB)
- Bookseller's Inventory #
- 1693396779ADA
- Title
- Anna of the Five Towns
- Author
- Arnold Bennett
- Format/Binding
- Hardcover
- Book Condition
- Used - Good
- Quantity Available
- 1
- Publisher
- Methuen and Co
- Date Published
- 1927
Terms of Sale
World of Rare Books
30 day return guarantee, with full refund including shipping costs for up to 30 days after delivery if an item arrives misdescribed or damaged.
About the Seller
World of Rare Books
Biblio member since 2009
Goring-by-Sea, West Sussex
About World of Rare Books
Wob sells rare and collectable books on behalf of charities. Our team of booksellers are happy to deal with any enquiries and aim to provide same-day dispatch for all orders.
Glossary
Some terminology that may be used in this description includes:
- Shelf Wear
- Shelf wear (shelfwear) describes damage caused over time to a book by placing and removing a book from a shelf. This damage is...
- Gilt
- The decorative application of gold or gold coloring to a portion of a book on the spine, edges of the text block, or an inlay in...
- Jacket
- Sometimes used as another term for dust jacket, a protective and often decorative wrapper, usually made of paper which wraps...
- Cloth
- "Cloth-bound" generally refers to a hardcover book with cloth covering the outside of the book covers. The cloth is stretched...
- Rubbing
- Abrasion or wear to the surface. Usually used in reference to a book's boards or dust-jacket.