Riceyman Steps

Riceyman Steps is a novel by British novelist Arnold Bennett, first published in 1923 and winner of that year's James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. It follows a year in the life of Henry Earlforward, a miserly second-hand bookshop owner in the Clerkenwell area of London.



Arnold Bennett was a keen amateur sailor and it was while on sailing trips on the Solent he discovered a chaotic second-hand bookshop in Southampton. He would visit the shop when bad weather prevented sailing and on one visit he bought a book on misers for sixpence. This book and the shop itself became the inspiration for this novel. Bennett also loved the Clerkenwell district of London which with its unpretentious working class life reminded him of his own origins in the Potteries. The location Riceyman Steps was modelled on Granville Place (now Gwynne Place) the steps of which lead up from King's Cross Road to Granville Square. Bennett's steps are "twenty in number, ... divided by a half-landing into two series of ten", whereas the steps of Granville Place number (from the bottom) fifteen, with eleven more from the half-landing. Granville Square, now a residential square containing a small park, was in 1923 dominated by St Philip's Church, which was demolished in 1936. (wikipedia.org)





About the Author:

Enoch Arnold Bennett (27 May 1867 - 27 March 1931) was an English writer. He is best known as a novelist, but he also worked in other fields such as the theatre, journalism, propaganda and films.

Bennett was born in a modest house in Hanley in the Potteries district of Staffordshire. Hanley was one of the Six Towns that were joined together at the beginning of the 20th century as Stoke-on-Trent and are depicted as "the Five Towns" in some of Bennett's novels. Enoch Bennett, his father, qualified as a solicitor in 1876, and the family moved to a larger house between Hanley and Burslem. Bennett was educated in Newcastle-under-Lyme.



In 1889 Bennett won a literary competition run by the magazine Tit-Bits and was encouraged to take up journalism full-time. In 1894 he became assistant editor of the magazine Woman. He noticed that the material offered by a syndicate to the magazine was not very good, so he wrote a serial that was bought by the syndicate for 75 pounds (equivalent to £10,000 in 2016). He then wrote another. This became The Grand Babylon Hotel. Just over four years later his novel A Man from the North was published to critical acclaim and he became editor of the magazine.



In 1900 Bennett gave up the editorship of Woman and dedicated himself to writing full-time. However, he continued to write for newspapers and magazines while finding success in his career as a novelist. In 1926, at the suggestion of Lord Beaverbrook, he began writing an influential weekly article on books for the London newspaper the Evening Standard.



One of Bennett's most popular non-fiction works was the self-help book How to Live on 24 Hours a Day. His diaries have yet to be published in full, but extracts from them have often been quoted in the British press.



Bennett's output was prodigious and, by his own admission, was based on maximising his income. As Bennett put it:



Am I to sit still and see other fellows pocketing two guineas apiece for stories which I can do better myself? Not me. If anyone imagines my sole aim is art for art's sake, they are cruelly deceived. (wikipedia.org)