A Man from the North

A Man from the North is a novel by Arnold Bennett, first published in 1898. It was Arnold Bennett's first novel. Its protagonist, Richard Larch, leaves the Potteries town of Bursley for London, carrying the expectations of the people at home and a private conviction that the capital will make him a writer.

Richard finds employment as a clerk and spends his free hours imagining literary distinction. Maps, books, theaters, restaurants, and the crowded streets feed his ambitions, but the dreamed-of career remains elusive as routine work and habitual postponement consume his energy.

His friendship with the erratic Mr. Aked and his attachment to Aked's niece Adeline appear to offer intellectual companionship and love. Both relationships expose the distance between Richard's generous fantasies and his actions, while London tests his capacity for commitment.

Bennett treats provincial aspiration without easy mockery or romance. The novel is a restrained study of solitude, class mobility, and self-deception, attentive to the way a life can advance while an ambition stalls. Its realism anticipates the urban and Five Towns fiction that followed.

"There grows in the North Country a certain kind of youth of whom it may be said that he is born to be a Londoner. The metropolis, and everything that appertains to it, that comes down from it, that goes up into it, has for him an imperious fascination."

This digital edition is based on the 1911 George H. Doran edition.