Bentley: A Modern Tragedy

    A Mill in Woodside ‘a clean newish building’ (I.1.1)

Now a retail outlet

 Along the road to Bradford another mill survives as a shell

‘Here and there empty chimneys and broken windows served to remind the beholder (if he had chanced to forget it) that the epoch was not a prosperous one’ (1.1.2).

By the text’s pessimistic end the new Victory Mill and the refurbished Heights Mill will be abandoned.

The Stage Metaphor

The implicit stage associations of ‘tragedy’ are reinforced by the book being divided into three parts called ‘Acts’, with each chapter within an act called ‘Scene’.     The book concludes with an Epilogue spoken by Rosamond Haigh, who is a member of the Hudley Harlequin Dramatic society, directly to the readers.  This reflects Bentley’s membership and foundation of the Halifax Thespians group (“Oh Dreams, O Destinations”, London, Gollancz, 1962, VII.III.146)

The austere classical front of the Halifax Playhouse

The Halifax Thespians stills exist (2018) and put on productions in the Halifax Playhouse.

Rosamond’s final summing up of the economic and social problems of the West Riding occur in an epilogue that is laid out like this:

EPILOGUE

Spoken by Rosamund

Here Bentley tries to find an equivalent in print to those moments when an actor breaks the theatre’s fourth wall and speaks directly to the audience after the play proper is over.   She will have been familiar with various Shakespearean precedents from the sardonically playful ending of Midsummer Night’s Dream to the grim predictions of the Chorus in the last lines of Henry V.  As befits a work called A Modern Tragedy,Rosamond’s final words are supposed to disturb rather than reassure the readers and yet offer some hope for a better society.   This is done through  inscribing one of Bentley’s favourite credos into the final monologue.   Like Bentley Rosamond  deplores the ‘fear, and lust for power,’   that prevents her ideal:  ‘Let no man seek his own, but every man another’s wealth…’ (L Corinthians, 10.24) coming into being.  In such a society the talents of each of the characters would have ‘saved the world!’ not led to ‘economic disease’ (Epilogue, 630).   

This credo is carved into one of the facades of The People’s Park, Halifax, as Bentley notes in her autobiography.   It is one of Bentley’s favourite spots to which she resorts when she wants to have a   vision of a better world: ‘the Library and the Park and the Technical college, seemed to me to exhale a nobler, more liberal air than the rest of Halifax,’ (‘O Dreams, O Destinations’ VII.III.120)

People’s Park

A ‘Municipal park’ appears in Act II Scene 7 when ‘Harry and Jessie strolled into the Municipal park to listen to a brass band performing there,’  (II.7.361) .  The Peoples’ Park has a bandstand suitable for the purpose;

People’s Park bandstand

Rosamond’s thought immediately put the text into a category apart from Greek tragedy.  Instead of being the inexorable working out of the design of the gods or fate, it is a tragedy in the modern newspaper sense; an accident that could have, indeed should have been averted.   The pattern is complicated because the text, up to Act III, Scene Nine, is modelled on Dr Faustus.  This is a play Bentley knew; in Sleep in Peace one of the projects the aspiring artist Laura Armistead undertakes is illustrations for Dr Faustus.   Laura thinks of it as ‘a work which had always held a deep attraction for her,’  (XI.I.400).     She is not the only artist inspired by the play in this period.   In 1929 Eric Ravilious produced a woodcut of the conjuring scene  https://auctions.roseberys.co.uk/m/lot-details/index/catalog/35/lot/14256/?url=%2Fm%2Fsearch%2F%3Fpage%3D144%26key%3D%26cat%3D159

Where the Ravilious image is literal and reconstructs the scene as part of an historical play, Laura gives the theme an idiosyncratic, symbolic interpretation: ‘Faustus was bored by ordinary society,… he was bored and repelled by Wittenberg as she was by Hudley,’ (XI.I.400).   Sleep in Peace rewrites Dr Faustus because it is more concerned with recording what is boring and repellent about being brought up in a Victorian ‘benevolent tyranny’ (XV.IV. 551) than being tempted to escape such tyranny through a magic infusion of wealth and power.    By contrast the early part of A Modern Tragedy is fascinated by power and temptation, shown by Walter Haigh’s state of mind:

    Why should some people be rich and clever, go about in fine blue cars, be accompanied by 

    elegant, lovely girls, know how to do things, how to speak and look and hold their own; while

     others were poor silly third-rate fools like himself?  (I.2.29)

   In this scheme Tasker looks like the devil, enticing the innocent Walter Haigh into corrupt business practices.   The first hint is given by the sympathetic-fallacy storm that breaks out as Tasker shows Walter Upper Heights Mill.  The name itself may be symbolic, recollecting, as Charlotte Bronte did at the end of Shirley, the Tower of Babel and its unholy ambition.    Here Tasker offers Walter the chance to run the mill but before Walter can respond: ‘ a peal of thunder suddenly broke over their heads, and rolled and rattled about the empty buildings,’  (1.7.96).   Walter ignores the warning and does not see Tasker as satanic until Act III Scene 1 where he says: ‘You are a devil!’  Tasker’s response is ‘I’ve been a good devil to you’ (IIL.1.439).  At this point the text looks as if it will resemble another meditation on the Faustus myth published in 1934, Dorothy Whipple’s They Knew Mr Knight.  Here ‘Mr Knight’ is actually ‘Mr Night’, the devil himself, who tempts Tom Blake into fraud.     Blake is left to carry the blame of Mr Knight, go to jail and be faced with the problem of rehabilitation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Knew_Mr._Knight_(novel). 

The name ‘Blake’ may be chosen because of the poet William Blake’s 1790 Marriage of Heaven and Hell.   Like C S Lewis in The Great Divorce (1945), Whipple wants to reassert Christian orthodoxy in the face of Blake’s provocative redefining of the devil as ‘energy’: ‘Energy is eternal delight’ (Plate 4). http://www.gailgastfield.com/mhh/mhh.html

Despite Bentley’s quoting of the Bible, she does not share Whipple’s Christian convictions.    Tasker is closer to a Blakean devil than to a Christian devil in so far as he is a being of energy, desperately trying to maintain business confidence and employment.    ‘I don’t like anybody to lose by me, and I don’t mean them to, either.  This slump can’t go on much longer,’ is his justification to Walter in the passage which begins with Walter calling him a ‘devil’ (IIL.1.439).    Tasker’s fraud seems to consist of mostly of ‘kiting’; paying dividends out of capital, not profit (II.1.450); and over-valuing his assets (III.5.526).  Nevertheless  if the slump had ended in 1928, it is implied his fraud would have ended with the slump and his assets would have been worth what he claims they are worth.   Further information is kept secret.    Bentley does not go into details of what he tells Walter to do, though Walter protests: ‘” But that’s fraud,”’ (III.1.440).     Unlike the traditional conception of the Devil, Tasker does not enjoy doing evil or corrupting souls, he is shown as a man struggling against ‘world forces’ that are the ‘product of ill-regulated human impulse’, (II.6.334).    These ‘world forces’ are mentioned in the context of Arnold Lumb who commits no fraud and yet watches his business get ruined because he can’t cut costs to compete.   Here the text anticipates the Marxist point made by Berthold Brecht in Der Gute Mensch von Sezuan (1943) (The Good Person of Szechuan).  In Brecht’s play the ‘good person’ can only remain ‘good’ by doubling up as a ‘bad’ person who deploys aggressive, capitalist tactics without restraint.

Bentley is no more convinced by traditional Marxism than she is by traditional Christianity.  The book looks for a way between these extremes.     As late as Act III Scene 9 it looks as if Tasker, like Mr Night, will vanish, leaving Walter to take all the blame.      However he is pursued by Rosamond and persuaded to come back and face trial.   At this point the text becomes a humanist melodrama.  A happy, in the sense of moral, ending is reached.  The trial of Walter and Tasker becomes a secular version of the Last Judgement, undertaken by an incorruptible judge who exposes all human failings: in a manner ‘incisive, cold, logical,’ (III.12.622).    Even Tasker has ‘a glint of admiration in his eyes,’ (III.12.622) for the judge.    In this secular world confession is not only good for the soul but is also granted a sensual reward, for Walter at least:

   “I did wrong, though,” whispered Walter, his head bowed against her breast, “and I’m very sorry.”

    “Never mind love,” wept Elaine.   “It doesn’t matter.  We’ll face it together.  I love you Walter!”

    That night she gave herself to him with rapture, and prayed that she might conceive.’ (III.11.612-3)

The text does not undercut this ‘rapture’ by saying if she conceived or not.   By doing so it avoids showing the difficulties of bringing up a child with the father in prisoner and the problems of reconciliation when a jobless Walter is released after five years in prison.  The convenient melodrama of the incident is granted a more rewarding complexity if given a Freudian tint.    Walter presents himself as child rather than master ‘his head bowed against her breast’.  Usually in Bentley such supplication disappoints rather than attracts a woman; it offers none of the possibility of being ‘conquered, forced’ that attracts Rosamond.  Here the mothering of Walter encouraged Elaine to think of herself as a real mother and she ‘hopes to conceive’. 

 Huddersfield: modern Court House

Walter’s family responsibilities do not affect the judgement handed down to him in the predecessor of this building.

In Der Gute Mensch von Sezuan the morality of society is shown to be as bankrupt as the economy of capitalism.      By contrast the court scene of A Modern Tragedy vindicates the law as representing a humane and human morality.  Nevertheless the last day of the trail is framed by Rosamond’s reactions that are less comforting.  On her way to the last day of the trial Rosamond sees a hunger-march ‘to London to present a petition’ marching past her bus (III.12.615).   As the photos on this site show, these marches were a world-wide phenomenon during the Great Depressions.   

https://www.theguardian.com/society/gallery/2017/mar/03/from-bread-lines-to-hunger-marches-street-photography-in-the-1930s

She recognises Harry Schofield.  He lost his job at Lumb’s and had three years’ work as a foreman at Walter’s factory.     Now both the honest and the dishonest have let him down.    All Rosamond can do is exclaim ‘in horror’  “One of the Valley [Mill] men!” (II.12.620).   The march is described as ‘a dreary and tragic spectacle’ (III.12.615) in a Scene simply called ‘Waste’.     Her Epilogue offers more rhetoric than solution:

  “ in this complex but organic industrial community, palpitating with harsh vigorous modern life,

   here that great experiment of fearless brotherhood would have most scope, and need most to be

   tried.”   (Epilogue, 631)            

After 631 pages none of the economic problems of society have even begun to be tackled.   The elections that have been held have resulted in a National Government that seems to have little idea of how to tackle the desperate economic situation of the nation.  A ‘considerable crowd of Hudley voters’ gather to see ‘the results of elections from different parts of the country’ projected from the Town Hall (III.3.498-9) but the book ends with the Hunger March and Rosamond’s speech that tries to soar above the politics of the day.   Above the voters stands the confident Victorian bulk of Hudley Town Hall.  Its use of a medieval architectural idiom: ‘pinnacles and balustrade gracefully silhouetted against a soft blueish halo,’ (III.3.498) only emphasises how backward and out of touch it is with modern times.

 Halifax Town Hall & street

Social Realism and Socialist Realism.

The book was written in the year that Stalin’s Russia turned the doctrine of Socialist Realism into dogma.  Bentley’s text embodies the difference between the two styles that have confusingly similar names.     Socialist Realism is most easily defined and identified as a visual style, though it also dominated Stalinist creative writing:

    A form of modern realism imposed in Russia by Stalin following his rise to power after the death of   

    Lenin in 1924, characterised in painting by rigorously optimistic pictures of Soviet life painted in a   

    realist style.  

    The doctrine was formally proclaimed by Maxim Gorky at the Soviet Writers Congress of 1934,

     although not precisely defined.

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/s/socialist-realism

The ‘rigorous optimism’ of the Tate’s definition is usually expressed by the creation of powerful role-models for the working class together with a prediction of the eventual triumph of the proletariat through mobilisation and organisation.

If A Modern Tragedy had been a Socialist Realist novel, the hero would have been Harry Schofield.   He is the one who most eloquently expresses disgust at the political inability to solve economic problems that the book foregrounds: ‘He was in a state of bitter disillusion and growing despair,’ (II.3.499) He is an articulate expresser of working class issues, sustained by a text that does not come from the Bible: ’The world should be managed primarily for those who work, not for those who own,’ (I.4.59).   This is a quote, not from Marx, but from R H Tawney, the economist and historian who wrote popular socialist books from the 1930s to 1940s. https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.84846/2015.84846.Principles-Of-The-New-Economics#page/n169/mode/2up

 The quote comes from Tawney’s 1920 book The Acquisitive Society.  Tawney was a Christian as well as a socialist and his work may well have been reassuring for Bentley at a time when she was struggling to move away from the Tory Christianity of her childhood; after all the word ‘primarily’ makes the statement less aggressive than it might have been coming from Marx or Engels.   Significantly the quote has been changed.  Where Tawney says ‘Industry’ Bentley says ‘The world’.   However Milner’s response ignores the ameliorative effect of ‘primarily’ and he is made to sound more like a fanatic that a visionary; ‘whispered Milner to himself, his dark eyes gleaming,’ (I.4.59).   Later books like Inheritance or Ring in the New will build up the fanaticism through the Mellor family, who assassinate a mill owner in 1812 and fight the police in 1968.  Nevertheless in the Epilogue Rosamond sees him initially in a more positive light: ‘an impassioned and heroic figure’ (Epilogue.618).  

For a moment it looks as if Bentley will redraw the sexual dynamics of A Modern Tragedy.   A politicised working-class rival to Tasker stands up and dominates Rosemond’s attention.     However this reinforces the difference between Bentley’s Social Realism and Socialist Realism   A Socialist Realist novel would have been based all the way through on the seductiveness of Tasker’s criminal luxury being opposed by the heroic resistance of Milner.   In Bentley’s world the incident is rendered ironic more than inspiring.    Firstly all Rosamond and readers get is a glimpse of Milner in action.  Rosamond’s bus stops, she briefly observes Milner rally the Hunger Marchers before they vanish from the novel.    Secondly, from the psychological perspectives that interest Bentley, Milner and Tasker are more equivalents than opposites.  Both are men whose Will to Power is driven by the belief that the end justifies the means.   Thirdly Tasker has already fallen by the time Milner rises.  Fourthly three qualifications attend Rosamond’s admiration. 

The first is that readers have seen Milner’s truculence intensify the economic difficulties of Arnold Lumb’s Valley Mill that eventually lead to its failure (II.6).   Bentley rewards Arnold with a job by the end of the book, Milner is not similarly rewarded.   

The second is that readers don’t hear what Milner says in his final appearance in the book.  After  a few words to his ‘comrades’ Milner throws away his megaphone, so he becomes, in Rosamond’s eyes ‘more effective and appealing as a spectacle,’ (Epilogue, 617-8). ‘Appealing’ is a powerfully ambiguous word that hovers between meaning  ‘making an appeal’ for pity or support or ‘appealing’ as meaning offering  aesthetic, histrionic and/or sexual satisfaction.  In all events it distances Milner from the political sphere in which he sees himself operate.   In part this seems to reflect Rosamond’s perspective; an amateur thespian herself she recognises similar qualities in Milner; but it diminishes Milner’s capacity as a leader able to envisage an alternative future.   

The third is that Rosamond’s last summing up of Milner: ‘”A fanatic,.. .He’s ready to die for his cause,” ’ (Epilogue.621).     She is prepared to blame society as much as Milner:  “And all the era can find him to do is to head a hunger-march,”’(Epilogue.621) but the word ‘fanatic’ has surfaced and is allowed to be the last word on Milner.   In Sleep in Peace Bentley will glance at how such ‘fanaticism’ will eventually polarise the 1930s between those who support totalitarianism either of the left or the right.    To avoid privileging such extremity, is not his voice or actions that dominate the Epilogue but Rosamond’s. 

Agitator

A Socialist Realism style illustration of the moment in the text when Milner speaks next to the banners carried by the Hunger Marchers might make the incident look the Socialist Realist painting by A. Gerasimov:  Lenin on the Rostrum (1923): https://artic.gr/100-xronia-rwsiki-epanastasi/. 

This means that Milner is only allowed a moment’s pause to urge resistance before the hunger march gets in its stride again.  Although p 620 describes it as marching ‘in fine style’ by page 621 the last glimpse Rosamond and the readers have is of it being merely an obstruction to her bus: ‘her vehicle overtook the hunger-marchers on the road, and had to proceed slowly past them,’ (III.12.621).

A Socialist Realist novel might have ended with Milner founding a Workers’ Cooperative in Valley Mill or shown his radical voice challenging established figures of the Left from within the TUC or the Labour Party.   Instead Bentley’s Social Realism watches the Hunger Marchers move off ‘down the street in fine style; drums beating, banners blowing, ‘(Epilogue.620).  Their slogans ‘Organize!  Organize!’ and ‘Better Fight than Starve’ are carried with them.  The novel does not follow the march to see how Milner might attempt to translate these maxims into action.    It is an ending, not a conclusion, which anticipates the closing of Sleep in Peace (1937) and Ring in the New (1969).  

It is not these ‘red banners which cried: Organize!  Organize and Better Fight than Starve’ that affect Rosamond the most (III.12.617).    The banner that calls forth the deepest emotional reaction is ‘a large white banner on which was crudely painted a picture of a mother holding young child, with the inscription below: “/- a week to feed me’, (III.12.617).         Characteristically Bentley shows Rosamond experiencing a conflict between conscious and unconscious mind: ‘“Modern version of the Madonna-and-Child theme,” thought Rosamond sardonically; her heart was beginning to beat with passionate sympathy,’ (III.12.617).  Though her conscious mind over-insistently rejects the sentimentality and the artistic and emotional crudeness of the picture, Rosamond’s unconscious mind finds the appeal of motherhood harder to resist.  This is intensified because no prospect of motherhood is ever offered to her within the text.   A Marxist might see this as a tactic of deflection, privileging bourgeois sentiment over political engagement but Bentley’s version of Social Realism tries to chart the workings of the social mind as well as workings of the social body.   

 Madonna and child banner.  

 Similar images are carried on Miners’ Banners announcing their union’s care for widows and orphans.    Monkwearmouth presents a good example.  ( Banners of the Durham coalfield, Norman Emery, Stroud, Sutton Publishing, 1998 p197).

Nevertheless Bentley has recorded and publicised a cultural device developed by the working class to dramatize, to pick up the dominant metaphor of A Modern Tragedy, their economic distress.  The Hunger March was used in many parts of the country, most famously in the ~Jarrow Crusade’ of 1936 http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/britain_wwone/jarrow_01.shtml    The memory of the latter is kept alive by cultural forces as diverse as the TUC and Alan Price, whose ‘Jarrow Song’   reached number six in the hit parade of 1974.

Yorkshire Hunger March

A drawing styled to resemble one of Sergei Eisenstein’s pre-production drawings.  A film by him would have emphasised the workers’ heroic stature rather than their vulnerability: ‘Harry slouched past, his head down, his expression sullen,’ (III.12.620).   ‘“He’s lost his self-respect,” thought Rosamond, wretchedly, ‘(III.12.617).                   

The text has moved from the supernatural portents of Act I Scene 7 where Tasker seems to be an agent of the devil to a different perspective in which Tasker is as much a victim of economic forces as the marchers: ‘if they [Tasker and Walter]  had been as honest as the day that column would yet have existed,’ (III.12.623)   More generally it shows a problem which will occur in most of Bentley’s work; the incorporation of Gothic elements from the Bronte works Bentley deeply admired alongside the prosaic concentration of Social Realism on observation and fact.    

Moral  Commentary

Bentley’s works always offer a moral commentary on the times in which they are set.   Usually this is implicit, carried out by observing the reactions and conscience of one of the protagonists, for example Laura in Sleep in Peace.  What is distinctive about A Modern Tragedy is the Epilogue, a lengthy moralising about the state of the nation, delivered by Rosamond.  Rosamond is a significant choice in so far as she remains detached from all the major economic manoeuvrings and romantic entanglements of the text.   This is not for reasons of timidity, like Laura in Sleep in Peace, indeed  Rosamond seems to embody everything Bentley might have wished to be in 1934.  She is economically independent, occupying a respected and secure post as a teacher, and she is not bound to her family and her family home by a dominant yet dependent parent, as Bentley was by her mother.  She has the looks and presence and the ‘tall handsome body’ that Bentley ‘s autobiography says she always wished to have:

   Her pale face was turned upwards in a terrible intensity of yearning; her crisp dark hair seemed to

   flow back from her broad white brow as if her spirit pressed forward too eagerly for its bodily

   casement; her dark eyes, beneath the strong arches of her eyebrows, sometime so merry, so full of

   laughter, now glowed with a sombre and passionate fire.’   (I.V.62)

The writing shows how much of a struggle it will be for Bentley to move beyond the conventions of Victorian writing, particularly at moments of heightened emotion.    Phrases like ‘terrible intensity of yearning’, ‘sombre and passionate fire’ and ‘bodily casement’ sound as rooted in the 19th century as the language of the play that Rosamond and the ‘Hudley Harlequin Dramatic Society’ (I.V.60) are rehearsing  in this scene.

The play is one of the Yorkshire playwright Gordon Bottomley’s neo-Shakespearean blank verse tragedies; Britain’s Daughter of 1922:

I have not crept to you for self’s mean ends,

Base use, foul warmth, like fleas in a dog’s coat (I.V.62)

https://archive.org/details/gruachbritainsda00bottuoft

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/gordon-bottomley

Having established a ‘high’ language of artistic aspiration, Bentley immediately questions its style and function.  One of the Hudley Harlequins says ‘Why do Bottomley any time?’ (I.V.63), rightly worrying that the style and the play have no relevance to the modern world.   The doubt is echoed by the manufacturer Arnold Lumb who is watching the rehearsal:

   Slumps and banks and overdrafts and falling prices were all about them, and here they were

   dressing up in furs and chattering about still trees.  (I.V.63)  

There is a tension here that Bentley cannot resolve that becomes more intense when applied to Rosamond.  On the one hand Rosamond has to be taken seriously as ‘Britain’s daughter’ in order for her moral commentary on Britain in the Epilogue to be respected.    On the other hand, Rosamond as Bottomley’s Nest is anachronistic and absurd: ‘she stood there, draped in thin white, with a rough fur (the producer’s notion of the garb of an Ancient Briton) slung across her tall handsome body’ (I.V.62).    She is a modern woman with a fashionable bobbed hairstyle: “I think I shall grow my hair again,” (I.V.69), inserted into an unconvincing ‘historic’ costume.

  Rosamond as Nest

An attempt to recreate the glaring clash between Rosamond’s hairstyle and ‘primitive’ costume.  One of the minor problems attendant on Social Realism’s responsive recording of the present is that certain parts of a Social Realist narrative date as swiftly as the fashions they record.   A 21st century reader would not be instantly familiar with the ‘bobbed’ hairstyle, nor with the kind of ‘Ancient Briton’ costumes used on the stages of the 1920-30s or even with Gordon Bottomley  whose plays are no longer in fashion with either audiences or critics.    

Geography and Local history

The geography and local history is more casual than it will be in later books.   Malcolm Bull’s Calderdale Companion site says ‘Annotsfield is Huddersfield, Hudley is Halifax, Ashworth is Bradford – plus a bit of Halifax’.   The first two identifications work reasonably well.   Hudley has its Harlequin Dramatic society where Halifax has its Thespians group.  Huddersfield has a court house and the site of a Cloth Hall.    In Act II Scene 12, Rosamond travels by bus to ‘the city of the assizes’ (III.12.615).    The Scene is called ‘Waste’ and the word is echoed.    As Rosamond sees ‘a dreary and tragic spectacle’ of ‘ashes and rubble,’ (III.12.615-6), it is revealed that ‘the waste was the site of the former cloth market of the town,’ (III.12.616).   Huddersfield’s Cloth Hall was being demolished from 1929-30, so the scar would have been raw whilst the novel was being written.

https://huddersfield.exposed/wiki/Cloth_Hall,_Huddersfield

Victoria Mill

Bentley usually gives her mill-towers clocks.  In reality few had them.

In the same way that Bentley escaped industrial Yorkshire by visiting places like Asrigg in Wensleydale (“O Dreams, O Destinations”, VII.ii.112) and eventually buying a cottage there, so her mill-owners wish to escape the industry that earns their living.   The countryside surrounding Bradford has ancient manor houses such as Coley Hall or Rodys Hall that could be models for the houses owned by Crossland and by Walter, though the detail: ‘not a mill chimney in sight,’ II. 8. 423), would be hard to fulfill so close to Bradford (see below).

                                                                                    View of Woodside from Royds Hall

The name ‘Haigh’ may have been suggested to Bentley by the Haigh family who ran Upper End Mill in Marsden: http://www.marsdenhistory.co.uk/work/mills/

The story of Clay Crossland seems based on the feat of Richard Wilson:

       In 1736, Ossett clothier Richard Wilson made two pieces of broadcloth and carried one on his

      head to the Leeds cloth market, where he sold it. The merchant wanted to buy the other piece,

      so Wilson walked back to Ossett, then carried the second piece of cloth back to Leeds before

      walking back home to Ossett again – a distance of about 40 miles in one day.

     https://www.ossett.net/eighteenth.html

Confusedly remembered through the mind of Walter Haigh this becomes more mock-heroic:

      He [Clay Crosland] had bought a pair of boots on credit in order to walk the six miles from the

      village of Clay Green to Hudley market with a piece of cloth of his own weaving over his shoulder

      or something of that sort.  Or, perhaps he had made the boots himself, and it was yarn instead of

       cloth; Walter was not quite sure.   (I.1.8)

Later readers discover that Clay Green has a church ‘little grey old church’ and a hall (Clay Hall) (II.8.396).   The description of the church is vague and unspecific.   

Finding a village with a church six miles from the centre of Halifax is surprisingly difficult.   Six miles norther west are uninhabited Pennies, six miles north east and east is Bradford, six miles south east are small towns like Liversedge and Brighouse that merge with Huddersfield that is six mile south.   Clay Green is on a hill, which rules out the canal-side valley towns such as Sowerby Bridge.  Churches were rare in this region in the Middle Ages and not every village was given one by the Victorians.  Near Bradford Norland Green has the place element ‘Green’ in its name but no church.   Wyke, close to Lower Wyke Manor, has a church, built in 1847, but the church is not little and is surrounded by suburbs.    Lower Wyke Manor is neither especially picturesque or rural unlike the houses of Crosland and Walter.

Greetland, to the west of West Vale, provides examples that would have been known to Bentley.     Holywell Green has the element ‘Green’ in its name and it merges with the village of Stainland with its 18th century ‘little grey old’ church.

Greetland: Bradley Hall

As might be expected Tasker does not bother with distancing himself from his power base or disguising his wealth with antiquity.  He lives in ‘Grey Garth, his large, new solitary house in a suburb of Ashworth,’ (I.6.79).  He resents the fact that Crosland regards him as a social inferior (1.6.79) but does not allow this to deflect him from his attempts to keep his enterprises buoyant by any means possible.  

The houses lived in by Henry, Walter and Arnold might be intended to carry a moral meaning.    The new aristocracy of the mill owners has displaced the old aristocracy of the 17th century, as Henry shows, continuing the work of his illustrious ancestor.   Walter should not attempt to ascend to these heights overnight by buying Clough End.  It is an act of hubris when he does so and his fall from this aspiration is swift.  He will not be content with the type of house lived in by Arnold: ‘Beech Lea was a solid detached house at the end of a highly respectable crescent erected in the seventies,’ (II.6.350).     However the text is more Marxist than moralistic when it shows all three threatened with the loss of their home through the Depression.   With a touch of sentimentality Bentley saves Arnold by having him find re-employment, but the Depression has destroyed, Arnold, Henry, Walter and Tasker as mill-owners.

In other words where later novels will tie the experiences of its protagonists to a specific locality, A Modern Tragedy, is content to be general.  The West Riding setting of this book is more typical than precise.    

Sex and Power

A first glance it looks as though the text is assembled of the standard ingredients of what is now called ‘chick-lit’.   The heroine, Rosamond, has a striking, up-to-date beauty that many women of the 1930s might have wanted and Bentley makes her into a character who shares the author’s intelligence, fluency, acting skills and political views.   She is not the mill girl who falls for the boss and eventually marries him but an independent teacher who starts and ends the book without a partner.    The plot looks equally hackneyed.     Like heroines as diverse as Emma and Bridget Jones the men Rosamond knows best are a sensible but boring man and a maverick.   The twist here is that there is no sexual chemistry between Rosamond and either the pedestrian Arnold Lumb or the adventurous Tasker and neither man deeply desires Rosamond.

The Inheritance books show men who combine assertive will and aggressive virility.  Their business and sex drives merge; business problems are likely to undermine sexual confidence.   Arnold Lund’s tepid courtship of Rosamond shows the negative side of such a psychology.   Arnold’s passion appears to have been exhausted by a ‘love match during the War,’ (I.5.67).  His wife’s leaving him for another man, whilst he was ‘at the front’ and her ‘convenient’ death (I.5.67) have left him an eligible but unexciting bachelor: ’She sometimes wondered whether Arnold was not falling in love with her, but rather felt such a rash act was beyond his scope,’ (I.5.67)      He is an equally unexciting business man: ‘his initiative was strictly limited,’ (I.5.69).    Rosamond’s analysis is detached and correct but unsurprising in so far as she is not drawn to Arnold.

His rival Tasker has ‘a jealous wife’ but he is said to ‘care little for women in any case’, (III.12.626), as if all his sexual energy is consumed by his business manipulations.  He takes little notice of Rosamond until the last four pages of the book.  In the middle of this trial ‘suddenly Tasker desired Rosamond with passion,’ (III.12.626).   The word ‘passion’ is misleading.   He desires Rosamond as representing the life he could have had: ‘He saw all the fine things in life he had missed in the pursuit of wealth – a wife good and noble, whom he loved;’ (III.12.626).    The list goes on for a paragraph but seems not to notice Rosamond’s body, only her ‘frank noble smile’ and ‘dark eyes’ (III.12.627). 

By contrast Rosamond is aware of Tasker as a sexual presence every time she sees him.   Nonetheless she maintains her power of detached analysis, indeed extends it to explore and expose the roots of a common fantasy of this genre.    Her internal dialogue admits ‘you fancy the Rochester type, don’t you?’(II.8.410).    The passage simultaneously analyses a fantasy figure of Charlotte Bronte and Bentley herself, exposing the shared root of ‘fancy’ and ‘fantasy’:

   To yield would go counter to your puritanical instincts, so you must be conquered, forced.  You

   fancy the Rochester type, don’t you?  With Leonard Tasker playing Rochester, and yourself in the

   part of Jane Eyre?’ (II.8.410).   

Readers who don’t know Jane Eyre would assume from this description that Rochester forcibly makes Jane into his mistress, rather than allowing her to leave Thornfield and return to be his carer as much as his wife.    These reflections ruthlessly expose the sexual elements that the plot of Jane Eyre conceals and yet the plot of A Modern Tragedy replays the story of Jane Eyre more ironically.   Like Jane Rosamond does not become the mistress of a powerful man; unlike Rochester however, Tasker does not desire the woman who wishes to be ‘conquered, forced’.    

In Act III Scene 9 Tasker briefly looks as if he could be a seductive devil again.  In Chapter 27 of Jane Eyre Rochester offers a résumé of his previous mistresses and how unsatisfactory they have been before intimating to Jane that the position is now vacant.  She turns him down: ‘How hard it was to reiterate firmly. “I am going.”’  (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1966, 343).  Implicitly being his mistress would involve leaving Yorkshire and living in the exotic areas Rochester has visited previously: ‘St Petersburg’, ‘Paris’, ‘Rome, Naples and Florence’ (338).  In A Modern Tragedy South America plays the same role.   Rosamond purses Tasker, consciously to persuade him to return to justice but unconscious because she is attracted by him.   On board the liner he intends to escape on,  Rosamond feels ‘a yearning to throw up  school, her mother, Walter, the West Riding (that place of smoke and duty), and sail away to tropical lands on this glittering vessel of pleasure,’  (III.9.569).