The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories

Bennett, Arnold, 1867-1931Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.8
Word count
543K words
Chapters
55

Tags

English Originals Foreign Literature Social ObservationPortrait GalleryHuman NatureDaily ReflectionsLife WisdomPopular Narrative

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories by Arnold BennettAuthor: Bennett, Arnold, 1867-1931,Language: English, Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature, Release Date: Jul 22, 2004

Editor's review

A short story collection by Arnold Bennett set in the "Five Towns," the pottery-producing district of Staffordshire, England, centering on boxing, small-town business, marriage, and social mobility, with vivid local color and a coolly realistic style. Bennett excels at finding dramatic tension between ordinary people's embarrassment and self-respect; the title story depicts a boxer's predicament, while the other pieces present the daily calculations and emotional fluctuations of Five Towns residents. For readers familiar with British regional fiction, this collection fills in a literary picture of industrial town life; for writers, it offers a chance to observe how Bennett advances character through spare dialogue and detail. Individual stories are moderate in length, suitable for reading in segments on a commute or before bed, and also serve as an introductory selection to Bennett's "Five Towns" series.

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. Read the title story "The Matador of the Five Towns" first, then pick other stories by interest; no need to follow the order.
  2. After each story, note in one sentence the characters' situation and turning point to compare Bennett's narrative patterns.
  3. Compare with other works in Bennett's "Five Towns" series to understand the continuity of the local background.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51
  52. 52
  53. 53
  54. 54
  55. 55

FAQ

Are the "Five Towns" a real place? The "Five Towns" are a literary region Bennett built on the model of the Staffordshire pottery district, not an official administrative place name. It comprises several neighboring towns, and Bennett wrote about this area repeatedly across many works, forming a literary space with the flavor of a local chronicle.
Is this collection suitable for readers new to Bennett? Yes. The stories are self-contained and close to everyday life, offering a quick sense of Bennett's realistic style and local color. To learn more about the "Five Towns" world, read his related novels.
Do I need to know British industrial history to read this? Not systematically, but knowing that the Five Towns were centered on the pottery industry and that residents were mostly merchants and workers will make it easier to understand the characters' working conditions, class anxiety, and daily calculations. A little background suffices and does not affect understanding of individual stories.

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About the author

Bennett, Arnold, 1867-1931 Author

Arnold Bennett (1867–1931) was an English novelist, essayist and playwright. Publicly available information is limited, so his early life and education cannot be described in detail, but his work is clearly recognisable. He often set his writing in the five pottery towns of Staffordshire, his home region, portraying the daily livelihoods and emotional ups and downs of ordinary people in a meticulous, restrained style, and revealing character and circumstance through everyday detail. The collection here holds 45 of his works, including The Old Wives' Tale, Riceyman Steps, Clayhanger and several Five Towns story collections, as well as essays such as The Author's Craft and How to Live on 24 Hours a Day. His writing thus spans fiction and essays on life and the craft of writing, drawing its material from ordinary life with a plain style and close observation.