Come stroll through the 'Paris of the five towns'

HISTORIAN MERVYN EDWARDS LOOKS AT ARNOLD BENNETT'S DEPICTIONS OF HANLEY

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an Arnold Bennett history walk in Foundry Street, Hanley, Inset, the town's Fountain Square in 1900.

WHAT were Hanley and Hanley people like around 1900?

To find the answer, we can source documents or autobiographical material from the City Archives - or we can read the works of a man who was born in Hope Street, in 1867.

Over the last two Wednesday afternoons, I have led history walks around Hanley in the company of the general public and members of the Arnold Bennett Society, discussing what Bennett wrote about the foibles and idiosyncrasies of Edwardian Hanley folk as well as the author's sagacious thoughts on all manner of town institutions, such as the long-gone Grand Theatre of Varieties, the former Town Hall and The Sentinel newspaper, which Bennett dubbed The Signal.

One way or another, Bennett left his ink-stained fingerprints all over Hanley, as we shall see today.

He saw the rise of a muscle-flexing Hanley from three angles.

There was his own standpoint, those of local people and then a perhaps hybrid view evinced by the characters in his novels.

In life, Hanley wrested the title of the dominant local town from Burslem, sometime between 1800 and 1830. By the time Bennett was writing, the deal was well and truly sealed and not all the Burslem-championing efforts of Enoch Wood and later Mother Town muckety-mucks could forestall Hanley's usurpation - all of which is adduced in Bennett, who writes in his short story His Worship The Goosedriver that 'nothing could be better calculated to straighten the back of a Bursley man than a reference to the mercantile activity of Hanbridge, the Chicago of the Five Towns!

Hanley was the operational centre of chest-thumping, cocksure businessmen and was altogether less provincial than its neighbours.

It was more knowing, more alert to possibilities and saw the world that lay beyond the Potteries.