ighest
scholastic achievement being the passing of the London University
Matriculation Examination. Some youthful adventures in journalism were
perhaps significant of latent power and literary inclination, but a small
provincial newspaper offers no great encouragement to youthful ambition,
and Enoch Arnold Bennett (as he was then called) made his way at 21 as a
solicitor's clerk to London, where he was soon earning a modest livelihood
by 'a natural gift for the preparation of bills for taxation.' He had
never 'wanted to write' (except for money) and had read almost nothing of
Scott, Jane Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontes, and George Eliot,
though he had devoured Ouida, boys' books and serials. His first real
interest in a book was 'not as an instrument for obtaining information or
emotion, but as a book, printed at such a place in such a year by
so-and-so, bound by so-and-so, and carrying colophons, registers,
water-marks, and _fautes d'impression_.' It was when he showed a rare copy
of _Manon Lescaut_ to an artist and the latter remarked that it was one of
the ugliest books he had ever seen, that Bennett, now in his early
twenties, first became aware of the appreciation of beauty. He won twenty
guineas in a competition, conducted by a popular weekly, for a humorous
condensation of a sensational serial, being assured that this was 'art,'
and the same paper paid him a few shillings for a short article on 'How a
bill of costs is drawn up.' Meanwhile he was 'gorging' on English and
French literature, his chief idols being the brothers de Goncourt, de
Maupassant, and Turgenev, and he got a story into the Yellow Book. He saw
that he could write, and he determined to adopt the vocation of letters.
After a humiliating period of free lancing in Fleet Street, he became
assistant editor and later editor of Woman. When he was 31, his first
novel, _A Man From the North_, was published, both in England and America,
and with the excess of the profits over the cost of typewriting he bought
a new hat. At the end of the following year he wrote in his diary:

"'This year I have written 335,340 words, grand total: 224 articles and
stories, and four instalments of a serial called _The Gates of Wrath_ have
actually been published, and also my book of plays, _Polite Farces_. My
work included six or eight short stories not yet published, also the
greater part of a 55,000 word serial _Love and Life_ for Tillotsons, and
the whole draft, 80