Riceyman Steps
First published 1923 · 349 pages · about 6 hours to read
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About this book
Riceyman Steps, first published in 1923, is set in “dingy and sordid” Clerkenwell, in central London, where “existence was a dangerous and difficult adventure in almost frantic quest of food, drink and shelter.” It’s there that Henry Earlforward runs a gloomy, dusty store full of secondhand books. He eats less and less with every day, keeps his young servant Elsie working long hours for minimal pay, and never lights a candle when darkness will do. One day he takes notice of Violet, a middle-aged widow who owns a confectionary shop nearby, and they become husband and wife soon after.
It quickly becomes clear that his miserliness, his “grand passion and vice,” has rubbed off on Violet, threatening her chances at happiness just as much as his. His obsession also imperils Elsie’s ability to help her lover Joe, who returned from World War I with shell shock, and who desperately needs her.
The year it was published Riceyman Steps won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. Its tragic tone represents a departure from many of the novels and stories Arnold Bennett set in the “Five Towns,” the fictional location inspired by his Staffordshire childhood. Instead, it reflects the pain and disappointment of the years immediately following the Great War. As Earlforward tells a customer early on, “We’re not quite straight here yet. The truth is, we haven’t been straight since 1914.”
Books like Riceyman Steps
Quotes
“On an autumn afternoon of 1919 a hatless man with a slight limp might have been observed ascending the gentle, broad acclivity of Riceyman Steps, which lead from King’s Cross Road up to Riceyman Square, in the great metropolitan industrial district of Clerkenwell. He was rather less than stout and rather more than slim.”
Chapter I
More quotes
“As to his age, an experienced and cautious observer of mankind, without previous knowledge of this man, would have said no more than that he must be past forty. The man himself was certainly entitled to say that he was in the prime of life.”
Chapter I “Mr. Earlforward, as an expert in interpretation, was aware that “well-known” on a newspaper placard meant exactly the opposite of what it meant in any other place; it meant not well-known.”
Chapter IV “The Victorian furniture was “good”; it was furniture meant to survive revolutions and conflagrations and generations; it was everlasting furniture; it would command respect through any thickness of dust.”
Chapter XIV “Dr. Raste would sometimes say with a dry, brief laugh, “we medicoes,” thereby proclaiming a caste, an order, a clan, separated by awful, invisible, impregnable barriers from the common remainder of mankind; and he never stepped beyond the barriers into humanity.”
Chapter X
Passages from the book's public-domain text on Project Gutenberg.
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