The novelist's image of the North: discussion

WE were much intrigued by D. C. D. Pocock's 'The novelist's image of the North' in Trans. Inst. Br. Geogr. N.S. 4, 62-76. In this fascinating article Pocock somehow managed to reduce an encyclopedia of reading to an almost mind-bending array of brief literary references. The overall effect was reminiscent of a burst of staccato machine-gun fire. A fragment from one novelist was followed by another in rapid and unrelenting succession, leaving the reader looking for some rest and relaxation and for further discussion and greater overall perspective than was actually provided. Having made this minor criticism, let us say at once how much we enjoyed the article. Pocock did not claim to have made a 'definitive statement on the topic', but the amount of literature covered was formidable none the less. Our own knowledge of the relevant material is puny by comparison, and our comments should therefore be construed not as criticism, but rather as reaction and amplification based on personal experience and images as much as on those of the novelists. It is a simple matter to react, but quite another to do the initial spadework by which a reaction may be provoked. The article struck a responsive chord right away, for the accompanying illustration on the cover of N.S. 4 No. i featured the bottle ovens of the nineteenth-century Potteries scene, an allusion to the milieu of Arnold Bennett. This was an excellent way to introduce the theme of the location of the literary North as a 'region of the mind' for which boundaries, if boundary is at all an appropriate word, are undefinable. Bennett, in the view of many 'Northerners', is a 'fringe' Northern novelist both in spatial terms (Stoke-on-Trent is an isolated industrial area somewhere between the Midlands and the North) and in terms of his literature, which often deviates from the earnest and hard-working North of the novelists in the direction of the smartness and sophistication of the South. The North under review in Pocock's article was stated (p. 63) to be 'at root . . part of coalfield Britain, flanked by the Pennines, and characterized by its nineteenth-century development of heavy and basic industries'. Almost by definition, though, the Pennines themselves must be at the heart of this region, rather than merely flanking it as the above statement implies. It might be argued that the moors and the agricultural dales are a separate region, as they are presented in the recent stories of James Herriot, the veterinary surgeon.' But the Pennines are in fact the vital link between the several distinctly separate subregions of the industrial North: the cotton district centred in east Lancashire, which dispersed its spin-off industries over the Lancashire Plain as far as Merseyside, its woollen counterpart in the West Riding, the coal, iron and steel area of the Don Valley in south Yorkshire, and the isolated Northumberland and 383