I The tight hand was Mrs Garlick’s. A miser, she was not the ordinary miser, being exceptional in the fact that her temperament was joyous. She had reached the thirtieth year of her widowhood and the sixtieth of her age, with cheerfulness unimpaired. The people of Bursley, when they met her sometimes of a morning […]

On a recent visit to the Five Towns I was sitting with my old schoolmaster, who, by the way, is much younger than I am after all, in the bow window of a house overlooking that great thoroughfare, Trafalgar Road, Bursley, when a pretty woman of twenty-eight or so passed down the street. Now the […]

I It was considered by certain people to be a dramatic moment in the history of musical enterprise in the Five Towns when Mrs Swann opened the front door of her house at Bleakridge, in the early darkness of a November evening, and let forth her son Gilbert. Gilbert’s age was nineteen, and he was […]

I Mr Morfe and Mary Morfe, his sister, were sitting on either side of their drawing-room fire, on a Friday evening in November, when they heard a ring at the front door. They both started, and showed symptoms of nervous disturbance. They both said aloud that no doubt it was a parcel or something of […]

I was just going into my tailor’s in Sackville Street, when who should be coming out of the same establishment but Mrs Ellis! I was startled, as any man might well have been, to see a lady emerging from my tailor’s. Of course a lady might have been to a tailor’s to order a tailor-made […]

The scene was the up-platform of Knype railway station on a summer afternoon, and, more particularly, that part of the platform round about the bookstall. There were three persons in the neighbourhood of the bookstall. The first was the principal bookstall clerk, who was folding with extraordinary rapidity copies of the special edition of the […]

I James Peake and his wife, and Enoch Lovatt, his wife’s half-sister’s husband, and Randolph Sneyd, the architect, were just finishing the usual Saturday night game of solo whist in the drawing-room of Peake’s large new residence at Hillport, that unique suburb of Bursley. Ella Peake, twenty-year-old daughter of the house, sat reading in an […]

When friends observed his occasional limp, Alderman Keats would say, with an air of false casualness, “Oh, a touch of the gout.” And after a year or two, the limp having increased in frequency and become almost lameness, he would say, “My gout!” He also acquired the use of the word “twinge.” A scowl of […]

I George Peel and Mary, his wife, sat down to breakfast. Their only son, Georgie, was already seated. George the younger showed an astounding disregard for the decencies of life, and a frankly gluttonous absorption in food which amounted to cynicism. Evidently he cared for nothing but the satisfaction of bodily desires. Yet he was […]

I It was an amiable but deceitful afternoon in the third week of December. Snow fell heavily in the windows of confectioners’ shops, and Father Christmas smiled in Keats’s Bazaar the fawning smile of a myth who knows himself to be exploded; but beyond these and similar efforts to remedy the forgetfulness of a careless […]

In the front-bedroom of Edward Beechinor’s small house in Trafalgar Road the two primary social forces of action and reaction–those forces which under a thousand names and disguises have alternately ruled the world since the invention of politics–were pitted against each other in a struggle rendered futile by the equality of the combatants. Edward Beechinor […]

It was Monday afternoon of Bursley Wakes–not our modern rectified festival, but the wild and naive orgy of seventy years ago, the days of bear-baiting and of bull-baiting, from which latter phrase, they say, the town derives its name. In those times there was a town-bull, a sort of civic beast; and a certain notorious […]