Arnold Bennett and Home Management: Domestic Efficiency

Arnold Bennett said “Domesticity is inescapable” and he is recognized as a close observer of interior scenes. But significance of Bennett’s immersion in discourses of domesticity has not been properly examined. This article shows that Bennett did more than “describe” interiors. He was embedded within larger debates about home management that paved the way for the ideas that shaped distinctively modern homes: smaller in physical size and occupancy, with many fewer domestic staff, and above all, more rationally organized. By locating Bennett’s engagement with rational efficiency in his longstanding interest in domestic organization, this discussion also shows how his espousal of a notion of social progress achievable through organization went hand in hand, often in the same texts, with implied misgivings about this very program. Indeed, the complexity of this position accounts for an uncertain narrative voice in many texts.