Charlotte's Row.
London: Jonathan Cape, 1931 (March 30). Dedication: To Henry James Byrom." New York: Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith. Written in 1929 with the provisional title "Early Years," Bates's third novel portrays a colorful cast of characters in a shoemaking street very similar to that experienced by Bates in Rushden: Adam, a young boy modeled after Bates's father, Albert Bates, (who started out in the shoe business at the age of ten) and through whom much of the novel is experienced; the idle, arrogant, ostentatious, and drunken shoemaker Quintus Harper, superficially influenced in his philosophy by his friend Masher, a gentle, book and nature-loving, socialist shopkeeper; Quintus's daughter Pauline, passionate, idealistic, and in love with Masher; a hypocritical Baptist baker (see Bates's bake-house memories in Vanished World 69-70) who brutally beats Adam for theft; and the wives, respectively abused and shrewish, of Quintus and Masher. A series of episodes, some quite powerfully written, depict poverty, hunger, violence, death, and hopelessness; both in dialogue and in action, religion and the economic system are criticized, in contrast with the idyllic countryside enjoyed by Masher, Pauline, and Adam. Even the despicable Quintus eventually appears as a victim, as he revenges Adam's beating and longs to take his dogs to the woods. More realistic and harsh both in subject matter and in style than Bates's previous works, the novel had a mixed reception. Baldwin (97-99) notes that Bates for the first time uses multiple points of view, and commends him on avoiding both sentimentalizing the working-class characters and preaching to the reader; he notes that all of the principle characters are "imposed upon countrymen whose quiet village has been transformed into a clamorous factory town" and whose lives have been therefore ruined. However, he criticizes the novel as lacking a vision or organizing principle. Vannatta (30-31) calls it a "thematic and structural mishmash...an anachronism: a piece of nineteenth-century naturalism without the redeeming political vision -- simplistic and puerile as it often was -- of the proletarian novels that were appearing around the world" in the 1930s. Bates himself felt that his writing of the novel was less influenced by others ("Gorky hadn't a hand in it, nor anyone else," quoted in Baldwin 93) and was based more on his own experience. Vannatta (31) concludes his discussion by saying that "flawed as the novel may be, it marks the end of his apprenticeship and looks forward to his flowering as a writer."