A printer's son in the Potteries wants to be an architect, and his father wants him in the shop; between them stand a woman with a secret and thirty years of the Five Towns. Bennett opened the trilogy in 1910 with the industrial town he grew up in, drawn without either sentiment or apology. The scene of the boy's last day at school is the one his contemporaries remembered. Fifty-four plates, from Grimshaw's moonlit bridges to Ford Madox Brown's Manchester murals, catch the smoke, gaslight and striving of the industrial towns Bennett knew.
