Clayhanger is a careful evocation of a boy growing to manhood during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and includes an unforgettable portrait of an autocratic father.

          Clayhanger is one of the most attractive heroes in twentieth-century fiction. Bennett, who believed inordinately in the interestingness of ordinary things and ordinary people, was never more successful in revealing the interestingness of an apparently ordinary man then in Edwin Clayhanger.