This coming-of-age story set in the Midlands of Victorian England follows Edwin Clayhanger as he leaves school, takes over the family business and falls in love.

[2][3] The second novel in the series parallels Edwin Clayhanger's story from the point of view of his eventual wife, Hilda, telling the story of her coming of age, her working experiences as a shorthand clerk and as a keeper of lodging houses in London and Brighton, her relationship with George Cannon, which ends in her disastrous bigamous marriage and pregnancy, and her reconciliation with Edwin Clayhanger.

Unlike his mother and stepfather, George has not experienced poverty and has been spoiled by having too easy a life (a theme that Bennett had previously explored with other characters in The Old Wives' Tale).

[2][3][8] The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature in English says of Clayhanger, "The provincial Methodist background, Darius's penniless childhood and his rescue from the workhouse, and the growing prosperity and cultural aspirations of the family are described in sharply observed cumulative detail.

[2] The Oxford Companion to Edwardian Fiction comments, "After the critical and commercial success of The Old Wives' Tale (1908), Clayhanger set the seal on Bennett's reputation as the laureate of the commonplace".

[3] The Manchester Guardian said, "It is almost incredible that two novels which have so much material in common should nevertheless possess such an absolute individuality that the effect of reading one is an immediate desire to refer to the other for new light on the situations described by both".

[11] The English Review said, "It is all very interesting, deftly spun, accurately observed; it is certainly life, and presented without trickery or nonsense, yet we must express the hope that there won't be a sequel".

In her 1974 study of Bennett, Margaret Drabble finds that although the book "has one or two good things in it" it is "not very successful: there is something peculiarly dispiriting about the whole novel, which is hard to analyse".