Bennett is remembered chiefly for his novels and short stories. The best known are set in, or feature people from, the six towns of the Potteries of his youth. He presented the region as "the Five Towns" because he found the phrase "the Six Towns" less aesthetically pleasing. His Five Towns correspond closely with their originals: the real-life Burslem, Hanley, Longton, Stoke and Tunstall become Bennett's Bursley, Hanbridge, Longshaw, Knype and Turnhill. These novels portray the Five Towns with what "The Oxford Companion to English Literature" calls "an ironic but affectionate detachment, describing provincial life and culture in documentary detail, and creating many memorable characters". It was not only locations on which Bennett drew for his fiction. Many of his characters are discernibly based on real people in his life. His Lincoln's Inn friend John Eland was the source for Mr Aked in Bennett's first novel, "A Man from the North"; "A Great Man" (1903) contains a character with echoes of his Parisienne friend Chichi; Darius Clayhanger's early life is based on that of a family friend and Bennett himself is seen in Edwin in "Clayhanger". He has been criticised for making literary use in that novel of the distressing details of his father's decline into senility, but in Pound's view, in committing the details to paper Bennett was unburdening himself of painful memories.