19th century fiction The 19th century saw the short story and the novel emerge as major features of Birmingham's literary output. A transitional figure was
Catherine Hutton, the daughter of Birmingham historian
William Hutton, who was first notable as a correspondent of many of the leading literary figures of the late 18th century, but who published her first novel
The Miser Married in 1813. This was itself written as a series of 63 letters discussing personal, social and literary issues among the fictional correspondents, and was followed by two further
epistolary novels –
The Welsh Mountaineers in 1817 and
Oakwood Hall in 1819.
Washington Irving, who was born in New York City and is regarded as the United States' first successful professional man of letters, spent many years in Birmingham after his first visit to the town in 1815, living with his sister and her husband in
Ladywood, the
Jewellery Quarter and
Edgbaston. His best-known works – the short stories "
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "
Rip Van Winkle" – were both written in Birmingham, as was his first and best-known novel
Bracebridge Hall of 1821, whose setting was loosely based on Birmingham's
Aston Hall. Many of his later works, including
Tales of the Alhambra and
Mahomet and His Successors, were completed in Birmingham after being drafted on his wider European travels.
Isabella Varley Banks was born in
Manchester and is best known for her 1876 novel
The Manchester Man, but her career as a novelist started only after she moved to Birmingham in 1846 after marrying local journalist, poet and playwright
George Linnaeus Banks. Her twelve novels were set in a variety of locations including Birmingham,
Yorkshire, Wiltshire,
Durham,
Chester, and
Manchester; each book being particularly notable for its faithful reproduction of local dialect and pronunciation.
West Bromwich-born
David Christie Murray received his training as a writer as a journalist under
George Dawson on the
Birmingham Daily Post. Several of his novels were set in Birmingham including
A Rising Star of 1894 – the story of a Birmingham reporter with literary aspirations – with many more set in surrounding areas such as the
Black Country and
Cannock Chase. Protestant religion remained a theme common to much of Birmingham's literary output during the 19th century.
John Inglesant – the "philosophical romance" that was the first and best-known work of the Birmingham novelist
Joseph Henry Shorthouse – became a publishing triumph in the atmosphere of highly charged religious controversy of the 1880s, seeing its author "fêted throughout the literary world", the object of admiration from writers as varied as
Charlotte Mary Yonge,
T. H. Huxley and
Edmund Gosse, and the subject of an invitation to breakfast at
10 Downing Street by
William Gladstone. The result of 30 years of study and over 10 years of writing, the novel told the story of a 17th-century English soldier and diplomat, his travels through England and Italy and his excursions through the principal religious philosophies of the time –
Puritanism,
Anglicanism,
Roman Catholicism,
Quietism and
Humanism – as a recreation of Shorthouse's own intellectual journey from
Quakerism to the
Church of England . Shorthouse wrote four other novels and a book of short stories over subsequent years, all of which catalogued their protagonists "protracted torments of conscience".
Emma Jane Guyton published over fifty popular and oft-reprinted novels between 1846 and 1882, most of which used their commonplace domestic settings to communicate an ecumenical Protestant or strongly anti-Catholic message.
Ashted-born
George Mogridge started writing for children on religious and moral issues in 1827 after a varied early life that included periods working as a
japanner in Birmingham's metal trades and living as a
tramp in France. He eventually wrote 226 successful and widely marketed books, including stories, collections, verse and plays; anonymously and under more than 20 pseudonyms including Old Humphrey, Ephraim Holding, Old Father Thames, Peter Parley, Grandfather Gregory, Amos Armfield, Grandmamma Gilbert, Aunt Upton, and X.Y.Z. At the time of his death in 1854 it was estimated that his books had sold a total of over 15 million copies across Britain and America. The Victorian era also saw Birmingham featuring as a setting for novelists from outside the town, placing it at the forefront of the fictional representation of industrial England's major urban centres. Five years before
Elizabeth Gaskell's 1848 portrayal of
Manchester in
Mary Barton, and nine years before
Charles Dickens'
Hard Times was loosely set in
Preston,
Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna gave a graphic depiction of working life in Birmingham in her 1843 four-part novel
The Wrongs of Woman, emphasising the exploitation of women in backstreet factories and the corrosive influence of industrial employment. The anonymously written 1848 novella
How to Get on in the World: The Story of Peter Lawley presented a more optimistic view, showing the positive consequences of learning to read for the poverty-stricken son of a Birmingham nailer.
George Gissing's ''
Eve's Ransom of 1894 presented Birmingham as a bustling metropolis of questionable values, with traffic "speedily passing from the region of main streets and great edifices into a squalid district of factories and workshops and crowded by-ways", while Mabel Collins used Birchampton
– a thinly disguised Birmingham – as the setting for her gothic novel The Star Sapphire'' of 1896. Passing references in more widely set fiction also provide evidence of Birmingham's growing significance in the culture of Victorian England.
Benjamin Disraeli's 1845 novel
Sybil uses Birmingham as a background political barometer – "They're always ready for a riot in Birmingham… The sufferings of '39 will keep Birmingham in check", while
Charlotte Brontë's 1849
Shirley sees the town at the root of the changes sweeping England – "In Birmingham I considered closely, and at their source, the causes of the present troubles of this country".
Crime fiction, science fiction and other genre fiction The Victorian period also saw authors with a Birmingham background produce fiction in a far broader range of genres.
Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the fictional detective
Sherlock Holmes, started his career as a writer in Birmingham. His first story "The Mystery of Sasassa Valley" was written and published in 1879 while he was working as a medical assistant in
Aston, as was his second "The American's Tale", whose success led his editor to advise him to give up medicine and pursue a full-time literary career. Birmingham appears in Conan Doyle's early stories as
Birchespool, and several of Conan Doyle's later Sherlock Holmes stories, including "
The Adventure of the Stockbroker's Clerk" and "
The Adventure of the Three Garridebs", have explicit Birmingham settings. caricatured in
Vanity Fair in 1897
Edwin Abbott Abbott, who worked for a period as a schoolmaster at Birmingham's
King Edward's School, was the author of a wide range of writings dominated by his highly imaginative theological works. He is best known, however, for the classic early science fiction work
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, which combined a
satirical treatment of contemporary social class structures and
gender roles, a deep expression of his own religious principles, and a speculative exploration of
geometrical dimensions that anticipates
Albert Einstein's
General Theory of Relativity.
Louisa Baldwin wrote poetry, two collections of children's stories and four novels for adults; but is most highly regarded for her gothic
ghost stories, which were originally published in literary magazines but were collected together and published as
The Shadow on the Blind by
John Lane in 1895. The imaginative adventure novels of
Max Pemberton, the
Edgbaston-born son of a Birmingham brass foundry owner, sold vastly well, from
The Iron Pirate of 1893, a seafaring tale of ironclad buccaneers, to
The Garden of Swords, an 1899 story of the
Franco-Prussian War. This swashbuckling genre was also represented by the highly successful 1884 novel
The Adventures of Maurice Drummore (Royal Marines) by Land and Sea, which claimed to be written by Linden Meadows and illustrated by F. Abell, though both in fact were pseudonyms of the Birmingham-born
Charles Butler Greatrex. The literary output of the Canadian-born author
Grant Allen, who was brought up in Birmingham from the age of 13 and attended
King Edward's School, was prodigious and varied even by Victorian standards. The Scottish critic
Andrew Lang called him "the most versatile, beyond comparison, of any man in our age". Allen is best known for his best-selling but controversial 1895 novel
The Woman Who Did, whose tragic plot combined support for
free love with opposition to the institution of marriage, and whose success scandalised Victorian society. He is also noted for innovations in
detective fiction, creating independent-minded female detectives modelled on the feminist ideal of the
New Woman in ''Miss Cayley's Adventures
; and for playing with the conventions of the crime genre in An African Millionaire'', where the criminal is the hero, and the short story "The Great Ruby Robbery", where the culprit turns out to be the detective investigating the crime. Allen's incorporation of his own scientific preoccupations into novels such as the time travel-based
The British Barbarians also made him an important early pioneer of science fiction.
H. G. Wells later wrote to him, acknowledging that "this field of scientific romance with a philosophical element that I am trying to cultivate, properly belongs to you."
Oscott, Newman and the Catholic literary revival Although Victorian Birmingham was known as a stronghold of
Protestant Nonconformism,
St. Mary's College, Oscott in the north of the city lay at the heart of the mid-19th century revival of
English Catholicism. The college built a reputation for Catholic literary scholarship after
Thomas Walsh brought major collections of Renaissance scholarship including the Harvington Library and the Marini Library to the college in the 1830s, and in 1840
Nicholas Wiseman was appointed the college's rector. His provocative, controversial and often witty books varied from
The New Antigone of 1887 – a cutting attack on socialism, atheism, free love and the cult of the
New Woman – to the more overtly Catholic
The Two Standards of 1898, and ''The Wizard's Knot
of 1901 – a satire on the Celtic Revival. Alfred Austin, who studied at Oscott in the 1840s, succeeded Tennyson as Poet Laureate in 1896, though it was widely believed that this had more to do with his support for the Tory Party than for his literary merit. Lord Acton became the editor of the Catholic monthly The Rambler, a trusted advisor to William Gladstone and one of the leading liberal historians of the 19th century, best known for his editorship of the monumental Cambridge Modern History
. The "first great modern philosopher of resistance to the state", Newman moved to Birmingham shortly after his conversion from the Church of England in 1845, staying initially at Oscott before founding the Birmingham Oratory in Edgbaston in 1849. Living at the Oratory almost continuously until his death in 1890, his major works written in Birmingham include the autobiographical Apologia Pro Vita Sua, the novel Loss and Gain, his principal philosophical work Grammar of Assent, and the poem The Dream of Gerontius, later set to music by Edward Elgar. Under Newman the Oratory became the focus of a literary culture itself, attracting further Catholic writers of note. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins taught at The Oratory School when he graduated and converted to Catholicism in 1867; it was here that he was to first develop the ideas of inscape and instress that were to prove central to his poetic practice. The novelist, poet and polemicist Hilaire Belloc came from a long line of Birmingham radicals – his mother was Bessie Rayner Parkes, his grandfather Joseph Parkes and his great-great-grandfather Joseph Priestley. He studied at the Oratory School from 1880 to 1886, and it was there he wrote his first published work Buzenval
. The poet Edward Caswall lived at the Oratory from 1852 until his death in 1878, writing his major works Lyra Catholica
and The Masque of Mary and other Poems''. Oscott also produced writers whose relationship with their Catholic background was ambiguous or actively hostile, and who – often writing from exile – were to become leading figures of the
decadent literature of the close of the 19th century. The Irish-born
George Moore was provoked into becoming a writer by his seven years at Oscott, which he called "a vile hole, a den of priests", turning to
Byron and
Shelley and noting that "it pleased me to read 'Queen Mab' and 'Cain' amid the priests and ignorance of a hateful Roman Catholic college". His early novels – particularly his 1885 work ''A Mummer's Wife'', which dealt with alcoholism and the seedy underside of theatrical life – "opened up new possibilities for the novel in English", being the first to break away from the literary conventions of the Victorian style under the influence of the
naturalism of
Émile Zola. Moore constantly developed the form of his literary self-expression, with his later novels having a more fragmented, tapestry-like structure. and a particular influence on
James Joyce: the critic
Graham Hough wrote that "neither the title nor the content of Joyce's
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man would have been quite the same in 1916 if it had not been for the prior existence of George Moore's
Confessions of a Young Man in 1886." His most famous work was the decadent semi-autobiographical wish-fulfilment novel
Hadrian the Seventh, published under his self-styled title Baron Corvo, in which he imagined himself as the Pope, but he also wrote short stories, poetry and essays.
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt was inspired to become poet by the metaphysical teachings of Oscott's professor of philosophy during the 1850s, but embarked upon a succession of affairs during his subsequent career as a diplomat, becoming a self-confessed
hedonist. He is best known for his
erotic verse, and for his anti-imperialist opposition to British policy in Ireland,
Egypt,
Sudan and
India. In 1914 a group of poets including
W. B. Yeats,
Ezra Pound, and
Richard Aldington entertained Blunt to a lunch of roast peacock, paying tribute to him as the first poet to relate poetry to real life.
19th century poetry and drama Although writing and, particularly, playwrighting were still not considered respectable activities for women throughout much of the period, 19th century Birmingham featured a notable concentration women poets and dramatists.
Constance Naden, who was born in
Edgbaston and lived most of her life in Birmingham, published two well-received volumes of poetry in the 1880s while studying science at
Mason Science College. She has been celebrated as the foremost female poet to hail from Birmingham.
Sarah Anne Curzon was born and educated in Birmingham, where she began writing and contributing essays and fiction to periodicals at an early age. "At any one time there must be five or six supremely intelligent people on the earth,"
The New Yorker poetry editor
Howard Moss wrote shortly after Auden's death, "Auden was one of them". Auden's family roots were strongly tied to the West Midlands and he grew up from the age of six months in the Birmingham area, first in
Solihull and then in
Harborne, the son of
George Augustus Auden, the Schools Medical Officer for
Birmingham City Council. Auden's early poetry carried strong social, political and economic overtones, reflecting an interest in the thought of
Marx and
Freud inherited from his father, but his later work was characterised by a greater interest in religious and spiritual issues. The huge range of form, style and subject exhibited by his work, the variety of its outlook and its accessibility and emotional directness initially provoked scepticism amongst
modernist critics who placed greater value on consistency and objectivity, but his reputation grew as modernist orthodoxy waned, and he has since increasingly come to be viewed as the first writer of the
postmodern era. By 2011 the American critic
Edward Mendelson could write: "at the start of the twenty-first century Auden's stature had reached the point where many readers thought it not implausible to judge his work the greatest body of poetry in English of the previous hundred years or more". (he was noted for going shopping for cigarettes in Harborne in his dressing gown) and he identified with the city throughout his lifetime. Birmingham also featured widely in his work. "As I Walked Out One Evening", one of his best-known early poems, moves a ballad constructed from a series of allusions to folksong and popular culture into the decidedly 20th century context of Bristol Street in Birmingham City Centre. In "
Letter to Lord Byron" he rejects the
Lake District idyll of
William Wordsworth in favour of a decisive if irony-tinged commitment to the contemporary urban landscape of the Midlands, declaring "Clearer the Scafell Pike, my heart has stamped on / The view from Birmingham to Wolverhampton"; before continuing "Tramlines and slagheaps, pieces of machinery / That was, and still is, my ideal scenery". The wider influence of the city on Auden's outlook and work was noted in 1945 by the American critic
Edmund Wilson who observed that Auden "in fundamental ways ... doesn't belong in that London literary world – he's more vigorous and more advanced. With his Birmingham background ... he is in some ways more like an American. He is really extremely tough – cares nothing about property or money, popularity or social prestige-does everything on his own and alone." Auden lay at the forefront of the
Auden Group that dominated English poetry of the 1930s and also included the Birmingham-born
Rex Warner and the Birmingham-based
Louis MacNeice, who had moved to the city from
Oxford in 1930 to teach classics at the
University of Birmingham. MacNeice's experience of Birmingham's urbanity lay behind the major advances in his poetry in the early 1930s, as his work increasingly reflected the city with the sympathetic detachment that was to become his distinctive poetic voice. His 1935 collection
Poems established him as one of the leading new poets of the time, being described by
Cecil Day-Lewis as "in some ways the most interesting of the poetical work produced in the last two years" – a particularly significant comparison for a period that included major publications by
T. S. Eliot, Auden,
Stephen Spender and Day-Lewis himself. In response MacNeice "began to go out a great deal and discovered Birmingham. Discovered that the students were human; discovered that Birmingham had its own writers and artists who were free of the London trade-mark." With his mentor
E. R. Dodds leaving the city, however, he came to feel increasingly isolated and in 1936 accepted a lectureship at
Bedford College, London. Later editions of the series also included the work of the
Halesowen-born, Birmingham-educated writer
Francis Brett Young.
Charles Madge, later the founder of
Mass-Observation and Professor of Sociology at Birmingham University, was a leading
Surrealist poet during the 1930s. His poetry featured regularly in the
London Bulletin, and his 1933 article "Surrealism for the English" advocated that English surrealist poets would need to combine knowledge of "the philosophical position of the French surrealists" with "a knowledge of their own language and literature" two or three years before most people in England had even heard of the movement.
Henry Treece, who was born in
Wednesbury and educated at the
University of Birmingham, led the
neo-romantic reaction against Auden Group in the late 1930s and 1940s as one of the founders of the
New Apocalyptics, describing the movement in his 1946 work
How I See Apocalypse: "In my definition, the writer who senses the chaos, the turbulence, the laughter and the tears, the order and the peace of the world in its entirety, is an Apocalyptic writer. His utterance will be prophetic, for he is observing things which less sensitive men may have not yet come to notice; and as his words are prophetic, they will tend to be incantatory, and so musical."
Highfield and the Birmingham Group W. H. Auden and
Louis MacNeice also formed part of the remarkable wider group of writers and artists that formed in Birmingham in the 1930s around the
Edgbaston home of the poet and classicist
E. R. Dodds; the
Birmingham Film Society; and
Highfield, the rambling
Selly Park home of the economist
Philip Sargeant Florence and his wife, the journalist and radical
Lella Secor Florence. United by their broadly left wing views, this group included a diverse range of writers. The
Erdington-born poet and dramatist
Henry Reed became involved as an undergraduate studying under MacNeice, later becoming well known for "
The Naming of Parts" – one of the best-known poems of the
Second World War – and establishing a reputation as a noted radio dramatist. Another radio dramatist associated with the group through MacNeice was
Lozells-born
R. D. Smith, who later married the novelist
Olivia Manning. The architectural writer and critic
Nikolaus Pevsner first visited
Highfield in 1933 as a refugee from Nazi Germany. From 1934 he lived at the
Ladywood home of
Francesca Wilson, which housed a varied group of international political refugees, while he conducted the study at the University of Birmingham for Sargeant Florence that led to the publication of
Pioneers of the Modern Movement in 1936 and
An Inquiry into Industrial Art in England in 1937: pivotal works in the study of modern design. Also living at Duchess Road was the emigre Russian linguist, classicist and cultural critic
Nicholas Bachtin, whom Wilson had met in Paris in 1928 and who was a former member of the "Bakhtin Circle" that had formed in Russia around his brother
Mikhail Bakhtin. The
literary critic and poet
William Empson took refuge at
Highfield after his expulsion from
Cambridge, living in the city for 6 months and unsuccessfully seeking a post at the university.
George Thomson associated with the group after his move to Birmingham in 1937. A classical scholar and Marxist philosopher, he wrote on an extraordinarily wide range of subjects – "kinship, poetry, land tenure, textual criticism, word order, linguistics, religion, Marxism, Thomas Hardy, communist political strategy, and much else". The philosopher
Ludwig Wittgenstein was also closely associated with the
Highfield group: although living in
Cambridge he found Birmingham's intellectual culture more outward-looking and made the city the focus of his primary social circle, being particularly close to Thomson and Bachtin, whom he visited frequently. He had had earlier links with Birmingham, visiting the city regularly in the years leading up to
World War I to stay with his friend
David Pinsent in
Selly Park. It was in Paradise Street opposite
Birmingham Town Hall in 1913 that Wittgenstein had dictated the typescript that would become
Notes on Logic, his first philosophical work. Also connected with
Highfield were
Walter Allen and
John Hampson, who formed a link to the separate group of novelists and short story writers known as the
Birmingham Group, which formed in 1935 after the American critic
Edward O'Brien announced of "a new group of writers emerging in the Midlands, chiefly in and near Birmingham". Despite their reputation as working class novelists, the Birmingham Group had the varied social backgrounds characteristic of highly
socially mobile Birmingham. His first published novel
Saturday Night at the Greyhound was set in a pub in
Derbyshire but featured flashbacks to the protagonists' Birmingham backgrounds, proving an unexpected success for the
Hogarth Press in 1931 and bringing Hampson fame and literary friendships with
Leonard and
Virginia Woolf,
William Plomer,
John Lehmann and
E. M. Forster. The Woolfs published Hampson's second novel
O Providence – a bleaker semi-autobiographical story of the descent into poverty of a boy born into luxury in
Five Ways, written in a sparse, angular style of short unconnected sentences – but they baulked at the explicit homosexual content of
Go Seek a Stranger, the stylistically sophisticated portrait of the dilemmas facing a Birmingham-born homosexual man in the 1930s that is considered Hampson's finest work. Hampson published two further Birmingham-set works: 1936's
Family Curse and the 1939 short story
Good Luck. He established himself as a successful author in the late 1930s with a series of realist novels – including
Innocence is Drowned of 1938, ''Blind Man's Ditch
of 1939 and Living Space
of 1940 – set in Birmingham and depicting the political and social tensions of working class life. After the war he became well known as a journalist and critic and in 1959 wrote All in a Lifetime'', also set in Birmingham and his most highly regarded novel. The most authentically working class of the Birmingham Group authors was
Leslie Halward, who was born over a butchers shop in
Selly Oak and worked as a
plasterer and
toolmaker. Halward's major works were his short stories, collected in the two anthologies
To Tea on Sundays and ''The Money's Alright and Other Stories'', which captured an ambience "peculiarly appropriate to Birmingham" and were commended by
E. M. Forster for their "good humour, the sureness and lightness of touch, the absence of any social moral" In contrast to Halward's origins
Peter Chamberlain was the grandson of Birmingham architect
J. H. Chamberlain and of the city's first
Lord Mayor James Smith. He was born in
Edgbaston and educated at the private
Clifton College. A notable motorcycle journalist and writer of short stories for the
New Statesman, his novel
Sing Holiday is a tale of motor racing set in Birmingham and the
Isle of Man. Despite their variety of style, purpose and genre, the writers of 1930s Birmingham from Auden through
Highfield to the Birmingham Group shared some distinctive characteristics – particularly their high level of political engagement and their use of
cinematic narrative techniques such as
montage in their writing. These were to form their greatest collective influence as, passed on through Hampson, Auden and MacNeice, they were to be adopted by
Virginia Woolf and through her much of 1930s literary London.
Early 20th century novelists The best-known early to mid 20th century novelist associated with Birmingham was
J. R. R. Tolkien, whose books
The Hobbit and
The Lord of the Rings are two of the world's four
best-selling books of all time, with over 100 million and over 150 million copies in print respectively. Although Tolkien was born in
Bloemfontein in South Africa, he later called this a "fallacious fact" claiming that he "happened to be born there by accident". Both of his parents were from Birmingham and he was brought up in the city from the age of three, living in
Sarehole – an area of
Hall Green then on the semi-rural southern edge of the city – and in
Moseley,
Kings Heath,
Edgbaston and
Rednal. Tolkien later remembered his time in Hall Green in particular as "the longest-seeming and most formative part of my life" and numerous connections have been made between his Birmingham upbringing and features of his work:
Sarehole Mill has been seen as the inspiration for the "Great Mill" of
The Hobbit;
Moseley Bog as the basis of the "
Old Forest" of Book One of
The Lord of the Rings; and the gothic brick towers of
Perrott's Folly and
Edgbaston Waterworks – dominating the skyline from the bedroom window of Tolkien's home in Stirling Street, Edgbaston – as the inspiration for "
The Two Towers" of Book Two of
The Lord of the Rings. The relationship between Birmingham and Tolkien's universe is a broader one, however. Tolkien's cultural outlook was deeply influenced by the
Arts and Crafts Movement, whose origins lay with the
Birmingham Set of the 1850s and of which Birmingham was a key hub. He was unambiguous that
The Shire of the
Lord of the Rings was based on a pre-industrial Birmingham area, claiming "I lived, for my early years, in the Shire, in a pre-mechanical age", The language that underlies his imaginary worlds was also strongly tied to the Birmingham area: "I am a West-midlander by blood" he wrote to
W. H. Auden in 1955, "and took to early west-midland Middle English as a known tongue as soon as I set eyes on it." Another novelist to take inspiration from the landscape of the early 20th century West Midlands was
Francis Brett Young. Born just west of Birmingham in
Halesowen, Young was educated in
Sutton Coldfield, at
Epsom in Surrey and at the
University of Birmingham before training as a doctor in the city; but he only started writing the stories of Midlands life that were to make his name after leaving Birmingham in 1907. His first published novel was
Undergrowth of 1913, but it was not until the late 1920s that he became firmly established as a best-selling writer with the resounding commercial success of 1927's
Portrait of Clare, which won the
James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was later being adapted into a film; and 1928's
My Brother Jonathan, also made into a film and later serialised for BBC Television. Like Tolkien, Young saw Birmingham's man-made urbanity and its mechanically driven economy as despoiling influences on the natural beauty and simple lifestyle of the rural Midlands, but other writers took a less nostalgia-driven approach.
Hardware: a novel in four books was written in 1914 and is recognised as the major work of the Birmingham-educated author
Kineton Parkes. It is set in the Midlands town of "Metlingham", which it depicts in prodigious detail and which is very obviously based on Birmingham. Parkes, like Tolkien, was influenced by the Arts and Crafts Movement but his writing also reflected the
urbanist values of the
Civic Gospel ideology with which the movement in Birmingham was closely associated, concluding "at heart Metlingham was sound: the City and its Council… the life of the City and of its suburbs…". The structure of
Hardware was also innovative and progressive, reflecting the fragmentation of urban life through its division into 4 books, 40 chapters and nearly 300 sections in a form that anticipated
James Joyce's later work
Ulysses. – has seen him described by the critic
Edward Stokes as "one of the most elusive, tantalizing and enigmatic of novelists", Green's 1929 novel
Living – set in a Birmingham foundry – was one of the earliest of the novels of working class life that would become common during the 1930s. It was more notable, however, for its experimental prose style, defamiliarised through the avoidance of the use of the articles "the" and "a", and the removal of adjectives from descriptive passages, both as a reflection of the local accent and as a conscious rejection of the residual
romanticism of the
psychological realist and
stream of consciousness styles of
James Joyce and
Virginia Woolf.
Genre fiction The
romantic novelist
Barbara Cartland, who was born in
Edgbaston in 1901, was cited by the
Guinness Book of Records at the time of her death as the world's bestselling living author, with over 700 books to her name having sold 900 million copies. Also notable as a romantic novelist was
Jeffery Farnol, who was born in
Aston in 1878 and first found work as a Birmingham brass-founder. He wrote over 40 novels that combined
regency romance with swashbuckling adventure, becoming an influence on
George MacDonald Fraser,
Jack Vance and
Georgette Heyer, and forming "a link between the major writers of the 19th century and the popular romancers of the present". •
Charles Talbut Onions: Birmingham born and educated, he was a prominent etymologist who worked on the
Oxford English Dictionary and was general editor of its shorter version. •
Sax Rohmer, author of the
Fu Manchu thrillers, was the pseudonym of Arthur Henry Ward, who was born in Birmingham but pursued his writing career in London and then New York. ==Post-war and contemporary literature==