[2] Their importance as a group was largely within the visual arts, where they played a significant role in the birth of the Arts and Crafts Movement: The Set were intimately involved in the murals painted on the Oxford Union Society in 1857, and members William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones and Charles Faulkner were founding partners of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. in 1861.
The group initially met every evening in the rooms of Charles Faulkner in Pembroke College,[3] though by 1856 its dominant figure was Edwin Hatch.
[4] The primary interests of the Birmingham Set were initially literary – they were admirers of Tennyson in particular[2] – and they also read the poetry of Shelley and Keats and the novels of Thackeray, Kingsley and Dickens.
[5] The turning point in the group's interests took place when Morris and Burne-Jones, and through them the rest of the group, discovered the writings of Thomas Carlyle[6] and John Ruskin and took to visiting English country churches and making pilgrimages to the medieval cities of France and Belgium.
[7] In 1856 members of the Set published twelve monthly issues of the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, which was created to propagate the group's views on aesthetics and social reform.