Literature of Birmingham

By the Victorian era Birmingham was one of the largest towns in England and at the forefront of the emergence of modern industrial society, a fact reflected in its role as both a subject and a source for the newly dominant literary form of the novel.

[6] It is in the mid 17th century that the first evidence of a distinctive and sustained literary culture emerges within Birmingham, based around a group of writers working at the heart of the town's growth as a centre of religious puritanism and political radicalism.

A vast number of essays and printed sermons on issues of religious controversy were produced by these radical clerics and their opponents over the following decades, in turn encouraging the further growth of the town's book trade.

[30] Thomas Day – an ardent follower of the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau – wrote an early series of radical poems including the anti-slavery work The Dying Negro (with John Bicknell) in 1773, and a passionate defence of the American Revolution The Devoted Legions in 1776.

Noted for his radicalism, he was a friend of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Lamb, William Wordsworth, Robert Southey and Thomas de Quincey; and was widely attacked by conservative publicists in the aftermath of the French Revolution for poems such as his 1798 Blank Verse, celebrating "the promis'd time … when equal man / Shall deem the world his temple".

[40] The century also saw Birmingham emerge as the centre of a vibrant and sophisticated culture of popular street literature, as the town's printers produced increasing numbers of the broadsides and chapbooks that formed the primary reading matter of the poor.

[41] Cheaply printed and carrying traditional songs, newly written ballads on topical matters, simple folk-tales with wood-cut illustrations, and news – particularly salacious coverage of gruesome crimes, executions, riots and wars[42] – broadsides and chapbooks were sold or exchanged by itinerant chapmen – also called "patterers" or "ballad-mongers" – who often displayed their goods in the street on a small table or pinned to a wall.

[45] Job Nott – probably a pseudonym of Theodore Price of Harborne – was a largely conservative figure who produced a wide range of pamphlets and broadsides on topical matters, attracting imitators as far afield as Bristol.

[50] Washington Irving, who was born in New York City and is regarded as the United States' first successful professional man of letters,[51] 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.

[52] Thomas Adolphus Trollope worked as a schoolteacher in Birmingham before establishing himself as a successful novelist, journalist and travel writer and moving to Florence in Italy, where his house became a magnet for British literary figures such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

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.

[64] 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.

[74] 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.

[81] 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.

[82] 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.

[91] 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.

[105] 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.

[116] 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".

"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.

[120] 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".

[124] As well as marking a high point in his poetic practice, MacNeice's period in Birmingham was one of domestic happiness, abruptly shattered in 1934 when his wife left him and his son to move to the United States with an American football player.

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".

[142] His first published novel Saturday Night at the Greyhound was set in a pub in Derbyshire but featured flashbacks to the protagonists' Birmingham backgrounds,[143] 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.

[147] 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.

[161] Tolkien later remembered his time in Hall Green in particular as "the longest-seeming and most formative part of my life"[162] 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.

Lodge's novels use parody and pastiche, formal experiments such as chapters composed entirely of newspaper clippings, and ironic allusions to other literary genres, to examine moral dilemmas and document changes in British society.

[193] His work sits outside the social realist mainstream of English novelists, having more in common with European and South American authors such as Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov, Franz Kafka, W. G. Sebald, Jorge Luis Borges or Gabriel García Márquez.

"[194] Jonathan Coe – described by Nick Hornby as "the best English novelist of his generation"[195] – was born and raised in Lickey on the southern edge of Birmingham and educated at King Edward's School, where he wrote his first novel at the age of 15.

[218] The science fiction critic David Pringle wrote that "British SF in the 1970s belonged to Ian Watson" with the author Brian Stableford concluding that "There is no other writer in the field who provides such a bold challenge to the imagination".

[231] Nicholas Shakespeare called Chatwin's work "the most glamorous example of a genre in which so-called 'travel writing' began to embrace a wider range: autobiography, philosophy, history, belles lettres, romantic fiction".