page_title: Literature of Birmingham
section_title: 19th century fiction
hierarchical_section_title: Literature of Birmingham / Regency and Victorian literature / 19th century fiction
caption_attribution_description: English: Joseph Henry Shorthouse
context_page_description: The literary tradition of Birmingham originally grew out of the culture of religious puritanism that developed in the town in the 16th and 17th centuries. Birmingham's location away from established centres of power, its dynamic merchant-based economy and its weak aristocracy gave it a reputation as a place where loyalty to the established power structures of church and feudal state were weak, and saw it emerge as a haven for free-thinkers and radicals, encouraging the birth of a vibrant culture of writing, printing and publishing.
  The 18th century saw the town's radicalism widen to encompass other literary areas, and while Birmingham's tradition of vigorous literary debate on theological issues was to survive into the Victorian era, the writers of the Midlands Enlightenment brought new thinking to areas as diverse as poetry, philosophy, history, fiction and children's literature. 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.
context_section_description: 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. 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. 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 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 Worboise published over fifty popular and often-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 
caption: Joseph Henry Shorthouse
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