page_title: Literature of Birmingham
section_title: Early 20th century novelists
hierarchical_section_title: Literature of Birmingham / Regency and Victorian literature / Early 20th century novelists
caption_attribution_description: Image based on a photograph of J. R. R. Tolkien in army uniform (taken in 1916, when Tolkien was aged 24). This image is a digitally modified version with cut-out contours, added gradient "shadow" around the contours, and noise reduction.
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 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", and his earliest tales of Middle Earth explicitly related it to the wider West Midlands region. 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." Tolkien's entire legendarium has been seen both as a lament for the lost world of his childhood, and as an imaginary reconstruction of the mythology of the rural Forest of Arden landscape that underlay the West Midlands' advancing modernity.
  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. 27 of Young's novels – from Undergrowth of 1913 to Wistanslow of 1956 – are set in "North Bromwich", a historically and geographically detailed portrayal of Birmingham and its suburbs that collectively forms the city's most extensive fictional representation.
  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 
caption: J. R. R. Tolkien
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