The Birmingham Set, sometimes called the Birmingham Colony,[1] the Pembroke Set or later The Brotherhood, was a group of students at the University of Oxford in England in the 1850s, most of whom were from Birmingham or had studied at King Edward's School, Birmingham.[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.

Activities and development

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.[8]

Members

References

  1. ^ Naylor 1971, p. 96
  2. ^ a b MacCarthy, Fiona (2004), "Morris, William (1834–1896), designer, author, and visionary socialist", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Online ed.), Oxford University Press, retrieved 4 June 2011
  3. ^ Whyte, William (2006), "Faulkner, Charles Joseph (1833–1892), university teacher and associate of William Morris", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Online ed.), Oxford University Press, retrieved 4 June 2011
  4. ^ Hare, Humphrey (1949), Swinburne: a biographical approach, London: H. F. & G. Witherby, p. 38, OCLC 361619, retrieved 4 June 2011
  5. ^ Naylor 1971, pp. 96–97
  6. ^ Mackail, J. W. (2011). The Life of William Morris. New York: Dover Publications. p. 38. ISBN 978-0-486-28793-5.
  7. ^ Naylor 1971, p. 97
  8. ^ Fleming, P. C. (2008), The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, NINES - Nineteenth-century Scholarship Online, retrieved 29 April 2013
  9. ^ "The Macdonald Sisters". www.historywebsite.co.uk. Retrieved 1 March 2022.

Bibliography

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