Author Archives: Emma Nelson

1. The Manchester woman: Mrs Isabella Linnæus Banks

   20th August 2025 1:00 pm 4 Comments

   One member of the Sun Inn Group of poets who met at Poets’ Corner, who is now among the most famous but was little-known at the time, was Mrs Isabella Banks (née Varley). One of nineteenth-century Manchester’s most prolific authors, she published no fewer than twelve novels, three volumes of poetry and three volumes of short stories between 1865 and 1894, but she also lived a life that could itself have provided the narrative for a Victorian novel. Her friend, the social reformer and writer Florence Fenwick Miller, wrote of Isabella that her literary productivity (of novels rather than poetry) was necessitated by her need to provide an income for her family: ‘not till she was forty three did Mrs Banks resume her pen … it was rather that circumstances compelled her to find food and education for her brood than because she desired literary position’. She had married for love in 1846, but her husband—a newspaper editor—moved the family around the country from Harrogate to Birmingham, Dublin, Durham, Sussex and Windsor, as he struggled with drink and depression until his death in 1881.

   Isabella was born in 1821 and grew up in the Cheetham area of Manchester. Her mother’s family were manufacturers of ‘smallware’, what we might refer to now as ‘haberdashery’, while her father was originally a chemist; after his eyesight was damaged in an accident, however, he and his wife opened a haberdashery shop from their home. Isabella was educated locally, and she and her siblings seem to have had a happy childhood. Her parents had a wide social circle, took her to the theatre and encouraged her to join the local Mechanics Institute, where she attended talks and exhibitions and made full use of the library. Her eldest brother was a member of the Manchester Athenaeum, and through him she was present at the Free Trade Hall when Charles Dickens visited Manchester in 1857.

   

   Figure 1: Isabella Varley, ‘The Neglected Wife’, in Ivy leaves (Manchester, 1844) (Manchester Central Library, 821.89B30, p. 79).

   As a young woman, Isabella took a keen interest in poetry; her first published work was a poem entitled ‘A Dying Girl to her Mother’, which appeared in the Manchester Guardian on 12 April 1837, when she was only 16 years old. The following year, she began to manage a small school near her home. In 1842 she became a member of the ladies committee of the Anti-Corn Law League, and she was also a lifelong advocate for women’s suffrage. In the same year, a friend of the family, John Bolton Rogerson, became the editor of the Oddfellows Magazine. He published another of Isabella’s poems, entitled ‘The Neglected Wife’ (figure 1), which was awarded the third prize in the magazine’s annual literary competition. It is impossible to read this poem now without feeling that it foreshadows the situation which Isabella eventually found herself in following her marriage to George Linnæus Banks:

   “Her husband is a truant from his home,
   Haply engaged in noisy revelry,
   And she with uncomplaining, patient love,
   Anxiously waits his long-delayed return.
   Yet once, and that so short a time agone
   It seems but yesterday-her slightest word,
   A half-breathed wish, had brought him to her side,
   And he would linger there as if entranced”

   John Rogerson was also a founding member of the Sun Inn Group, and he persuaded Isabella to become involved with the group. As the late Chetham’s Librarian Michael Powell wrote in 2017, however, ‘the young Isabella Varley attended the March 1842 soirée at the Sun Inn but lacked the confidence to perform alongside her fellow, mostly male poets and listened to their readings whilst hiding behind velvet curtains’. The songs and poems presented at the March 1842 meeting were subsequently collected together in an anthology, published in July that year as The Festive Wreath: A Collection of Original Contributions Read at a Literary Meeting, Held in Manchester, March 24th, 1842, at the Sun Inn, Long Millgate. Isabella’s poem ‘Love’s Faith’ was included in the anthology. In 1844, when Isabella was in her early twenties, a book of her poetry entitled Ivy Leaves was published by Simpkin, Marshall & Co. of London. How this publication was funded is unclear, although it seems highly unlikely that her family were the source. A significant proportion of the poems in the book are about death and dying: they include ‘The White World’, ‘The Spirit Visitants’, ‘The Funeral Bell’ and ‘Homeward Bound’ (a poem about a dying sailor). This book also re-published ‘The Neglected Wife’.

   

   Figure 2: A bust of a young Isabella Varley (John Rylands Library, VFA.40).

   It seems likely that Isabella first met her future husband, George Linnæus Banks, through Rogerson. George—always referred to by Isabella as Linnæus—was a newspaper man, writer and poet, and an active radical and public speaker. Isabella’s biographer E. L. Burney quotes ‘the writer in Manchester Faces and Places’ who stated that ‘“a young Birmingham poet had been attracted by Miss Varley’s poems in the Oddfellows Magazine, and she on her part had not been so much attracted as amused by a review in the same publication of a volume of his, Nlossoms of Poetry. Later on these two young litterateurs were introduced in a somewhat singular manner”’. They married in 1846 at Manchester’s collegiate church—now the cathedral—when Isabella was 25 years old. The E. L. Burney Collection at the John Rylands library, which contains letters, notebooks and other objects associated with Isabella Banks, contains a small plaster bust of Isabella (figure 2); there is no information about the bust’s provenance or maker, but it seems to depict her at roughly this date. The sculptor seems to suggest a sadness in his sitter.

   Linnæus struggled with alcoholism and depression throughout their life together, which appears to be the reason why they frequently moved from one end of the country to the other; he went from the Harrogate Advertiser to the Birmingham Mercury, and then to The Dublin Daily Express, the Durham Chronicle, the Sussex Mercury and the Windsor Royal Standard. On more than one occasion, he sold the family’s furniture and belongings to fund his addiction, and it was a need for money that prompted Isabella to start writing fiction to support her family. Her first novel, God’s Providence House, was published in 1865, along with Daisies in the grass: a collection of songs and poems, by Mr. and Mrs. G. Linnæus Banks. also appeared. The copy of these poems in the library’s collections features a handwritten dedication by Isabella. She wrote at least a dozen more novels, some of which first appeared in instalments in magazines, but the family were still struggling financially. Her final volume of poetry, Ripples and breakers, was published in 1878; it is often biographical in nature, and Burney suggested that it ‘describes her struggles to keep her house and home together’.

   

   Figure 3: A fight in the yard of Chetham’s Hospital School (Chetham’s Library, 12.F.3.21, np).

   Isabella’s most famous novel was of course The Manchester Man (1876). The novel traces the life of a Manchester resident, Jabez Clegg, who was saved from drowning in a flood and educated at Chetham’s Hospital School (figure 3). The dramatic illustration above—which depicts a fight between schoolboys in the yard of the school, with what is now Chetham’s Library clearly visible in the background—is found in the 1896 edition of the novel. According to Burney, Isabella arranged to visit Chetham’s Hospital School and Library in 1866 when she first started researching her story, and she donated her manuscript copy of the novel to the library in 1887. The library still has this copy as well as sixteen printed editions of the work, including several copies of the popular 1896 edition, published by Abel Heywood and illustrated by Charles Green and Hedley Fitton. One of these includes a frontispiece photograph of Mrs Banks (figure 4). The image is striking, but perhaps not flattering; it depicts her at around 76 years old as a bespectacled old lady.

   

   Figure 4: Photograph of Isabella Banks (Chetham’s Library, 12.F.3.21, np).

   Isabella also applied for—and received—several grants from the Royal Literary Fund. In an article on female applicants to this fund published in 1990, S. J. Mumm described how ‘Isabella Banks, best known as the author of The Manchester Man, had ten children to provide for as well as supporting an alcoholic, abusive husband who entertained at intervals the delusion that he was the second Christ, and whose “chief pleasure [was] to thwart and persecute his unhappy wife”. Taking up the pen at the age of forty-three under the compulsion of dire want, her literary income was deservedly higher than most of the other applicants, peaking at £320 in 1881, but it was unequal to the demands placed upon it’. In fact, Isabella only gave birth to eight children, only three of whom survived her. George died in 1881, and Isabella herself died in 1897. Ironically, it was Isabella’s devotion to her own very troubled man that inspired her prolific and extremely successful literary career.

    

   By Patti Collins

2. ‘The Peaceful, the Pure, the Victorious Pen!’: The Sun Inn Group

   11th July 2025 10:58 am Leave a Comment

   During the nineteenth century, Manchester was one of the most written-about cities globally; it was famously the subject of Percy Shelley’s ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, written following the Peterloo Massacre in 1819, and was later studied in Friedrich Engels’ The Conditions of the Working Class in England (1845) following weeks spent studying at Chetham’s Library with Karl Marx that summer. None of these writers were native to Manchester, however; although there were a few famed nineteenth-century Mancunian writers in the nineteenth century—chiefly Elizabeth Gaskell—many of them went overlooked or otherwise achieved little fame. Our current exhibition therefore shines a light on a collective of such overlooked writers, known as the Sun Inn Group. This group of largely working-class poets took their name from the Sun Inn, a timber-framed building that stood opposite the entrance to Chetham’s Library on Long Millgate where they met to recite poetry together in the 1840s. In turn, this public house earned the affectionate title of ‘Poet’s Corner’ from the literary gatherings that took place there.

   

   Figure 1: Joseph Adshead’s map of Manchester in 1851, showing the Sun Inn opposite the entrance to Chetham’s Library on Long Millgate (Chetham’s Library, Gal.M.2.1).

   Although the Sun Inn Group was relatively short-lived, it did manage to achieve relative local fame, with The Manchester Guardian occasionally reporting on their meetings. One meeting was reportedly attended by roughly thirty people, who gave a series of speeches, poetic recitals and songs, and was—according to the Guardian—‘conducted with much harmony and kind feeling’. Amongst the attendees was John Bolton Rogerson, who, in addition to being a poet, acted as the group’s most significant organisational figure, arranging many of their meetings, acting as the chairperson or vice-chairperson during them, and later ensuring that members of the group received paid poetry commissions during his time as an editor for the Oddfellows’ Magazine. Rogerson was also responsible for compiling and editing the group’s only published anthology, The Festive Wreath, which was comprised of poems read at a meeting held in March 1842. According to the Guardian, this meeting was attended by over forty individuals.

   

   Figure 2: John Bolton Rogerson (ed.), The Festive Wreath (Manchester: Bradshaw & Blacklock, 1842) (Chetham’s Library, 8.J.5.70).

   Our collections include a copy of The Festive Wreath, which is currently on display as part of our exhibition. Much of this anthology—including a preface written by Rogerson—appears keen to assure readers of the group’s poetic capabilities and legitimacy, often listing the poets’ other accomplishments after their names. The collection also stresses the importance of the Sun Inn Group’s gathering together to combine their abilities for a greater purpose. The collection’s first poem, ‘The Poet’s Welcome’, was penned by the group’s leading light John Critchley Prince. In the poem, he welcomed both the poets and spectators in attendance at the meeting, and emphasised the significance of the gathering, declaring:

   ‘The scattered sons of humanizing song,
   Like twilight starts ought not to reign apart
   As jealous of each other’s light, but come
   Clustering in one most glorious galaxy
   Of mental splendour – as I see you now.

   Although the poem feels overzealous in promoting the supposedly-divine nature of poetry, Prince’s love of poetry was lifelong. In the sixth edition of his own anthology, Hours with the Muses (1857)—a copy of which can also be found in our collections—he wrote that ‘poetry has been the star of my adoration, affording me a serene and steady light through the darkest portion of my existence.’ Prince’s journey towards becoming a poet was a difficult one; his father, a reed-maker, resented his son’s interest in literature, and the family’s financial struggles made accessing literature a difficult endeavour. Prince nevertheless stressed that ‘poverty, want, and punishment were unable to exterminate’ his passion for poetry. In a working men’s journal, Prince reminisced about how he had stolen away from his labour, into a ‘mental feast from the pages of a Pope, a Prior, a Gay, and more especially a Goldsmith’, a medley of older poets on whom Prince’s own poetry later drew. As his list indicates, Prince’s poetry is more evocative of older poets such as Milton, Spenser, and Shakespeare, all of whom were more accessible to those with little money than the contemporary Romantics, whose works were more expensive and took some time to become available in the north.

   A similar sentiment is echoed later in The Festive Wreath, in Alexander Wilson’s self-referential poem ‘The Poet’s Corner’, an upbeat drinking song that implicitly attributes the success of the Sun Inn Group to ‘Tragedy, Comedy, Byron and Burns; / To Milton and Moore’. This poem is also the second of two within the anthology that explicitly names many of its members (the first being George Richardson’s poem ‘A Poetical Replication’). These poems are incredibly helpful when it comes to identifying the Sun Inn Group’s most prominent participants, and work to paint a colourful picture of the contemporary Mancunian literary landscape. Both poems are keen to portray their group as being comprised of a range of different members, each with their own poetic styles: Richardson turns from Samuel Bamford’s prosaic ‘graphical picture[s]’ to John Scholes’ medievalist ‘legend of Naworth’s old tower’.

   

   Figure 3: George Richardson’s ‘A Poetical Replication’, in John Bolton Rogerson (ed.), The Festive Wreath (Manchester: Bradshaw & Blacklock, 1842) (Chetham’s Library, 8.J.5.70, p. 13).

   Alongside their members’ various poetic inclinations, both Wilson and Richardson emphasised the group’s diversity of character and origin; Wilson playfully characterised the group as consisting of ‘publicans, sinners, Cork Cutters [a reference to James Boyle] and dinners’, and suggested a variety of political beliefs, writing of ‘whig agitators, and tory debaters’. Indeed, politics do not appear to have been a particularly taboo subject, although the group rarely used their poetry for the purpose of political activism. Richardson’s reference to Bamford eagerly underlines Bamford’s radical political beliefs and activism, and mentions the many times that he had had been arrested and imprisoned: a footnote jovially informed readers that ‘Mr. Bamford has suffered more imprisonment in the cause of Reform than perhaps any man of the present day’.

   Despite their range, however, these poems do not capture the full picture. The Sun Inn Group was home to a number of female poets, including Isabella Varley (née Banks), Eliza Craven Green and Eliza Battye, all of whom had poems featured within The Festive Wreath. None of these members were present at the festival: the Guardian noted that a number of the group’s female members did not attend, but did have some of their poems read during the event. Isabella Varley was an elusive member of the group who once hid behind a pair of curtains to hear her poem recited during a meeting. If one were to use ‘The Poets’ Corner’ and ‘A Poetical Replication’ as a basis for the group’s members, however, it would seem like there were no female members within the Sun Inn Group at all. Similarly, Richardson and Wilson’s poems seemingly refer to Robert Rose, ‘the bard of colour’, out of obligation alone; Richardson made no mention of Rose’s poetic capabilities, and merely requested that Rose attend the meeting ‘with his feelings more pure than his skin may be fair’, while Wilson wrote that Rose’s prose had poetry flow from it (as if to suggest that Rose was otherwise incapable of the delicate art of poetry).

   The rest of The Festive Wreath consists of less self-referential poetry, featuring lyric pieces, ballads, sonnets, and various other pieces of conventional poetry. Perhaps the most striking element of this collection is the continued thread of domesticity and the commonplace. Craven Green’s poem, ‘Children Sleeping’, devotes itself to the domestic sweetness of witnessing one’s kin asleep, while John Ball’s poem, ‘To My Daughter’ is ‘affectionately dedicated’ to his wife, and takes joy simply in the sound of his two year-old daughter’s attempts at lisping her parents’ names. As was previously mentioned, the group lacked a particularly political edge to their poetry, but there is nevertheless a sense of something radical in their emphasis on domestic matters, respite and personal relationships. Elijah Riding’s simply-named ‘Stanzas’ is a patriotic piece, which sees him celebrate love for one’s country through the mere act of spending time with one’s friends and families, the transformative capacity of which is capable of lifting oneself out of life’s difficulties. Rogerson’s own poem within the collection, ‘The Minstrel’s Lot’, laments that the poet often goes ‘unpitied and uncar’d for by the crowd’ while living a humble and often difficult life, but is posthumously granted ‘an age of fame’, with people undertaking pilgrimages to their grave while the rich man’s grave lies forgotten. With any luck, our latest exhibition will re-enact the same fate that Rogerson foresaw for himself and his companions.

   Blog post by Anna Pirie

    

3. Poets’ Corner: Industry and Identity

   6th June 2025 9:40 am 2 Comments

   ‘Near to the gates of Chetham College, in Long Millgate, stands one of those ancient and picturesque houses, which occasionally start to view like spectres of a bygone age, but are now fast disappearing before the levelling hand of improvement’. So begins the preface to an anthology of poems called The Festive Wreath (1842), written by a group of largely working-class poets who came to be known variously as the ‘Sun Inn Group’, the ‘Manchester Poets’ and the ‘Bards of Cottonopolis’. The group’s meeting place was this picturesque house, the Sun Inn, a timber-framed building on the corner of Long Millgate, which came to be known in the early 1840s as ‘Poets’ Corner’, from the literary gatherings that took place there. Notable members of the group included its leading light John Critchley Prince, the radical reformer Samuel Bamford, the ‘Bard of Colour’ Robert Rose, and Isabella Varley—who later wrote and published The Manchester Man under her married name, Mrs G. Linnæus Banks.

   Chetham’s Library’s latest exhibition focuses on this group and its poetry. The Sun Inn group was the one of the most prolific of the societies of working-class poets that emerged in Britain’s industrial cities around the middle of the nineteenth century. It played an important role in shaping Manchester’s literary and cultural identity at a key moment in the city’s history; while some of its members wrote about working-class conditions at a time when Manchester was rapidly expanding as an industrial powerhouse, others embraced a far broader range of themes, challenging contemporary views of the city as a literary wasteland. Some of the group wrote in their Lancashire dialect, a choice that went against the grain and contributed to a growing interest in regional dialect literature in subsequent decades. Although their poetry has been largely forgotten, and the Sun Inn no longer exists—its license was withdrawn and it became an antiques shop, its roof collapsed in a storm in July 1914, and it was demolished in the 1920s—the group staked out a claim to a literary identity for the city, foreshadowing its modern status as a UNESCO City of Literature. Over the coming months, we look forward to exploring this group’s membership and sharing some of its poetry with you.

   

   Figure 1: Print of the Sun Inn and Poet’s Corner, in John Bolton Rogerson (ed.), The Festive Wreath (Manchester: Bradshaw & Blacklock, 1842) (Chetham’s Library, 8.J.5.70).