The Birmingham Set, sometimes called the Birmingham Colony, 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.
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,
though by 1856 its dominant figure was
Edwin Hatch
Edwin Warren Hatch (4 September 1835 Derby, England – 10 November 1889 Oxford, England) was an English theologian. He is best known as the author of the book '' Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages Upon the Christian Church'', which was based ...
.
The primary interests of the Birmingham Set were initially literary – they were admirers of
Tennyson in particular
– and they also read the poetry of
Shelley and
Keats and the novels of
Thackeray,
Kingsley Kingsley may refer to:
People
*Kingsley (given name)
* Kingsley (surname)
Places Australia
*Kingsley, Western Australia
Canada
* Rural Municipality of Kingsley No. 124, Saskatchewan
England
*Kingsley, Cheshire
*Kingsley, Hampshire
*Kingsley, St ...
and
Dickens. 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 and
John Ruskin and took to visiting English country churches and making pilgrimages to the medieval cities of France and Belgium.
In 1856 members of the Set published twelve monthly issues of the ''
Oxford and Cambridge Magazine
''The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine'' was a periodical magazine of essays, poems, reviews, and stories, that appeared in 1856 as twelve monthly issues.
The magazine was founded by a "set" of seven undergraduate students including William Morris ...
'', which was created to propagate the group's views on aesthetics and social reform.
Members
*
Charles Joseph Faulkner
*
Edward Burne-Jones
*
William Morris
*
Cormell Price
*
Richard Watson Dixon
*
Edwin Hatch
Edwin Warren Hatch (4 September 1835 Derby, England – 10 November 1889 Oxford, England) was an English theologian. He is best known as the author of the book '' Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages Upon the Christian Church'', which was based ...
*William Fulford
*Harry MacDonald, brother of the
MacDonald sisters
References
Bibliography
* {{Citation, last=Naylor, first=Gillian, year=1971, title=The Arts and Crafts Movement: a study of its sources, ideals and influence on design theory, publication-place=London, publisher=Studio Vista, isbn=028979580X, url-access=registration, url=https://archive.org/details/artscraftsmoveme0000nayl
Arts and Crafts movement
Culture of the University of Oxford
Literary societies