Birmingham Set

Not to be confused with Birmingham Group (artists).

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

• Charles Joseph Faulkner
• Edward Burne-Jones
• William Morris
• Cormell Price
• Richard Watson Dixon
• Edwin Hatch
• William Fulford
• Harry MacDonald, brother of the MacDonald sisters^[9]