Birmingham 1889: One Year in a Victorian City

Abstract

This entertaining book provides a vivid, month-by-month portrait of life in Birmingham in one year - 1889, the year city status was awarded by Queen Victoria. Drawing on the city's famous satirical magazines and the correspondence columns of its leading morning newspaper, this account reveals what Brums most enjoyed doing (going to the pantomime and the circus, day trips to Llandudno, watching the Villa win at Perry Barr) and what they most moaned about (noisy and expensive trams, naked bathing in the canals, watching the Villa lose at Perry Barr). Readers will meet the rather stern town clerk Edward Orford Smith, the first black pastor in the city Peter Stanford, the Shah of Persia, Austen Chamberlain and Billy Poole, who appeared before the magistrates for being drunk and disorderly on no fewer than 170 occasions. The book is illustrated with ten photographs and ten cartoons relating to Brum in 1889