LITERARY HERITAGE

Wellington may not loom large in the lives of England's great writers, but look closely and you'll find that it occasionally features in the small print. Some lived here, others worked here, and some simply came to linger on The Wrekin and admire the view. Wellington now hosts an annual Literary Festival every October - for a taste of the programme,

Houlstons' the Publishers

Literary Wellington begins with Houlstons', the town's first publishing firm. Edward Houlston Snr set up his book shop in Wellington's Market Square in the 1770s. In 1804, his son took the firm into publishing, and twenty years later it had become one of England's most important publishers of evangelical literature, opening a branch in London in the 1820s. To read more about Houlstons', and some of their authors listed below, see our Feature Articles page, or

WELLINGTON'S OWN

Hesba Stretton (Sarah Smith) was the daughter of Wellington printer and postmaster, Benjamin Smith, who started out working for Houlstons'. Hesba thus grew up surrounded by books. Her own short stories were first published in Charles Dickens’ Household Words magazine in the 1850s.

Her pen name was formed from the initials of her siblings' names - HESBA - and Stretton from Church Stretton, the South Shropshire village she visited as a child. She wrote sixty books in all, and it was the best-selling ‘Jessica’s First Prayer’ that made her name – one and a half million copies sold in dozens of languages around the world. In 1870 she moved to Richmond near London, and, exhibiting that same evangelical fervour as Houlstons' early lady writers, was instrumental in founding what would become the NSPCC.

THE WREKIN IN MIND

PG Wodehouse spent a lot of time in East Shropshire when he was a youngster, hence he located the fictional Blandings Castle somewhere in the vicinity of Bridgnorth - The Wrekin, he tells us, was visible from it's "noble battlements". And it was The Wrekin, hybridised with the village of Wykyn near his home of Stableford, that gave rise to Wrykyn - the minor public school that appears in some of his stories.

JRR Tolkien is perhaps the most famous author to have enjoyed the magic and romanticism of The Wrekin, spending long hours walking there during the time he lived at Penkridge in nearby Staffordshire. Study the map of Middle Earth and you'll find that it isn't disimilar to a map of the West Midlands. Certainly standing on top of The Wrekin, Tolkien would have had the best view of that landscape - the idylic Shire beneath him, the high mountains west of him, and just beyond the eastern horizon, the smoking chimneys of the Black Country (Mordor, that is). Presumably the isolated Wrekin itself became Tolkien's 'Lonely Mountain'?