Isabella Banks

Isabella Banks (; 25 March 1821 – 4 May 1897), also known as Mrs G. Linnaeus Banks, was an English novelist and poet. Born in Manchester, England, Banks is most widely remembered today for her book The Manchester Man, published in 1876.

Early years Isabella Varley, was born on 25 March 1821 above her father's pharmacy at 10 Oldham Street, in the area now known as Manchester's Northern Quarter. Isabella developed a keen interest in the history of Manchester and its political development. Both her father James and her mother Amelia were active in politics long before the period when the City of Manchester had its own parliamentary representatives; her father held several official civic roles in his lifetime as a town alderman and magistrate.

Writing career

Varley's flair for writing was first noted when The Manchester Guardian published her poem "A Dying Girl to her Mother" in 1837. Around the same time she began to frequent the Sun Inn on Long Millgate in Manchester, a pub popular with poets, writers, and other working class intellectuals, and became part of a poetry collective known as the Sun Inn Group alongside figures such as Samuel Bamford, John Critchley Prince, John Bolton Rogerson, Robert Rose, Elijah Ridings, and Robert Story. However, she was too shy to participate fully in the Group's meetings, preferring to hide behind a velvet curtain at the back of the room during readings, and asking others to read her own works aloud on her behalf. She contributed to the Sun Inn Group's only published anthology, The Festive Wreath, in 1842.

It was through the Sun Inn Group that Varley was paid for her writing for the first time, when she was commissioned by Rogerson, editor of Oddfellows' Magazine from 1841 to 1848. She also met her husband, George Banks—a journalist and editor who reported from across the UK—when both worked for the magazine. They married in 1846, after which she mostly published under the name of "Mrs G. Linnaeus Banks," although she sometimes still wrote under her maiden name. Her first collection of poetry, Ivy Leaves, was published in 1844. The book became her most lasting achievement and is considered to be an important social and historical novel, charting the rise of Jabez Clegg, the eponymous "Manchester Man", from the time of the Napoleonic Wars to the first Reform Act. His personal fortunes, from the near tragic snatch of his crib from the River Irk, create a tale of romance and melodrama, his life from apprentice to master and from poverty to wealth, mirroring the growth and prosperity of the city. This is achieved in a politico-historical setting, with vivid accounts of the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 and the Corn-Law riots (the Anti-Corn Law League was formed in Manchester in 1838). In 1896, the year before she died, a well-illustrated edition of The Manchester Man was published with forty-six plates and three maps.

The book is still read throughout the world (following republication in 1991 and again in 1998), and its heroes, Jabez Clegg and Joshua Brooks, are commemorated locally in the names of Manchester public houses. A quotation from the novel ('Mutability is the epitaph of worlds / Change alone is changeless / People drop out of the history of a life as of a land though their work or their influence remains') forms the epitaph on the tombstone of Tony Wilson, one of the founders of Factory Records in Manchester.

Anthony Trollope greatly admired Isabella Banks's contribution to literature, and is reported to have observed that her "reward in literary life had fallen short of [her] deserts". She was buried in the Little Elm Walk at Abney Park Cemetery, Stoke Newington, in London, alongside her husband, who had died in 1881. In 2015, she was honoured with a street named after her within Manchester's First Street development.