I’ve found another three novels set on Stoke-on-Trent.

1) Annie Keary’s children’s novel Sidney Grey: A Tale of School Life (1857), written while raising her children in Trent Vale. Her fiction was well regarded, and the survey book Masterworks of Children’s Literature states the novel was written for her own children and… “dealt with their [north] Staffordshire region and its brick kilns”. The novel was also a “picture of grammar-school life” in the 1850s, with a disabled boy hero. I’m guessing that the school would then have been in Newcastle-under-Lyme, and that the novel drew its impetus from the tensions between school life and life in the brickyards. The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English calls it a “notable children’s book”. For some reason there’s no free copy on either Archive.org, Hathi or Gutenberg.

Update: there was also a later sequel, now online.

2) Cedric Beardmore‘s Dodd the Potter (1931) has an embossed board cover that “depicts an industrial building with chimneys” according to an unillustrated record page for the V&A collection. The novel is apparently a frank Potteries coming-of-age story with what were — in those days — some titillating aspects. A syndicated review in an Australian newspaper remarked…

“Dodd is an employee at a pottery. So are some of the other people — most of them in fact — and their life story, if it is correctly shown by the author is suggestive of curious social relationships in the well known ‘five towns’.”

Beardmore was a Stoke lad, so it was evidently drawn from life, or perhaps life as he would have liked it to be. Arnold Bennett was the author’s uncle, though the novel was written without Bennett’s help. After the war Beardmore went south and into children’s comics. He wrote at least one Dan Dare story for the famous Eagle comic of the 1950s, but his mainstay was writing Belle of the Ballet for Girl comic (the girls’ equivalent of Eagle).

3) Under the pseudonym ‘Cedric Stokes’ Cedric Beardmore also published a historical novel titled The Staffordshire Assassins (1944), set around Bucknall in the 19th century. The Sydney Morning Herald review stated…

“This strange story of an ancient family and a band of renegade monks depends for its interest upon a macabre atmosphere and psychological abnormalities.”

He wrote many other popular novels, and it’s possible that some of those also draw on his life in Stoke-on-Trent.