A newly discovered novel, set in the Potteries. Charles Francis Keary‘s The Mount (1909) is set in his home place of Stoke-on-Trent…

“The scene of The Mount is that part of Staffordshire where the towns lie beneath an almost unbroken pall of smoke, and the chemicals with which the air is laden bite into the face of Nature, pitting, discolouring, and withering everything. Those who were not tied to the place by industrial connexions have fled before the blight, and a new ‘aristocracy’ has arisen…” [the novel not for everyone, such as] “the hasty reader whose palate cannot taste fine shades of flavour will perceive no reason for the insistence on minute differences of tone and meaning. Mr. Keary does not write for him, and is, we suspect, splendidly indifferent to his judgement.” (The Spectator review, 4th September 1909).

Sadly the book is utterly obscure and unobtainable. Keele Local Collection doesn’t even have it. I didn’t even know about it, re: my recent survey of local novels (FactoryMag #1). There’s one copy in the British Library, and a Google-scanned copy in Hathi is on an annoying and unnecessary copyright lockdown.

C. F. Keary was the son of the borough of Stoke-on-Trent’s first Mayor, and the brother of the local folklore collector Miss Keary. His book of weird tales Twixt Dog and Wolf was admitted by James Joyce to have been an influence on Dubliners.

From the Times obituary…

[His novels] “The Journalist” (1898), “High Policy” (1902), “Bloomsbury” (1905), “The Mount” (1909). Keary’s novels, aiming at depicting life, after the manner of the great Russian writers, in its chaotic reality and avoiding conventional selection and arrangement, never had a large popular circulation. They were, however, very highly though of within the limited literary set. Besides his novels proper two little books of Keary’s call for notice. One was a small volume “The Wanderer” (1888), published under the pseudonym H. Ogram Matuce, in which Keary strings together a number of disconnected thoughts and criticisms under the assumed person of a retired man of letters, somewhat in the manner of Gissing’s “Papers of Henry Rycroft.” This is perhaps the most perfect and charming of Keary’s prose works. The other little book is a series of short sketches in the weird and macabre, “Twixt Dog and Wolf” (1901), excellently done.

If there is perhaps another Stoke or Staffordshire setting hidden in these titles, other than The Mount, is unknown.

Update, Feb 2020: The Mount is now online for free at Archive.org.