stylistic:tone
Literature

Manchester is a UNESCO City of Literature known for a "radical literary history". Manchester in the 19th century featured in works highlighting the changes that industrialisation had brought. They include Elizabeth Gaskell 's novel Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life (1848), and studies such as The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 by Friedrich Engels, while living and working here. Manchester was the meeting place of Engels and Karl Marx. The two began writing The Communist Manifesto in Chetham's Library – founded in 1653 and claiming to be the oldest public library in the English-speaking world. Elsewhere in the city, the John Rylands Library holds an extensive collection of early printing. The Rylands Library Papyrus P52, believed to be the earliest extant New Testament text, is on permanent display there.

Letitia Landon 's poetical illustration Manchester to a vista over the city by G. Pickering in Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book, 1835, records the rapid growth of the city and its cultural importance.

Charles Dickens is reputed to have set his novel Hard Times in the city, and though partly modelled on Preston, it shows the influence of his friend Mrs Gaskell. Gaskell penned all her novels but Mary Barton at her home in 84 Plymouth Grove. Often her house played host to influential authors: Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Charles Eliot Norton, for example. It is now open as a literary museum.

Charlotte Brontë began writing her novel Jane Eyre in 1846, while staying at lodgings in Hulme. She was accompanying her father Patrick, who was convalescing in the city after cataract surgery. She probably envisioned Manchester Cathedral churchyard as the burial place for Jane's parents and the birthplace of Jane herself. Also associated with the city is the Victorian poet and novelist Isabella Banks, famed for her 1876 novel The Manchester Man. Anglo-American author Frances Hodgson Burnett was born in the city's Cheetham Hill district in 1849, and wrote much of her classic children's novel The Secret Garden while visiting nearby Salford's Buile Hill Park.

Anthony Burgess is among the 20th-century writers who made Manchester their home. He wrote here the dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange in 1962. Dame Carol Ann Duffy, Poet Laureate from 2009 to 2019, moved to the city in 1996 and lives in West Didsbury.