author

Thomas T. Harman

A Birmingham writer, printer, and compiler with a talent for turning local history into something lively and useful, he is best remembered for creating a richly detailed guide to one of England’s fastest-changing cities. His work preserves the streets, institutions, people, and everyday texture of nineteenth-century Birmingham with remarkable range.

1 Audiobook

Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham

Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham

by Thomas T. Harman, Walter Showell

About the author

Thomas T. Harman, also known as Thomas Thalric Harman, was a nineteenth-century British printer, compositor, and writer associated with Birmingham. Sources consulted identify him as living from 1831 to 1893 and describe him as a working man of letters whose books focused on recording the city around him.

He is best known for Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham, a wide-ranging historical and reference work produced with Walter Showell. Arranged like an alphabetical guide, the book gathers together dates, places, public buildings, local institutions, and notable figures, giving readers a vivid sense of Birmingham’s past and present at a time of rapid industrial growth.

Harman’s surviving reputation rests on that gift for careful compilation. Rather than writing fiction or memoir, he built practical books that helped document a city in motion, and that makes his work especially valuable today: it offers modern readers a detailed snapshot of Birmingham as it was lived, remembered, and explained in the late nineteenth century.