William Westall

Born in Lancashire in 1834, William Bury Westall was first educated in Liverpool and then went into his family's cotton-spinning business. Around 1870 he left business behind, lived for long periods abroad, and turned seriously to journalism and fiction.

While living in places including Dresden and Geneva, he worked as a foreign correspondent for The Times and the Daily News, and also helped edit the Swiss Times. Those years fed directly into his writing: his novels often drew on Lancashire industrial life, continental settings, and the people he met while traveling through Europe and the Americas.

Westall became a prolific novelist, with works such as The Old Factory, The Phantom City, and Her Two Millions. Contemporary reference works describe him as a writer who relied strongly on incident and description, which helps explain the quick-moving, story-first appeal of his fiction. He died in Sussex in 1903, having just completed another novel.