John Inglesant – the "philosophical romance" that was the first and best-known work of the Birmingham novelist Joseph Henry Shorthouse – became a publishing triumph in the atmosphere of highly charged religious controversy of the 1880s, seeing its author "fêted throughout the literary world", the object of admiration from writers as varied as Charlotte Mary Yonge, T. H. Huxley and Edmund Gosse, and the subject of an invitation to breakfast at 10 Downing Street by William Gladstone.[61] The result of 30 years of study and over 10 years of writing, the novel told the story of a 17th-century English soldier and diplomat, his travels through England and Italy and his excursions through the principal religious philosophies of the time – Puritanism, Anglicanism, Roman Catholicism, Quietism and Humanism – as a recreation of Shorthouse's own intellectual journey from Quakerism to the Church of England .[62] Shorthouse wrote four other novels and a book of short stories over subsequent years, all of which catalogued their protagonists "protracted torments of conscience".[63] Emma Jane Guyton published over fifty popular and oft-reprinted novels between 1846 and 1882, most of which used their commonplace domestic settings to communicate an ecumenical Protestant or strongly anti-Catholic message.[64] Ashted-born George Mogridge started writing for children on religious and moral issues in 1827 after a varied early life that included periods working as a japanner in Birmingham's metal trades and living as a tramp in France. He eventually wrote 226 successful and widely marketed books, including stories, collections, verse and plays; anonymously and under more than 20 pseudonyms including Old Humphrey, Ephraim Holding, Old Father Thames, Peter Parley, Grandfather Gregory, Amos Armfield, Grandmamma Gilbert, Aunt Upton, and X.Y.Z.[65] At the time of his death in 1854 it was estimated that his books had sold a total of over 15 million copies across Britain and America.[66]