Ramsbottom Grant Arms Hotel in Market Place was the home of William and Daniel Grant, 19th century industrialists closely associated with the rise of the town and reputed to be the inspiration for the Cheeryble brothers in "Nicholas Nickleby" by Charles Dickens. The Grants' employees were paid in tokens that had to be redeemed at a public house owned by the company. The landlord converted the tokens into cash, but only after deducting threepence per person, which had to be spent on beer, a variation on the truck system. A network of roads and railways routed through Ramsbottom allowed for a
Francis Dickens Rudy Wiebe. In recent decades, Francis Dickens has been depicted as a comic figure. In "W.G. Grace's Last Case" (1984), by William Rushton, in a fantastic plot that includes fictional characters like Jekyll and Hyde and Dr. Watson, Francis Dickens encounters Apache Indians and (anachronistically) meets the famed cricketer of the title during the latter's team's 1872 North American tour. Francis Dickens later was the subject of a comic novel by humorist Eric Nicol, "Dickens of the Mounted" (1989). The book is a series of fictional letters, a mock document purporting to be a record of Dickens's correspondence spanning his