as children played with a model of him. Martin's fantasy architecture influenced the Glasstown and Angria of the Brontë juvenilia, where he himself appears as Edward de Lisle of Verdopolis. Martin enjoyed a European reputation and influence. Heinrich Heine wrote of the music of Hector Berlioz that "It makes me see visions of fabulous empires and many a cloud-capped, impossible wonder. Its magical strains conjure up Babylon, the hanging gardens of Semiramis, the marvels of Nineveh, the mighty constructions of Mizraim, as we see them in the pictures of the English painter Martin." Martin's work influenced the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood – especially Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and several generations of movie-makers, from D. W. Griffith, who borrowed his Babylon from Martin, to Cecil B. DeMille and George Lucas. Writers like Rider Haggard, Jules Verne, and H. G. Wells were influenced by his concept of the sublime. The French Romantic movement, in both art and literature, was inspired by him. Much Victorian railway architecture was copied from his motifs, including his friend Brunel's Clifton Suspension Bridge. A number of Martin's engineering plans for London which included a circular connecting railway, though they failed to be built in his lifetime, came to fruition many years later. This would have pleased him inordinately – he is known to have exclaimed to his son, Leopold, that he would rather have been an engineer than painter. Like some other popular artists, Martin fell victim to changes in fashion and public taste. His grandiose visions seemed theatrical and outmoded to the mid-Victorians, and after Martin died his works became neglected and gradually forgotten. "Few artists have been subject to such posthumous extremes of critical fortune, for in the 1930s his vast paintings fetched only a pound or two, while today they are valued at many thousands." A number of Martin's works survive in public collections: the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle – which also holds his famous "black cabinet" of projects in progress; Tate Britain, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Louvre, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., Yale Center for British Art, Saint Louis Art Museum and elsewhere in the USA. The RIBA holds many of his engineering pamphlets. There are letters in private collections and at Queen Mary College in London. John Martin wrote two autobiographies, the first an article in The Athenaeum of 14 June 1834, page 459 and the most extensive in