If I had waited a little till I had got into the beautiful
Derbyshire country which lies, or rather rolls, between
Manchester and Sheffield, I could as easily have got
rid of my epoch in the smiling agricultural landscape.
I do not know just the measure of the Black Country
in England, or where Sheffield begins to be perhaps
the blackest spot in it; but I am sure that nothing
not surgically clean could be whiter than the roads
that, almost as soon as we were free of Manchester,
began to climb the green, thickly wooded hills, and
dip into the grassy and leafy valleys. In the
very heart of the loveliness we found Sheffield most
nobly posed against a lurid sunset, and clouding the
sky, which can never be certain of being blue, with
the smoke of a thousand towering chimneys. From
whatever point you have it, the sight is most prodigious,
but no doubt the subjective sense of the great ducal
mansions and estates which neighbor the mirky metropolis
of steel and iron has its part in heightening the
dramatic effect.
I
The English, with their love of brevity and simplicity,
call these proud seats the Dukeries, but our affair
was not with them, and I shall not be able to follow
the footmen or butlers or housekeepers who would so
obligingly show them to the reader in my company.
I had a fine consciousness of passing some of them
on my way into the town, and when there of being,
however, incongruously, in the midst of them.
Worksop, more properly than Sheffield, is the plebeian
heart of these aristocratic homes, or sojourns, which
no better advised traveller, or less hurried, will
fail to see. But I was in Sheffield to see the
capital of the Black Country in its most characteristic
aspects, and I thought it felicitously in keeping,
after I had dined (less well than I could have wished,
at the railway hotel which scarcely kept the promise
made for it by other like hotels) that I should be
tempted beyond my strength to go and see that colored
opera which we had lately sent, after its signal success
with us, to an even greater prosperity in England.
In Dahomey is a musical drama not pitched in
the highest key, but it is a genuine product of our
national life, and to witness its performance by the
colored brethren who invented it, and were giving it
with great applause in an atmosphere quite undarkened
by our racial prejudices, was an experience which
I would not have missed for many Dukeries. The
kindly house was not so suffocatingly full that it
could not find breath for cheers and laughter; but
I proudly felt that no one there could delight so
intelligently as the sole American, in the familiar
Bowery figures, the blue policemen, the varying darky
types, which peopled a scene largely laid in Africa.
The local New York suggestions were often from Mr.
Copyrights
Seven English Cities from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
