With the constantly passing trams which traverse the
square, he is undoubtedly more significant of modern
Manchester than the episcopacy is, and perhaps of
that older Manchester which held for him against the
king, and that yet older Manchester of John Bradford,
the first martyr of the Reformation to suffer death
at the stake in Smithfield. Of the still yet
older, far older Manchester, which trafficked with
the Greeks of Marseilles, and later passed under the
yoke of Agricola and was a Roman military station,
and got the name of Maen-ceaster from the Saxons, and
was duly bedevilled by the Danes and mishandled by
the Normans, there may be traces in the temperament
of the modern town which would escape even the scrutiny
of the hurried American. Such a compatriot was
indeed much more bent upon getting a pair of cotton
socks, like those his own continent wears almost universally
in summer, but a series of exhaustive visits to all
the leading haberdashers in Manchester developed the
strange fact that there, in the world-heart of the
cotton-spinning industry, there was no such thing
to be found. In Manchester there are only woollen
socks, heavier or lighter, to be bought, and the shopmen
smile pityingly if you say, in your strange madness,
that woollen socks are not for summer wear. Possibly,
however, it was not summer in Manchester, and we were
misled by the almanac. Possibly we had been spoiled
by three weeks of warm, sunny rain on the Welsh coast,
and imagined a vain thing in supposing that the end
of August was not the beginning of November.
II
I thought Manchester, however, as it shows itself
in its public edifices, a most dignified town, with
as great beauty as could be expected of a place which
has always had so much to do besides looking after
its figure and complexion. The very charming series
or system of parks, public gardens, and playgrounds,
unusual in their number and variety, had a sympathetic
allure in the gray, cool light, even to the spectator
passing in a hurried hansom. They have not the
unity of the Boston or Chicago parkways, and I will
own that I had not come to Manchester for them.
What interested me more were the miles and miles of
comfortable-looking little brick houses in which,
for all I knew, the mill-labor dwelt. Very possibly
it did not; the mills themselves are now nearly all,
or mostly, outside of Manchester, and perhaps for
this reason I did not find the slums, when shown them,
very slummy, and I saw no such dreadful shapes of
rags and dirt as in Liverpool. We passed through
a quarter of large, old-fashioned mansions, as charming
as they were unimagined of Manchester; but these could
not have been the dwellings of the mill-hands, any
more than of the mill-owners. The mill-owners,
at least, live in suburban palaces and villas, which
I fancy by this time are not
—“pricking
a cockney ear,”
Copyrights
Seven English Cities from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
