Seven English Cities | Page 6

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,"
as in the time of Tennyson's "Maud."
What wild and whirling insolences, however, the people who have
greatly made the greatness of England have in all times suffered from

their poets and novelists, with few exceptions! One need not be a very
blind devotee of commercialism or industrialism to resent the affronts
put upon them, when one comes to the scenes of such mighty
achievement as Liverpool, and Manchester, and Sheffield; but how
mildly they seem to have taken it all--with what a meek subordination
and sufferance! One asks one's self whether the society of such places
can be much inferior to that of Pittsburg, or Chicago, or St. Louis,
which, even from the literary attics of New York, we should not exactly
allow ourselves to spit upon. Practically, I know nothing about society
in Manchester, or rather, out of it; and I can only say of the general type,
of richer or poorer, as I saw it in the streets, that it was uncommonly
good. Not so many women as men were abroad in such weather as we
had, and I cannot be sure that the sex shows there that superiority
physically which it has long held morally with us. One learns in the
north not to look for the beautiful color of the south and west; but in
Manchester the average faces were intelligent and the figures good.
III
With such a journal as the Manchester Guardian still keeping its high
rank among English newspapers, there cannot be question of the
journalistic sort of thinking in the place. Of the sort that comes to its
effect in literature, such as, say, Mrs. Gaskell's novels, there may also
still be as much as ever; and I will not hazard my safe ignorance in a
perilous conjecture. I can only say that of the Unitarianism which
eventuated in that literature, I heard it had largely turned to episcopacy,
as Unitarianism has in our own Boston. I must not forget that one of
our religions, now a dying faith, was invented in Manchester by Ann
Lee, who brought, through the usual persecutions, Shakerism to such
spiritual importance as it has now lost in these States. Only those who
have known the Shakers, with their good lives and gentle ways, can
regret with me the decline of the celibate communism which their
foundress imagined in her marital relations with the Lancashire
blacksmith she left behind her.
I am reminded (or perhaps instructed) by Mr. Hope Moncrieff in
Black's excellent Guide to Manchester that before Mrs. Gaskell's
celebrity the fitful fame of De Quincey shed a backward gleam upon
his native place, which can still show the house where he was probably
born and the grammar-school he certainly ran away from. In my

forgetfulness, or my ignorance, that