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.