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 Manchester was the mother of this tricksy master-spirit
of English prose, who was an idol of my youth, I failed to visit either
house. The renown of Cobden and of Bright is precious to a larger world
than mine; and the name of the stalwart Quaker friend of man is dear
to every American who remembers the heroic part he played in our behalf
during our war for the Union. It is one of the amusing anomalies of
the British constitution, that the great city from whose political
fame these names are inseparable should have had no representation in
Parliament from Cromwell’s time to Victoria’s. Fancy Akron, Ohio, or
Grand Rapids, Michigan, without a member of Congress!
[Illustration: TOWN HALL, MANCHESTER]
The “Manchester school” of political economy has long since passed
into reproach if not obloquy with people for whom a byword is a potent
weapon, and perhaps the easiest they can handle, and I am not myself
so extreme a _laissez-faireist_ as to have thought of that school with
pathos in the city of its origin; but I dare say it was a good thing
in its time. We are only now slowly learning how to apply the opposite
social principles in behalf of the Man rather than the Master, and
we have not yet surmounted all the difficulties or dangers of the
experiment. It is droll how, in a tolerably well-meaning world like
this, any sort of contempt becomes inclusive, and a whole population
suffers for the vice, or it may be the virtue, of a very small majority,
or a very powerful minority. Probably the most liberal and intelligent
populations of Great Britain are those of Manchester and Birmingham,
names which have stood for a hard and sordid industrialism, unrelieved
by noble sympathies and impulses. It is quite possible that a less
generous spirit than mine would have censured the “Manchester school”
for the weather of the place, and found in its cold gray light the
effect of the Gradgrind philosophy which once wrapt a world of fiction
in gloom.