Seven English Cities by W. D. Howells

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SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES

by

W. D. HOWELLS

Illustrated

[Illustration: A VIEW OF MONK BAR]

* * * * *

BOOKS OF TRAVEL AND COMMENT BY WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

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A LITTLE SWISS SOJOURN....................... .50

MY YEAR IN A LOG CABIN. Illustrated.......... .50

CRITICISM AND FICTION........................ 1.00

HEROINES OF FICTION. Illustrated............. net 3.75

IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES.................. 1.50

LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE. Ill'd..... 2.50

LITERATURE AND LIFE.......................... net 2.25

MODERN ITALIAN POETS. Illustrated............ 2.00

MY LITERARY PASSIONS......................... 1.75

STOPS OF VARIOUS QUILLS...................... 2.50
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* * * * *

CONTENTS

A MODEST LIKING FOR LIVERPOOL
SOME MERITS OF MANCHESTER
IN SMOKIEST SHEFFIELD
NINE DAYS' WONDER IN YORK
TWO YORKISH EPISODES
A DAY AT DONCASTER AND AN HOUR OUT OF DURHAM
THE MOTHER OF THE AMERICAN ATHENS
ABERYSTWYTH, A WELSH WATERING-PLACE
LLANDUDNO, ANOTHER WELSH WATERING-PLACE
GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH CHARACTER

* * * * *

ILLUSTRATIONS

A VIEW OF MONK BAR
ST. GEORGE'S HALL, LIVERPOOL
THE WELLINGTON MONUMENT, LIVERPOOL
THE LIVERPOOL DOCKS
MANCHESTER CATHEDRAL
TOWN HALL, MANCHESTER
THE MANCHESTER SHIP-CANAL
TOWN HALL, SHEFFIELD
YORK MINSTER--THE GRANDEST IN ALL ENGLAND
BOOTHAM BAR AND THE MINSTER
WALMGATE BAR HAS A BARBICAN
ST. MARY'S ABBEY
CLIFFORD'S TOWER
YORK AS SEEN FROM THE RIVER
DURHAM CATHEDRAL--NORTHWEST VIEW
FINCHALE PRIORY
DURHAM CATHEDRAL--ITS MATCHLESS SEAT ON THE BLUFFS OF THE RIVER
THE "STUMP" OF ST. BOTOLPH'S CHURCH AGAINST THE SKY
THE WORTHY ANCESTRESS OF FANEUIL HALL AND QUINCY MARKET-PLACES
THE RIVER AT EVENING
LIFTING ITS TOWER FROM THE BRINK OF THE WITHAM
FISHING-SHIPS AT GREAT GRIMSBY
THE BEACH, ABERYSTWYTH
ABERYSTWYTH FROM CRAIG GLAS ROCKS
LLANDUDNO--THE CITY AND HARBOR
LLANDUDNO FROM GREAT ORME'S NECK
THE GREAT PIER, LLANDUDNO
CONWAY CASTLE
PLAS MAWR
A PRESENTATION AT COURT
THE ENGLISH HOUSEMAID
LEADS A LIFE OF GAYETY ON THE SANDS

* * * * *

A MODEST LIKING FOR LIVERPOOL

Why should the proud stomach of American travel, much tossed in
the transatlantic voyage, so instantly have itself carried from
Liverpool to any point where trains will convey it? Liverpool is
most worthy to be seen and known, and no one who looks up from
the bacon and eggs of his first hotel breakfast after landing,
and finds himself confronted by the coal-smoked Greek
architecture of St. George's Hall, can deny that it is of a
singularly noble presence. The city has moments of failing in the
promise of this classic edifice, but every now and then it
reverts to it, and reminds the traveller that he is in a great
modern metropolis of commerce by many other noble edifices.

I

Liverpool does not remind him of this so much as the good and
true Baedeker professes, in the dockside run on the overhead
railway (as the place unambitiously calls its elevated road); but
then, as I noted in my account of Southampton, docks have a fancy
of taking themselves in, and eluding the tourist eye, and even
when they "flank the Mersey for a distance of 6-7 M." they do not
respond to American curiosity so frankly as could be wished. They
are like other English things in that, however, and it must be
said for them that when apparent they are sometimes unimpressive.
From my own note-book, indeed, I find that I pretended to think
them "wonderful and almost endless," and so I dare say they are.
But they formed only a very perfunctory interest of our day at
Liverpool, where we had come to meet, not to take, a steamer.

Our run from London, in the heart of June, was very quick and
pleasant, through a neat country and many tidy towns. In the
meadows the elms seemed to droop like our own rather than to hold
themselves oakenly upright like the English; the cattle stood
about in the yellow buttercups, knee-deep, white American
daisies, and red clover, and among the sheep we had our choice of
shorn and unshorn; they were equally abundant. Some of the
blossomy May was left yet on the hawthorns, and over all the sky
hovered, with pale-white clouds in pale-blue spaces of air like
an inverted lake of bonnyclabber. We stopped the night at
Chester, and the next evening, in the full daylight of 7.40, we
pushed on to Liverpool, over lovely levels, with a ground swell
like that of Kansas plains, under a sunset drying its tears and
at last radiantly smiling.

II

The hotel in Liverpool swarmed and buzzed with busy and murmurous
American arrivals. One could hardly get at the office window, on
account of them, to plead for a room. A dense group of our
countrywomen were buying picture-postals of the rather suave
office-ladies, and helplessly fawning on them in the inept
confidences of American women with all persons in official or
servile attendance. "Let me stay here," one of them entreated,
"because there's such a draught at the other window. May I?" She
was a gentle child of forty-five or fifty; and I do not know
whether she was allowed to stay in the sheltered nook or not,
tender creature. As she was in every one else's way there,
possibly she was harshly driven into the flaw at the other
window.

[Illustration: ST. GEORGE'S HALL, LIVERPOOL]

The place was a little America which swelled into a larger with
the arrivals of the successive steamers, though the soft swift
English trains bore our co-nationals away as rapidly as they
could. Many familiar accents remained till the morning, and the
breakfast-room was full of a nasal resonance which would have
made one at home anywhere in our East or West. I, who was then
vainly trying to be English, escaped to the congenial top of the
farthest bound tram, and flew, at the rate of four miles an hour,
to the uttermost suburbs of Liverpool, whither no rumor of my
native speech could penetrate. It was some balm to my wounded
pride of country to note how pale and small the average type of
the local people was. The poorer classes swarmed along a great
part of the tram-line in side streets of a hard, stony look, and
what characterized itself to me as a sort of iron squalor seemed
to prevail. You cannot anywhere have great prosperity without
great adversity, just as you cannot have day without night, and
the more Liverpool evidently flourished the more it plainly
languished. I found no pleasure in the paradox, and I was not
overjoyed by the inevitable ugliness of the brick villas of the
suburbs into which these obdurate streets decayed. But then,
after divers tram changes, came the consolation of beautiful
riverside beaches, thronged with people who looked gay at that
distance, and beyond the Mersey rose the Welsh hills, blue, blue.

III

At the end of the tram-line, where we necessarily dismounted, we
rejected a thatched cottage, offering us tea, because we thought
it too thatched and too cottage to be quite true (though I do not
now say that there were vermin in the straw roof), and accepted
the hospitality of a pastry-cook's shop. We felt the more at home
with the kind woman who kept it because she had a brother at
Chicago in the employ of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, and had
once been in Stratford-on-Avon; this doubly satisfied us as
cultivated Americans. She had a Welsh name, and she testified to
a great prevalence of Welsh and Irish in the population of
Liverpool; besides, she sent us to a church of the Crusaders at
Little Crosby, and it was no fault of hers that we did not find
it. We found one of the many old crosses for which Little Crosby
is named, and this was quite as much as we merited. It stood at
the intersection of the streets in what seemed the fragment of a
village, not yet lost in the vast maw of the city, and it calmed
all the simple neighborhood, so that we sat down at its foot and
rested a long, long minute till the tram came by and took us back
into the loud, hard heart of Liverpool.

I do not mean to blame it, for it was no louder or harder than
the hearts of other big towns, and it had some alleviation from
the many young couples who were out together half-holidaying in
the unusually pleasant Saturday weather. I wish their complexions
had been better, but you cannot have South-of-England color if
you live as far north as Liverpool, and all the world knows what
the American color is. The young couples abounded in the Gallery
of Fine Arts, where they frankly looked at one another instead of
the pictures. The pictures might have been better, but then they
might have been worse (there being examples of Filippo Lippi,
Memmi, Holbein, and, above all, the _Dante's Dream_ of
Rossetti); and in any case those couples could come and see them
when they were old men and women; but now they had one another in
a moment of half-holiday which could not last forever.

In the evening there were not so many lovers at the religious
meetings before the classic edifice opposite the hotel, where the
devotions were transacted with the help of a brass-band; but
there were many youths smoking short pipes, and flitting from one
preacher to another, in the half-dozen groups. Some preachers
were nonconformist, but there was one perspiring Anglican priest
who labored earnestly with his hearers, and who had more of his
aspirates in the right place. Many of his hearers were in the
rags which seem a favorite wear in Liverpool, and I hope his
words did their poor hearts good.

Slightly apart from the several congregations, I found myself
with a fellow-foreigner of seafaring complexion who addressed me
in an accent so unlike my own American that I ventured to answer
him in Italian. He was indeed a Genoese, who had spent much time
in Buenos Ayres and was presently thinking of New York; and we
had some friendly discourse together concerning the English. His
ideas of them were often so parallel with my own that I hardly
know how to say he thought them an improvident people. I owned
that they spent much more on state, or station, than the
Americans; but we neither had any censure for them otherwise. He
was of that philosophic mind which one is rather apt to encounter
in the Latin races, and I could well wish for his further
acquaintance. His talk rapt me to far other and earlier scenes,
and I seemed to be conversing with him under a Venetian heaven,
among objects of art more convincing than the equestrian statue
of the late Queen, who had no special motive I could think of for
being shown to her rightly loving subjects on horseback. We
parted with the expressed hope of seeing each other again, and if
this should meet his eye and he can recall the pale young man,
with the dark full beard, who chatted with him between the
pillars of the Piazzetta, forty years before our actual encounter
I would be glad of his address.

IV

How strange are the uses of travel! There was a time when the
mention of Liverpool would have conjured up for me nothing but
the thought of Hawthorne, who spent divers dull consular years
there, and has left a record of them which I had read, with the
wish that it were cheerfuler. Yet, now, here on the ground his
feet might have trod, and in the very smoke he breathed, I did
not once think of him. I thought as little of that poor Felicia
Hemans, whose poetry filled my school-reading years with the roar
of the wintry sea breaking from the waveless Plymouth Bay on the
stern and rock-bound coast where the Pilgrim Fathers landed on a
bowlder measuring eight by ten feet, now fenced in against the
predatory hammers and chisels of reverent visitors. I knew that
Gladstone was born at Liverpool, but not Mrs. Oliphant, and the
only literary shade I could summon from a past vague enough to my
ignorance was William Roscoe, whose _Life of Leo X._, in the
Bohn Library, had been too much for my young zeal when my zeal
was still young. My other memories of Liverpool have been
acquired since my visit, and I now recur fondly to the
picturesque times when King John founded a castle there, to the
prouder times when Sir Francis Bacon represented it in
Parliament; or again to the brave days when it resisted Prince
Rupert for three weeks, and the inglorious epoch when the new
city (it was then only some four or five hundred years old) began
to flourish on the trade in slaves with the colonies of the
Spanish Main, and on the conjoint and congenial traffic in rum,
sugar, and tobacco.

[Illustration: THE WELLINGTON MONUMENT, LIVERPOOL]

It will be suspected from these reminiscences that I have been
studying a page of fine print in Baedeker, and I will not deceive
the reader. It is true; but it is also true that I had some
wonder, altogether my own, that so great a city should make so
small an appeal to the imagination. In this it outdoes almost any
metropolis of our own. Even in journalism, an intensely modern
product, it does not excel; Manchester has its able and well-
written _Guardian_, but what has Liverpool? Glasgow has its
Glasgow School of Painting, but again what has Liverpool? It is
said that not above a million of its people live in it; all the
rest, who can, escape to Chester, where they perhaps vainly hope
to escape the Americans. There, intrenched in charming villas
behind myrtle hedges, they measurably do so; but Americans are
very penetrating, and I would not be sure that the thickest and
highest hedge was invulnerable to them. As it is, they probably
constitute the best society of Liverpool, which the natives have
abandoned to them, though they do not constitute it permanently,
but consecutively. Every Cunarder, every White Star, pours out
upon a city abandoned by its own good society a flood of
cultivated Americans, who eddy into its hotels, and then rush out
of them by every train within twenty-four hours, and often within
twenty-five minutes. They understand that there are no objects of
interest in Liverpool; and they are not met at the Customs with
invitations to breakfast, luncheon, and dinner from the people of
rank and fashion with whom they have come to associate. These
have their stately seats in the lovely neighboring country, but
they are not at the landing-stage, and even the uncultivated
American cannot stay for the vast bourgeoisie of which Liverpool,
like the cities of his own land, is composed. Our own cities have
a social consciousness, and are each sensible of being a centre,
with a metropolitan destiny; but the strange thing about
Liverpool and the like English towns is that they are without any
social consciousness. Their meek millions are socially unborn;
they can come into the world only in London, and in their
prenatal obscurity they remain folded in a dreamless silence,
while all the commercial and industrial energies rage round them
in a gigantic maturity.

V

The time was when Liverpool was practically the sole port of
entry for our human cargoes, indentured apprentices of the
beautiful, the historical. With the almost immediate transference
of the original transatlantic steamship interests from Bristol,
Liverpool became the only place where you could arrive. American
lines, long erased from the seas, and the Inman line, the Cunard
line, the White Star line, and the rest, would land you nowhere
else. Then heretical steamers began to land you at Glasgow; worse
schismatics carried you to Southampton; there were heterodox
craft that touched at Plymouth, and now great swelling agnostics
bring you to London itself. Still, Liverpool remains the greatest
port of entry for our probationers, who are bound out to the
hotels and railroad companies of all Europe till they have
morally paid back their fare. The superstition that if you go in
a Cunarder you can sleep on both ears is no longer so exclusive
as it once was; yet the Cunarder continues an ark of safety for
the timid and despairing, and the cooking is so much better than
it used to be that if in contravention of the old Cunard rule
against a passenger's being carried overboard you do go down, you
may be reasonably sure of having eaten something that the
wallowing sea-monsters will like in you.

[Illustration: THE LIVERPOOL DOCKS]

I have tried to give some notion of the fond behavior of the
arriving Americans in the hotels; no art can give the impression
of their exceeding multitude. Expresses, panting with as much
impatience as the disciplined English expresses ever suffer
themselves to show, await them in the stations, which are
effectively parts of the great hotels, and whir away to London
with them as soon as they can drive up from the steamer; but many
remain to rest, to get the sea out of their heads and legs, and
to prepare their spirits for adjustment to the novel conditions.
These the successive trains carry into the heart of the land
everywhere, these and their baggage, to which they continue
attached by their very heart-strings, invisibly stretching from
their first-class corridor compartments to the different luggage-
vans. I must say they have very tenderly, very perfectly imagined
us, all those hotel people and railroad folk, and fold us,
anxious and bewildered exiles, in a reassuring and consoling
embrace which leaves all their hands--they are Briarean--free for
the acceptance of our wide, wild tips. You may trust yourself
implicitly to their care, but if you are going to Oxford do not
trust the head porter who tells you to take the London and
Northwestern, for then you will have to change four times on the
way and at every junction personally see that your baggage is
unladen and started anew to its destination.

* * * * *

SOME MERITS OF MANCHESTER

I will suppose the reader not to be going to Oxford, but, in
compliance with the scheme of this paper, to Manchester, where
there is perhaps no other reason for his going. He will there,
for one thing, find the supreme type of the railroad hotel which
in England so promptly shelters and so kindly soothes the
fluttered exile. At Manchester, even more than at Liverpool, we
are imagined in the immense railroad station hotel, which is
indeed perhaps superorganized and over-convenienced after an
American ideal: one does not, for instance, desire a striking, or
even a ticking, clock in the transom above one's bedroom door;
but the like type of hotel is to be found at every great railroad
centre or terminal in England, and it is never to be found quite
bad, though of course it is sometimes better and sometimes worse.
It is hard to know if it is more hotel or more station; perhaps
it is a mixture of each which defies analysis; but in its well-
studied composition you pass, as it were, from your car to your
room, as from one chamber to another. This is putting the fact
poetically; but, prosaically, the intervening steps are few at
the most; and when you have entered your room your train has
ceased to be. The simple miracle would be impossible in America,
where our trains, when not shrieking at the tops of their
whistles, are backing and filling with a wild clangor of their
bells, and making a bedlam of their stations; but in England they

"Come like shadows, so depart,"

and make no sound within the vast caravansary where the enchanted
traveller has changed from them into a world of dreams.

I

These hotels are, next to the cathedrals, perhaps the greatest
wonder of England, and in Manchester the railway hotel is in some
ways more wonderful than the cathedral, which is not so much
planned on our native methods. Yet this has the merit, if it is a
merit, of antedating our Discovery by nearly a century, and pre-
historically it is indefinitely older. My sole recorded
impression of it is that I found it smelling strongly of coal-
gas, such as comes up the register when your furnace is
mismanaged; but that is not strange in such a manufacturing
centre; and it would be paltering with the truth not to own a
general sense of the beauty and grandeur in it which no English
cathedral is without. The morning was fitly dim and chill, and
one could move about in the vague all the more comfortably for
the absence of that appeal of thronging monuments which harasses
and bewilders the visitor in other cathedrals; one could really
give one's self up to serious emotion, and not be sordidly and
rapaciously concerned with objects of interest. Manchester has
been an episcopal see only some fifty years; before that the
cathedral was simply T' Owd Church, and in this character it is
still venerable, and is none the less so because of the statue of
Oliver Cromwell which holds the chief place in the open square
before it. Call it an incongruity, if you will, but that enemy of
episcopacy is at least not accused of stabling his horses in The
Old Church at Manchester, or despoiling it of its sacred images
and stained glass, and he merits a monument there if anywhere.

[Illustration: MANCHESTER CATHEDRAL]

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,"

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.

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