The Manchester Man

MRS. BANKS’S NOVELS. THE MANCHESTER MAN.
THE FIGHT IN THE COLLEGE YARD.
Author of “God’s Providence House, Glory,” &c.
Tenth Edition.
OLD MARKET STREET.
Manchester: ABEL HEYWOOD & SON, 56 & 58, OLDHAM STREET, London: SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT & Co., Limited. STATIONERS’ HALL COURT. 1897.

THE MANCHESTER MAN.
And only an antiquary or a very old inhabitant can recall Manchester as it was at the close of the last century, and shutting his eyes upon railway-arch, station, and esplanade, upon Palatine buildings, broad roadways, and river embankments, can see the Irk and the Irwell as they were when the Cathedral was the Collegiate Church, with a diminutive brick wall round its ancient graveyard. Then the irregular-fronted rows of quaint old houses which still, under the name of Half Street, crowd upon two sides of the churchyard, with only an intervening strip of a flagged walk between, closed it up on a third side, and shut the river (lying low beneath) from the view, with a huddled mass of still older dwellings, some of which were thrust out of sight, and were only to be reached by flights of break-neck steps of rock or stone, and like their hoary fellows creeping down the narrow roadway of Hunt’s Bank, overhung the Irwell, and threatened to topple into it some day.
The Chetham Hospital or College still looks solidly down on the Irk at the angle of the streams; the old Grammar School has been suffered to do the same; and—thanks to the honest workmen who built for our ancestors—the long lines of houses known as Long Millgate are for the most part standing, and on the river side have resisted the frequent floods of centuries.
In 1799 that line was almost unbroken, from the College (where it commenced at Hunt’s Bank Bridge) to Red Bank. The little alley by the Town Mill, called Mill-brow, which led down to the wooden Mill Bridge, was little more of a gap than those narrow entries or passages which pierced the walls like slits here and there, and offered dark and perilous passage to courts and alleys, trending in steep incline to the very bed of the Irk. The houses themselves had been good originally, and were thus cramped together for defence in perilous times, when experience taught that a narrow gorge was easier held against warlike odds than an open roadway.