LIVERPOOL.
When you land on the platform, if you can afford it, go to the Adelphi Hotel, where the accommodation is first-rate, but the charges about the same as in Bond Street or St. James’s Street, London.
There are others to suit all purses, and plenty of dining-houses on the London system, so that it is not absolutely necessary to submit to the dear and often indifferent dinners which are the rule in the coffee-rooms of most English hotels.
Liverpool has no antiquities of any mark; the public buildings and works worth seeing are few but important, although a page might be filled with the names of Institutions of various kinds.
By far the most interesting, original, and important, are those connected with the commerce of the town. That is to say, the docks and the gigantic arrangements at the railways for goods’ traffic. St. George’s Hall, a splendid building in the Corinthian style, containing the Law Courts and a hall for public meetings, as a sort of supplement to the Town-hall, meets the view immediately on leaving the railway station. The Mechanics’ Institution in Mount Street, one of the finest establishments of the kind in the kingdom, provides an excellent education for the young, and for adults, at a very cheap rate.
A Collegiate Institution, opened in 1843, for affording a first-class education on the plan of the Durham and Marlborough Colleges, at a less expense than at Oxford or Cambridge, is to be found at Everton in a handsome Elizabethan building.
The Town-hall, with its auxiliary buildings, encloses the Exchange on three sides. The vestibule contains a statue of George Canning by Chantrey: in the centre of the Exchange stands a monument to Nelson, which we cannot admire. On the occasion of an invitation to dinner from the Mayor, or of a grand ball, it is worth while to penetrate beyond the vestibule, otherwise the walk through tolerably handsome rooms is scarcely worth the trouble, although it costs nothing.
The immense News-rooms of the Exchange, under one of the Arcades, are open to every respectable stranger introduced,—we may almost say without introduction. There are several other News-rooms with libraries attached. The Lyceum in Bold Street, and the Athenæum in Church Street, which was founded by purchases from the library of William Roscoe, contain a number of valuable works of reference.
The Royal Institution of Science and Literature, founded by William Roscoe in 1814, by the subscription of shareholders, contains a museum of natural history of considerable value, some curious pictures, a set of casts from the Ægina and Phigaleian marbles, and a collection of philosophical instruments, with a laboratory and a theatre in which lectures are occasionally delivered. This Institution is not flourishing. It was lately offered to the Corporation as a free gift by the proprietors, on condition that the museum, etc., were to be open free to the town. The offer was declined by a small majority.
There are several cemeteries, one of which has been ingeniously arranged in an exhausted stone quarry, and contains a marble statue of Huskisson, by Gibson, commemorating the facts of his having represented Liverpool in several Parliaments, and been killed on the 15th Sept., 1830, by a locomotive, at the opening of the Manchester and Liverpool Railway. On the last occasion of his election for Liverpool, in conjunction with the late General Gascoigne, without opposition, the windows of Huskisson’s friends were smashed by the High Tory mob which accompanied Gascoigne’s chairing procession. Such are the changes of time. Where could a High Tory mob be found now, or who now differs with the mild liberalism of Huskisson?
A Workhouse on a very extensive scale, capable of affording indoor relief to 1800; a Blind Asylum, celebrated for the singing of the inmates, two Infirmaries, are far from completing the list of public institutions of a town with nearly 400,000 inhabitants; but, in the greater number, resemble all other institutions of the same kind, and, for the rest, a local guide may be consulted.
The best part of the town may be seen in a walk from St. Lukes’ Church at the top of Bold Street, a short distance from the Adelphi Hotel, through Church Street, Lord Street, crossing Castle Street, down to St. George’s Pier. By this line the best and the busiest streets of Liverpool will be seen, with shops nearly equal to the finest in London, and with customers in fine ladies, who are quite as pretty, and much more finely dressed, than the residents of that paradise of provincial belles, Belgravia. Indeed both sexes in this town are remarkable for their good looks and fashionable costume, forming a strong contrast to the more busy inhabitants of Manchester.
In Bold Street is the Palatine, a miniature copy of the Clubs of Pall Mall: at the doors and windows may be seen, in the intervals of business, a number of young gentlemen trying very hard to look as if they had nothing to do but dress fine and amuse themselves. But so far from being the idle fellows they would be thought, the majority are hardworking merchants and pains-taking attornies, who bet a little, play a little, dote upon a lord, and fancy that by being excessively supercilious in the rococo style of that poor heathen bankrupt Brummel, they are performing to perfection the character of men of fashion. This, the normal state of young Liverpool, at a certain period the butterfly becomes a grub, a money grub, and abandoning brilliant cravats, primrose gloves, and tight shiny boots, subsides into the respectable heavy father of genteel comedy, becomes a churchwarden, a patron of charities, a capitalist, and a highly respectable member of society. The Manchester man is abrupt, because his whole soul is in the money-making business of the day; the Liverpool gentleman’s icy manners are part of his costume. The “cordial dodge,” which has superseded Brummel’s listless style in the really fashionable world, not having yet found its way down by the express train to the great mart of cotton-wool.
‘Change hours, which are twice a-day, morning and afternoon, afford a series of picturesque groups quite different to those of any other town, which should be kept in mind when visiting Manchester.
But perhaps the pleasantest thing in Liverpool is a promenade on one of the piers, or rather quays (for they run along and do not project into the river) when the tide is coming in, the wind fair for the Mersey, and fleets of merchantmen are driving up with full-bellied sails to take their anchorage ground before going into dock. An examination of the Docks, with the curious Dock arrangements of the Railway Companies, and the Sailor’s Home, of which Prince Albert laid the first stone in 1846, will take a day. The Cheshire side of the Mersey forms a suburb of Liverpool, to which steamers are plying every ten minutes from the villages of Rock Ferry, Tranmere, Birkenhead, Monk’s Ferry, Seacombe, Liskeard, Egremont, and New Brighton. The best idea of the extent of the Liverpool Docks may be obtained from the Seacombe Hotel, an old-fashioned tavern, with a bowling green, where turtle soup, cold punch, and claret are to be had of good quality at moderate charges.
In fine weather a seat after dinner at the window of this tavern is not a bad place for considering the origin, rise, progress, and prospects of the commerce of Liverpool. There is the river, with its rapidly-flowing muddy waters before you, ploughed in all directions by boats, by ships, by steamers, by river barges and flats; on the opposite side five miles of Docks, wherein rise forest after forest of masts, fluttering, if it be a gala day, with the flags of every nation—Russian, Sardinian, Greek, Turkish, French, Austrian, but chiefly, after our own, with the stripes and stars of the Great Republic.
No better text for such a contemplation can be found than the following inscription, copied from the model, contributed by Liverpool to the Great Exhibition of Industry:—
PROGRESS OF THE COMMERCE OF LIVERPOOL.
Under Queen Elizabeth, | Queen Anne, | Queen Victoria,
A.D.1570. | A.D.1710. | A.D.1850.
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Population. 800 | 8,168 | About 400,000
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Tonnage [{151}] 268 | 12,636 | 3,336,337
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Number of 15 | 334 | 20,457
Vessels | |
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Dock Dues. - | £600 | £211,743
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Income of £20 | £1,115 | £139,152
Corporation | |
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Customs Dues £272 | £70,000 | £3,366,284
This extraordinary progress, of which we have far from seen the limits, has been founded and supported by a position which every commercial change, every new invention relating to sea-borne coasting trade, or inland conveyance, has strengthened.
The discovery of the passage around the Cape of Good Hope, and improvements in the art of navigation, destroyed the commercial importance of Venice, and extinguished a line of river ports from Antwerp to Cologne. In our own country, the Cinque Ports, Harwich, Great Grimsby, and other havens, fell into decay when navigators no longer cared to hurry into the first harbour on coming within sight of land. But Liverpool, situated on the banks of a river which, until buoyed and improved at a vast expense, was a very inferior port for safety and convenience, has profited by the changes which have rendered the American the most important of our foreign customers, and Ireland as easily reached as Runcorn in a sailing flat.
The rise of the cotton manufacture has been as beneficial to Liverpool as to those districts where the yarn is spun and woven. The canal system has fed, not rivalled or “tapped,” the trade of the Mersey. The steamboats on which the seafaring population of Liverpool at first looked with dislike and dismay, have created for their town—first, a valuable coasting trade, independent of wind or tide, which with sailing vessels on such a coast and with such a river could never have existed; and next, a transatlantic commerce, which, through Liverpool, renders New York nearer to Manchester than Dublin was five and twenty years ago; while, at the same time, the opposite coast of Cheshire has been transformed into a suburb, to which omnibus-steamers ply every five minutes. And yet little more than five and twenty years ago there was only one river steamer on the Mersey, and that a flat bottomed cattle boat, with one wheel in the centre.
Bristol took the lead in establishing transatlantic steamers; but Liverpool, backed by Manchester, transplanted to her own waters the new trade, and even the steamers that proved the problem.
Railways (the only great idea in this generation that Liverpool has ventured to originate and execute) have not, as was promised, transferred any part of the Liverpool trade to Manchester; but, on the contrary, largely increased and strengthened their connection with the cotton metropolis. An hour now takes the cotton broker to his manufacturing customers twice a week, who formerly rose at five o’clock in the morning to travel by coach in four hours to Manchester, and returned wearied at midnight.
The Electric Telegraph, the next great invention of this commercial age was not less beneficial to this port by facilitating the rapid interchange of communication with the manufacturing districts, and settling the work of days in a few hours. A hundred miles apart merchants can now converse, question, propose, and bargain.
By all these improvements uncertainties have been reduced to certainties, and capital has been more than doubled in value. On the expected day, well calculated beforehand, the steamer arrives from America; with the rapidity of lightning the news she brings is transmitted to Manchester, to Birmingham, to Sheffield, to London, to Glasgow; a return message charters a ship, and a single day is enough to bring down the manufactured freight. Thus news can be received and transmitted, a cargo of raw material landed, manufactured goods brought down by rail from the interior of England, and put on board a vessel and despatched, in less time than it occupied a few years ago to send a letter to Manchester and get an answer.
And under all these changes, while commerce grows and grows, the porters and the brokers, the warehousemen and the merchants, are able to take toll on the consumption of England.
Even the old dangerous roadstead, and far-falling tides of the Mersey, proved an advantage to Liverpool; by driving the inhabitants to commence the construction of Docks before any other port in the kingdom, and thus obtain a certain name and position in the mercantile world, from having set an example which cities provided with more safe and convenient natural harbours were unwilling to follow.
The first Dock ever constructed in England is now the site of the Liverpool Custom House; a large building erected at a period when our architects considered themselves bound to lodge all public institutions in Grecian temples.
This Dock was constructed in 1708, and twelve others have since been added, occupying the shore from north to south for several miles, including one which will accommodate steamers of the largest class. These Docks are far from perfect in their landing arrangements. Cargo is discharged in all but one, into open sheds. The damage and losses by pilferage of certain descriptions of goods are enormous. Attempts have been repeatedly made to establish warehouses round the docks into which goods might be discharged without the risk or expense of intermediate cartage. But the influence of parties possessed of warehouse property is too great to allow the execution of so advantageous a reform. Whigs and Radicals are, in this instance, as determined conservators of abuses which are not time-honoured as any Member for Lincoln City or Oxford University.
In 1764 more than half the African slave trade was carried on by Liverpool merchants. The canal system commenced by the Duke of Bridgewater next gave Liverpool an improved inland communication. After Arkwright’s manufactures stimulated the trade of America, cotton imports into Liverpool soon began to rival the sugar and tobacco imports into Bristol. The Irish trade was rising at the same time, and the comparatively short distance between the midland counties, where Irish livestock was chiefly consumed, soon brought the Irish traders to Liverpool. The progress of steam navigation presently gave new openings to the coasting trade of Liverpool. In 1826 the admirable canal system, which united Liverpool with the coal and manufacturing districts in the kingdom, was found insufficient to accommodate the existing traffic, and the railroad was the result. By the railroad system Liverpool has been brought within an hour of Manchester, two hours of Leeds, and four hours of London; and into equally easy, cheap, and certain communication with every part of England and Scotland; while fully retaining all the advantages of being the halfway house between the woollen districts, the iron districts, and the cotton districts, and America—the intermediate broker between New Orleans, Charleston, New York, and Manchester.
Six-sevenths of all the woollen imported into England comes through Liverpool, besides a large trade in sugar, tobacco, tea, rice, hemp, and every kind of Irish produce.
Thus Liverpool is in a position to take toll on the general consumption of the kingdom; and this toll in the shape of dock dues, added to the increase in the value of landed property, occupied by warehouses, shops, and private residences, has enabled the municipal corporation to bestow on the inhabitants fine buildings, and greatly improve the originally narrow streets. Liverpool has no manufactures of any special importance. Few ships are built there in comparison with the demands of the trade, in consequence of the docks having taken up most of the space formerly occupied by the building-yards. The repairs of ships are executed in public graving docks, chiefly by workmen of a humble standing, called pitchpot masters,—a curious system, whether advantageous or not to all parties, is a matter of dispute.
The environs of Liverpool are particularly ugly, remarkably flat, and deficient in wood and water. There are scarcely any rides or drives of any kind. The best suburb, called Toxteth Park, although no park at all, lies on the southern side of the town, parallel with the Mersey. In this direction the wealthiest merchants have erected their residences, some of great size and magnificence, surrounded by pleasure-grounds and fancy farms, presenting very favourable instances of the rural tastes of our countrymen in every rank of life. But there is nothing in the environs of Liverpool to make a special ride necessary, unless a stranger possesses a passport to one of the mansions or cottages of gentility to be found on each side of the macadamized road behind rich plantations, where hospitality is distributed with splendour, and not without taste.
The north shore of the Mersey consists of flat sands, bounded on the land side by barren sand hills, where, driven by necessity, and tempted by a price something lower than land usually bears near Liverpool, some persons have courageously built houses and reclaimed gardens. On this shore are the two watering-place villages of Waterloo and Crosby, less populous, but as pleasant as Margate, with salt river instead of salt sea bathing, in shade and plenty of dust. The hard flat sands, when the tide is down, afford room for pleasant gallops.
The best settlement on the opposite shore, called New Brighton, has the same character, but enjoys a share of the open Irish sea, with its keen breezes. It must be bracing, healthy, dreary, and dull.
* * * * *
BIRKENHEAD is a great town, which has risen as rapidly as an American city, and with the same fits and starts. Magical prosperity is succeeded by a general insolvency among builders and land speculators; after a few years of fallow another start takes place, and so on—speculation follows speculation. Birkenhead has had about four of these high tides of prosperous speculations, in which millions sterling have been gained and lost. At each ebb a certain number of the George Hudsons of the place are swamped, but the town always gains a square, a street, a park, a church, a market-place, a bit of railway, or a bit of a dock. The fortunes of the men perish, but the town lives and thrives. Thus piece by piece the raw materials of a large thriving community are provided, and now Birkenhead is as well furnished with means for accommodating a large population as any place in England, and has been laid out on so good a plan that it will be one of the healthiest as well as one of the neatest modern towns. It has also the tools of commerce in a splendid free dock, not executed so wisely as it would have been if Mr. Rendel, the original engineer, (the first man of the day as a marine engineer), had not been overruled by the penny-wise pound-foolish people, but still a very fine dock. Warehouses much better planned than anything in Liverpool; railways giving communication with the manufacturing districts; in fact, all the tools of commerce—gas, water, a park, and sanitary regulations, have not been neglected.
Some people think Birkenhead will be the rival of Liverpool, we think not: it will be a dependency or suburb of the greater capital. “Where the carcase is, there the eagles will be gathered together.” Birkenhead is too near to be a rival; shipping must eventually come to Birkenhead, but the business will still continue to be done in Liverpool or Manchester, where are vested interests and established capital.
An hour or two will be enough to see everything worth seeing at Birkenhead. To those who enjoy the sight of the river and shipping, it is not a bad plan to stop at one of the hotels there, as boats cross every five minutes, landing at a splendid iron pontoon, or floating stage, on the Liverpool side, of large dimensions, constructed with great skill by Mr. W. Cubitt, C.E., to avoid the nuisance of landing carriages at all times, and passengers at low tides in boats.
At Liskeard, a ferry on the Cheshire side, Mr. Harold Littledale—a member of one of the first firms in Liverpool—has established a model dairy farm, perhaps one of the finest establishments of the kind in the kingdom.
All the buildings and arrangements have been executed from the plans and directions of Mr. William Torr, the well known scientific farmer and short-horn breeder, of Aylsby Manor, Lincolnshire. No expense has been spared in obtaining the best possible workmanship and implements, but there has been no waste in foolish experiments; and, consequently, there is all the difference between the farm of a rich man who spends money profusely, in order to teach himself farming, and a farm like that at Liskeard, where a rich man had said to an agriculturist, at once scientific and practical, “Spare no expense, and make me the best thing that money can make.”
The buildings, including a residence, cottages, and gardens, occupy about four acres, and the farm consists of 350 acres of strong clay land, which has been thoroughly drained and profusely manured, with the object of getting from it the largest possible crops. Fifty tons of turnips have been obtained from an acre.
Eighty cows are kept in the shippons, ranged in rows, facing the paths by which they are all fed at the head. They are fed on turnips, mangels, or potatoes, with cut chaff of hay and straw, everything suitable being cut and steamed, in the winter—on green clover, Italian ray-grass, and a little linseed-cake, in the summer. They are curry-combed twice a day, and the dung is removed constantly as it falls. The ventilation and the drainage has been better managed than in most houses, so that the shippons have always a sweet atmosphere and even temperature. The fittings, fastenings, and arrangements of the windows, hanging from little railways, and sliding instead of closing on hinges, are all ingenious, and worth examination. Mr. Littledale makes use of a moveable wooden railway, carted over by a donkey in a light waggon, to draw root crops from a field of heavy land.
The churn in use in the dairy makes eighty pounds of butter at a time, and is worked by the steam-engine also used for cutting and steaming the food of the cows. The milk and cream produced at this dairy is sold by retail, unadulterated, and is in great demand. A brief account of this farm appeared in the “Farmer’s Magazine” of May, 1848, with a ground plan; but several improvements have been made since that time. To parties who take an interest in agricultural improvement, a visit to Liskeard Farm will be both interesting and profitable.
We believe that Mr. Torr also farms another estate, which he purchased, in conjunction with friends, from Sir William Stanley, at Eastham, near Hooton (a pleasant voyage of an hour up the river), and cultivates after the North Lincolnshire style, in such a manner as to set an example to the Cheshire farmers—not a little needed. The country about Eastham is the prettiest part of the Mersey.
While on the subject of agricultural improvements, we may mention that Mr. Robert Neilson, another mercantile notability, holds a farm, under Lord Stanley, at a short railroad ride from Liverpool, which we have not yet had an opportunity of examining, but understand that it is a very remarkable instance of good farming, and consequently heavy crops, in a county (Lancashire) where slovenly farming is quite the rule, and well worth a visit from competent judges, whom as we are also informed Mr. Neilson is happy to receive.
If, as seems not improbable, it should become the fashion among our merchant princes to seek health and relaxation by applying capital and commercial principles to land, good farming will spread, by force of vaccination, over the country, and plain tenant-farmers will apply, cheaply and economically, the fruits of experience, purchased dearly, although not too dearly, by merchant farmers. A successful man may as well—nay, much better—sink money for a small return in such a wholesome and useful pursuit as agriculture, than in emulating the landed aristocracy, who laugh quietly at such efforts, or hoarding and speculating to add to what is already more than enough.
If a visit be paid to Mr. Neilson’s farm, it would be very desirable to obtain, if possible, permission to view the Earl of Derby’s collection of rare birds and animals, one of the finest in the world. But permission is rarely granted to strangers who have not some scientific claim to the favour. Lord Derby has agents collecting for him in every part of the world, and has been very successful in rearing many birds from tropical and semi-tropical countries in confinement, which have baffled the efforts of zoological societies. The aviaries are arranged on a large scale, with shrubs growing in and water flowing through them. In fine weather some beautiful parrots, macaws, and other birds of a tame kind, are permitted to fly about the grounds. There is something very novel and striking in beholding brilliant macaws and cockatoos swinging on a lofty green-leaved bough, and then, at the call of the keeper, darting down to be fed where stately Indian and African cranes and clumsy emus are stalking about.
The late Earl was celebrated as a cockfighter, and the possessor of one of the finest breeds of game fowls in the kingdom. A few only are now kept up at Knowsley, as presents to the noble owner’s friends. Knowsley lies near Prescott, about seven miles from Liverpool. The family are descended from the Lord Stanley who was created Earl of Derby by the Earl of Lancaster and Derby, afterwards Henry IV., for services rendered at the battle of Bosworth Field. An ancestress, Charlotte de la Tremouille, Countess of Derby, is celebrated for her defence of Latham House against the Parliamentary forces in the Great Civil War, and is one of the heroines of Sir Walter Scott’s novel of “Peveril of the Peak.” [{159}]
Liverpool is particularly well placed as a starting point for excursions, in consequence of the number of railways with which it is connected, and the number of steamboats which frequent its port, where a whole dock is especially devoted to vessels of that class.
By crossing over to Birkenhead, Chester may be reached, and thence the quietest route to Ireland, by Britannia Bridge and Holyhead; or a journey through North Wales may be commenced. By the East Lancashire, starting from the Station behind the Exchange, a direct line is opened through Ormskirk to Preston, the lakes of Cumberland, and to Scotland by the west coast line.
From the same station a circuitous route through Wigan and Bolton, on the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway, opens a second road to Manchester, and affords a complete communication with the manufacturing districts of Lancashire and Yorkshire.
On the roads to London it is not now necessary to treat.
The steam accommodation from Liverpool has always been excellent, far superior to that afforded in the Thames. No such wretched slow-sailing tubs are to be found as those which plied between London and Boulogne and Calais, until railway competition introduced a little improvement. The interior fittings and feeding on board Liverpool boats are generally superior. The proprietors have taken the Scotch and Americans as models, and not the stingy people of the Thames.
It is very odd that while the French and Scotch can contrive to give a delicious breakfast or dinner on shipboard, while the Germans on the Rhine are positively luxurious, and while we know that a steam-boiler offers every convenience for petits plats, the real old English steam-boats of the General Steam Navigation Company never vary from huge joints and skinny chickens, with vegetables plain boiled.
We remember, some years ago, embarking on a splendid French steamer, afterwards run down and sunk in the Channel, to go to Havre, and returning by Boulogne to London. In the French vessel it was almost impossible to keep from eating,—soups, cutlets, plump fowls, all excellent and not dear. On board the English boat it was necessary to be very hungry, in order to attack the solid, untempting joints of roast and boiled.
This is a travelling age, and both hotel keepers and steam-boat owners will find profit in allowing the spirit of free trade and interchange to extend to the kitchen. Our public cooks are always spoiling the best meat and vegetables in Europe.
More than twenty lines of steamers ply from Liverpool to the various ports of Ireland; the Isle of Man, which is a favourite watering-place for the Lancashire and Cheshire people; Glasgow and other parts of Scotland, Whitehaven and Carlisle, Bangor, Caernarvon, and other ports of Wales, beside the deep-sea steamers to New York, Philadelphia, and Boston; to Constantinople, Malta, and Smyrna; and to Gibraltar, Genoa, Leghorn, Civita Vecchia (for Rome), Naples, Messina, and Palermo; so that an indifferent traveller has ample choice, which is sometimes very convenient for a man who wants to go somewhere and does not care where.
The amusements of Liverpool include two theatres, an amphitheatre for horsemanship, and several sets of subscription concerts, for the use of which a fine hall has been erected.
The race-course is situated at some miles distant from the town; races take place three times a-year, two being flat races, and the third a steeple-chase. They are well supported and attended, although not by ladies so much as in the Midland and Northern Counties. The Liverpool races are chiefly matters of business, something like the Newmarket, with the addition of a mob. A large attendance comes from Manchester, where more betting is carried on than in any town out of London. Gambling of all kinds naturally follows in the wake of cotton speculation, which is gambling.
The crashes produced in Liverpool by the sacra fames auri are sometimes startling, and they come out in visible relief, because, in spite of its size, gossip flourishes as intensely as in a village. During one of the cotton manias a young gentleman, barely of age, in possession of an income of some two thousand a-year from land, and ready money to the extent of one hundred and fifty thousand pounds, joined an ingenious penniless gentleman in speculating in cotton, and found himself in less than twelve months a bankrupt; thus sacrificing, without the least enjoyment, a fortune sufficient for the enjoyment of every rational pleasure, or for the support of the highest honours in the State.
Such instances are not uncommon, although on a less magnificent scale; indeed, it is well to be cautious in inquiring after a Liverpool merchant or broker after an absence of a few years; a very few years are sufficient to render the poor rich and the rich poor, an eighth of a penny in the pound of cotton will do it.
The Municipal Corporation of Liverpool is the wealthiest in England after London, and virtually richer than London, inasmuch as the expenses are trifling, the property is improving, and the Liverpool aldermen and common-councillors have no vested claims to costly entertainments.
The majority is in the hands of the Conservative party, the Liberal party having only enjoyed the sweets of power for a brief period after the passing of the Financial Reform Bill; but the principle of representation keeps down any inclination toward the inevitable jobberies of a close self-elected body, and pushes local legislators on, quite up to the mark of the public opinion of the locality they govern.
A stranger, who has no interest in party squabbles, must confess that the funds of this wealthy estate are on the whole fairly and wisely distributed.
The Irish population, amounting to many thousands of the poorest and most ignorant class, who find a refuge from the miseries of their own country in the first port from Dublin, and employment in the vast demand for unskilled labour caused by the perpetual movement in imports and exports, impose a heavy tax on the poor-rates and police-rates of this borough.
In the education of this part of the community, the Liberal Corporation made provision in the extensive Corporation schools, by adopting the Irish Government scheme of instruction, permitting the Roman Catholics to make use of their own translation of the Bible, and to absent themselves from the religious instruction of the orthodox.
On this question the municipal elections were fought. The general education party were eventually beaten. The Roman Catholics were withdrawn from the schools, and thrown entirely upon the priests or the streets for education, and great was the rejoicing among the party who carried a large wooden Bible as their standard.
But subsequent events have induced those who have given any attention to the state of the operative classes in Liverpool, of whatever politics, to doubt whether it would not have been better to have been busy, for the last fifteen years, in teaching those classes something, who, knowing nothing, supply very expensive customers to the Liverpool courts of law and jail.
Liverpool returns two members to the House of Commons.
The election contests were formerly wonderfully bitter and absurd, for on one occasion, just before the passing of the Reform Bill, nearly two hundred thousand pounds were spent by two parties, between whose politics there was scarcely a shade of difference.
William Roscoe represented Liverpool for a short time, but was rejected at a second election, in consequence of his opposition to the Slave Trade. He was the son of a publican, and rose from an office boy to be an attorney in large practice, and eventually a banker. He was ruined by the stopping of his bank, which, after being for many years under the taxing harrows of the old corrupt bankrupt system, paid twenty shillings in the pound. William Roscoe was a voluminous writer of political pamphlets and poetry, which are now quite forgotten; his literary reputation deservedly rests upon his lives of Lorenzo de Medici, published in 1796, and of Leo X; the former of which has recently been republished by Mr. Bohn, in his cheap series of reprints.
Of even more value than his literary productions, was the school, or party, which he founded in Liverpool, while he was still wealthy and influential, embracing all who had a taste for literature and art. At that period Liverpool was rising into wealth on a vigorous prosecution of the Slave Trade, of which its parliamentary representatives were the avowed supporters. At that time vulgar wealth was the only distinction, and low debauchery the almost only amusement of the principal merchants. Absurd as it may now seem, when all the well-to-do world profess to be educated and temperate, Roscoe and his friends rendered inestimable service by making elegant tastes and temperate habits respectable, and by raising up an opposition to the old Slave Trade party, whose paradise lay in turtle soup, port wine, and punch. He set an example to merchants of stocking a library as well as a cellar, which has been followed, until now it is considered a matter of course. William Roscoe died in 1831, at a very advanced age. He was a remarkably fine-looking man, with a grand aristocratic head.
In addition to Huskisson and George Canning, Liverpool once very nearly had the honour of sending to Parliament Henry Brougham, in days when the Chancellorship and the House of Lords could scarcely have been expected by that versatile genius, even in a dream.
At present Liverpool interests are well represented in the House of Commons. The borough has had the good sense to prefer a merchant townsman, Sir Thomas Birch, and the son of a merchant, and friend and co-minister of the late Sir Robert Peel, Mr. Cardwell, to a soldier, and the dreamy poetical son of a Protectionist duke. A place like Liverpool ought to find in its own body better men than young lords or old soldiers. But young Liverpool dearly loves a lord, of any politics; and a little polite attention from a duke will produce an unconscious effect even on the trade report of a broker of “fashion.”
Mr. William Brown, at the head of the greatest American house in the world, after Baring’s, represents South Lancashire, but on Manchester influence, scarcely with the consent of Liverpool. Mr. Brown, who is an Irishman by birth, has been entirely the architect of his own fortune, and began business—on a very limited scale indeed—within the memory of persons now living. The firm has now agents in every town of any importance in the United States, and is the means of keeping in active employment hundreds of traders in all our manufacturing districts. The relations with Birmingham and the hardware country are very close. Another Liverpool man of whom the Liverpool people are justly proud, is the best debater in the House of Commons, if he only knew his own mind, the Right Honourable William Gladstone, the son of Sir John Gladstone, Bart., of Fasque, N.B., formerly a Liverpool merchant. Sir John Gladstone is a Scotchman, and in conjunction with another gentleman, also the head of a first-rate Liverpool house, Mr. Sandbatch, went out to the West Indies (Demerara) as journeymen bakers, in the same way that Mr. Miles, the grandfather of the members for East Somerset and Bristol, and founder of the great Bristol banking house, went out to Barbadoes as a journeyman cooper. If we add to these instances that the first Sir Robert Peel and Mr. Brotherton (who himself told the House, in a debate on the Factory Time Bill, that he had commenced life as a factory operative), beside many others, too numerous to mention, it will be found that our House of Commons is not so far out of the reach of industrious merit as foreigners usually imagine.
In conclusion, we may note that Liverpool, which gave very cold and niggard support to the Great Exhibition (chiefly because the project was ill received by the ducal house which patronizes the fashionables of the town), sent a contribution which very completely represented its imports, specifying the scientific and commercial name of each article, country of production, and quantity imported.
This collection occupies a considerable space, but it will be found, on examination, that a few staples employ the greater part of the shipping inwards. Cotton occupies by far the largest place, the air is filled with floating motes of cotton all round the business quarters of the town; timber probably stands next in the tonnage it employs; West Indian produce is less important than it was formerly; a great trade is done with South America, in hides, both dry and salted; tobacco, both from the United States and Cuba, arrives in large quantities. There are several great snuff and cigar manufactories in Liverpool. The hemp and tallow trade is increasing, as is the foreign corn trade. The Mediterranean, and especially the Italian, trade, has been rendered more important by steam communication. The China trade has not increased as much as was expected.
When the Docks and Public Institutions have been examined, and the places of interest on the Cheshire shore visited, Liverpool presents nothing to detain the traveller who has no private claims on his attention.
It must be acknowledged that the general appearance of the town and of the people is more agreeable than that of Birmingham or Manchester, although Liverpool can claim none of the historical and antiquarian interest in which Bristol and Chester are rich. There are parts of the town devoted to low lodging houses, and accommodation for the poor Irish and emigrants, as bad as the worst parts of St. Giles’s or Spitalfields. Indeed, the mortality is greater than that of any other town in England.
Liverpool is a great port for emigration to the United States and Canada. On the line of packet ships the accommodation for those who can pay £5 and upwards is excellent; in the timber ships they are packed like herrings after being lodged like pigs. But what can be expected for the fare. At £2 the shipowners undertake to give a passage, and find two quarts of water and a pound of bread per day. The Government Emigration Agents are indefatigable in their efforts, municipal and Parliamentary regulations have been from time to time applied to the subject, nevertheless the frauds and cruelties inflicted on emigrants are frightful.
An attempt was made some short time since to have an Emigrant’s Home as a sort of Model Barrack, erected in one of the New Docks, so as to form a counterpoise to the frauds of emigration lodging-house keepers, but local jealousies defeated a plan which would have been equally advantageous to the town and the emigrants.
The state of poverty and crime in Liverpool, fed as it is by the overflowings of many districts, is an important subject, which has excited the anxious attention of several enlightened residents, among others of the late Police Magistrate, Mr. Edward Rushton, who died suddenly without being able to bring his plans to maturity.
In conclusion we may say of Liverpool, that it is a town which has a great and increasing population, a wealthy Corporation, a thriving trade, yet less of the materials of a metropolis than many other towns of less commercial importance.
For further temporary information, a traveller may advantageously consult the Liverpool papers, of which there is one for every day in the week—that is to say, an Albion, a Times, a Mail, a Standard, a Mercury, a Journal, a Chronicle—of all shades of politics, of large size, conducted with great ability, and affording, in addition to the news and politics of the day, a great deal of general information, in the shape of extracts from popular works and original articles.
If we would learn why the opinions of inhabitants of towns prevail over the opinions of landowners and agriculturists, we have only to compare the active intelligence of the two as exhibited by such journals as are to be found in Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham with those supported by the rural community. A single sect expends more on the support of the press than all the farmers and farmers’ friends united, who are more numerous, more wealthy, not wanting in intelligence in their own pursuits, but quite without cohesion or combination.
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LIVERPOOL TO MANCHESTER.—There are two ways from Liverpool to Manchester, one by the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway, through Bolton, which has a station behind the Exchange, and one by the old route, through Newton. The line by the new one has Bolton upon its course, and renders the Aintree Racecourse half as near Manchester as Liverpool.
For choice take a Tuesday or Saturday, and travel up by the early Cotton Brokers’ Express to Manchester, so as to see one more phase of the English commercial character. The Brokers are a jovial set and hospitable, as keen as Yankees and as industrious. There is a marked difference between them and the Spinners, but they are of no particular country. Liverpool, like Manchester, although not to the same degree, is colonised by strangers. Both Irishmen and Scotchmen are to be found among the most respectable and successful, and a considerable number of Americans are settled there as merchants and shipping agents; indeed it is half American in its character.
In this year of 1851, to describe the Liverpool and Manchester Railway would be absurd; acres of print, in all civilized languages, and yards of picture-illustration, have been devoted to it. At Newton Station you see below you a race-course of great antiquity, and what was once a huge hotel, built to supply a room large enough for the Mother Partingtons of Lancashire to meet and prepare their mops for sweeping back the Atlantic tide of public opinion. There they met, and dined and drank and shouted, and unanimously agreed that it was foolish legislation which transferred the right of representation from the village of Newton to the great city of Manchester; after which they went home, and wisely submitted to the summons which found its speaking-trumpets at Manchester. Fortunately for this country, a minority knows how to submit to a majority, and the Conservative Hall, by a sort of accidental satire on its original uses, has been turned into a printing office.
A little farther on is Chat-Moss, a quaking bog, which the opponents of the first railway proved, to the satisfaction of many intelligent persons, to be an impassable obstacle to the construction of any solid road. We fly across it now reading or writing, scarcely taking the trouble to look out of the window. But if we do, we may see reclamation and cultivation, in the shape of root-crops and plantations, extending over the wet waste.
William Roscoe was one of the first to attempt to reclaim this Moss; and it is worthy of note, that it was among the literary and scientific friends of Roscoe that George Stephenson’s idea of a railroad from Liverpool to Manchester, through Chat-Moss, found its warmest supporters, at a time when support was much needed; for the shares were hawked, and even distributed among friends who were guaranteed against loss, in order to make up a fitting parliamentary subscription to what has proved one of the most successful speculations in public works, of this century.