“It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but, as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black, like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with evil-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows, where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets, all very like one another, and many small streets, still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next. These attributes of Coketown were in the main inseparable from the work by which it was sustained; against them were to be set off comforts of life which found their way all over the world, and elegancies of life which made we will not ask how much of the fine lady, who could scarcely bear to hear the place mentioned. You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful....

“In the hardest working part of Coketown; in the innermost fortifications of that ugly citadel, where Nature was as strongly bricked out as killing airs and gasses were bricked in; at the heart of the labyrinth of narrow courts upon courts, and close streets upon streets, which had come into existence piecemeal, every piece in a violent hurry for some one man’s purpose, and the whole one unnatural family, shouldering, and trampling, and pressing one another to death; in the last close nook of the great exhausted receiver, where the chimneys, for want or air to make a draught, were built in an immense variety of stunted and crooked shapes, as though every house put out a sign of the kind of people who might be expected to be born in it.”

Of Coketown on a sunny midsummer day (for “there was such a thing sometimes, even in Coketown”) the author exhibits a realistic picture. “Seen from a distance in such weather, Coketown lay shrouded in a haze of its own, which appeared impervious to the sun’s rays. You only knew the town was there because you knew there could have been no such sulky blotch upon the prospect without a town. A blur of soot and smoke, now confusedly bending this way, now that way, now aspiring to the vault of heaven, now murkily creeping along the earth as the wind rose and fell or changed its quarter—a dense, formless jumble, with sheets of cross-light in it, that showed nothing but masses of darkness. Coketown in the distance was suggestive of itself, though not a brick of it could be seen ... the streets were hot and dusty on the summer day, and the sun was so bright that it even shone through the heavy vapour drooping over Coketown, and could not be looked at steadily. Stokers emerged from low underground doorways and factory yards, and sat on steps, and posts, and palings, wiping their swarthy visages, and contemplating coals. The whole town seemed to be frying in oil. There was a stifling smell of hot oil everywhere. The steam-engines shone with it; the dresses of the Hands were soiled with it; the mills throughout their many stories oozed and trickled it. The atmosphere of those Fairy palaces[72] was like the breath of the simoon, and their inhabitants, wasting with heat, toiled languidly in the desert. But no temperature made the melancholy-mad elephants more mad or more sane. Their wearisome heads went up and down at the same rate, in hot weather and cold, wet weather and dry, fair weather and foul. The measured motion of their shadows on the walls was the substitute Coketown had to show for the shadows of rustling woods; while for the summer hum of insects it could offer, all the year round, from the dawn of Monday to the night of Saturday, the whir of shafts and wheels.

“Drowsily they whirred all through this sunny day, making the passenger more sleepy and more hot as he passed the humming walls of the mills. Sun-blinds and sprinklings of water a little cooled the main streets and shops, but the mills and the courts and the alleys baked at a fierce heat. Down upon the river, that was black and thick with dye, some Coketown boys, who were at large—a rare sight there—rowed a crazy boat, which made a spurious track upon the water as it jogged along, while every dip of an oar stirred up vile smells.”[73]

Apropos of “Hard Times,” it may be mentioned that in 1854 Dickens stayed at the Bull Hotel in Preston, when he visited that town expressly for the purpose of witnessing the effects of a strike in a manufacturing town. He failed, however, to secure much material here for the story, for he wrote: “Except the crowds at the street-corners reading the placards pro and con, and the cold absence of smoke from the mill-chimneys, there is very little in the streets to make the town remarkable.” He expected to find in Preston a model town, instead of which it proved to be, in his estimation, a “nasty place,” while to the Bull he referred in disrespectful terms as an “old, grubby, smoky, mean, intensely formal red-brick house, with a narrow gateway and a dingy yard.” Preston figures in the early chapters of “George Silverman’s Explanation,” a cellar in that town being the birthplace of the principal character, the Rev. George Silverman.

THE RED LION, BARNET. ([Page 173].)
Dickens and Forster dined here in March, 1838, to celebrate the birth of Miss Mary (Mamie) Dickens.

Reverting to Manchester, it must not be forgotten that Dickens, in the capacity of an actor, journeyed thither four times, appearing with his amateur company first at the Theatre Royal in 1847 for the benefit of Leigh Hunt, twice in 1852 at the Old Free Trade Hall, and again in that building in 1857. Needless to say, the performances attracted vast and enthusiastic audiences, and were eminently successful both artistically and financially.

The Free Trade Hall, too, was the scene of his public Readings in Manchester, and it is recorded that he was accustomed to stay at Old Trafford as the guest of Mr. John Knowles, of the Theatre Royal. This large house was then surrounded by an extensive wood, and considered to be a lonely and remote place, but is now near a network of railways, and the reverse of rural.[74]

About the year 1841 Charles Dickens’s elder sister Fanny (nearly two years his senior) married Henry Burnett, an accomplished operatic singer, who had retired from performing on the stage, and taken up his abode in Manchester as an instructor in music, Mrs. Burnett, herself a musician of considerable acquirements, assisting her husband in conducting the choir of Rusholme Road Congregational Chapel, where they worshipped, and the pastor of which was the Rev. James Griffin, who has recorded in print his recollections of the Burnetts. There is, consequently, a link of a distinctly personal kind connecting Dickens with Manchester, which is made additionally interesting by the fact that the little crippled son of the Burnetts (who lived in Upper Brook Street) was the prototype of Paul Dombey. It may be added that Mr. Burnett unconsciously posed for some of the characteristics of Nicholas Nickleby, while in Fanny Dorrit there are certain indications suggesting that her portrait was inspired by the novelist’s sister.