where we arrived at 11 o'clock, and found the place, as we had anticipated, very smoky in atmosphere, and largely inhabited by poor working-people. High taxes, lack of education, and hard usage keep the people down. The public buildings and stores are spacious, but our surroundings were uncomfortable and we made but a three hours' stay.
Birmingham is a city of immense manufactures, and may well be considered the great workshop of England. Here John Bull everywhere has on his workshop paper cap, and shows the brawniest of brawny arms, and the smuttiest of smutty faces. A Birmingham dry-goods clerk, by reason of the smoky atmosphere, is about as untidy as an average American mechanic.
The city lies on ground sloping to the River Rhea, and canals radiate to several railroads. It has three parks: Adderly, triangular in shape, opened in 1856; Calthorpe, near the river, in 1857; and Ashton, in 1858. The older portions are on low grounds. The Town Hall is of Anglesea marble, 160 feet long, 100 feet wide, and 83 feet high, and is of Corinthian architecture, in imitation of the temple of Jupiter Stator at Rome. The public hall is 145 feet long, 65 feet wide, and 65 feet high,—that is, 30 feet longer than Boston Music Hall, 15 feet narrower, and of the same height. The organ is one of the most powerful in Europe, and has 78 stops.
The old church of St. Martin has a massive tower, and a spire 210 feet high. This church contains monuments of the De Berminghams, the ancient lords of the place. It has 343,696 inhabitants, is first mentioned in Doomsday Book under the name of Bermingeham, and remained an obscure village for centuries.
Its first impetus towards manufactures was given at the close of the last century, by the introduction of the steam-engine,—especially by the demand for muskets created by the American Revolution and the French wars. There are many large factories, but more than elsewhere is it customary for persons of limited means to carry on manufactures on a small scale. They generally employ men to work by the piece and at home; or, where steam is required, they hire rooms furnished with the requisite power.
In 1865 there were 724 steam-engines in the place, with 9,910 horse-power. There were 1,013 smelting and casting furnaces, and 20,000 families were engaged in manufactures. The value of hardware and cutlery exported in 1864 was $20,000,000. There were also exports of firearms, glass, leather, machinery, iron and steel wire, plate, copper, brass, zinc, tin, and coal, to the amount of $185,000,000. History says that 5,000,000 firearms were furnished during the Napoleonic wars; and during the first two years of the Civil War in America, 1,027,336 were exported to the United States. 30,000 wedding rings have in a single year passed through the assay office. This city is noted for its steel pens. At the Gillott establishment 500 workmen are employed, and 1,000,000 gross are produced annually. The whole number of pens made in the city is 9,000,000 annually, and 500 tons of steel are consumed in their manufacture. Every kind of manufacture in metals is carried on here, and to name the items would bewilder us. Birmingham is the workshop of Great Britain, and we may say of the world, for no other place approaches it in the extent and variety of metallic work. Our next move was for
LICHFIELD.
We reached it after an hour's ride from Birmingham, arriving at 3 p. m. Valises deposited at a very homelike chateau, not far from the station, we were out for sights. Through a couple of short and narrow streets, where the brick buildings were painted in light colors, we passed into an opening dignified by the name of Square, measuring perhaps a hundred feet on each side. On the right-hand corner is an ancient Gothic church. On our left, making another corner, is the house in which, on the 18th of September, 1709, was born Samuel Johnson, the great lexicographer, son of "Michael Johnson, bookseller and stationer, sometime magistrate of Lichfield," and who died, leaving his family in poverty. The house is three stories in height, with a hipped roof. It has nothing striking about it, and is forty feet or so square, of stone or brick, plastered on the outside, and painted cream-color. In the youth of Johnson, it contained a store, but has long since been remodelled, and the store is now the common room of the dwelling-house. The houses about it are closely built; no yard, garden, or tree is in sight.
In front, in the centre of the square, is a statue of Johnson, on a pedestal much too high. The statue is in a sitting posture, and looks too young for a man who did not come into public notoriety until much beyond the age represented by this sculpture. The unpretentious birthplace is more interesting than the monument. These streets, through which he so many times walked,—the church in which he so many times attended worship, and in which he was baptized,—these were too real not to make their impression. We could see the scrofulous boy of ten years, with his disfigured face and injured sight and hearing, his education already begun, and he a student of Latin at the Lichfield free school. He was five years there, then one at Stourbridge; and at the age of sixteen desired to enter Oxford, but was prevented by poverty. Going as assistant to one more fortunate in worldly affairs than himself, at length, in 1728, he was admitted to Pembroke, where, the record says, "he was disorderly, but not vicious." He died in London, Dec. 13, 1784. What incidents and great events go to make up his history for those intervening years! Wherever the English language is spoken it is influenced by his labors.
Not much antiquity is anywhere apparent in Lichfield. Take Johnson and the cathedral away, and there would be nothing of moment, for it has little business.