I myself came away entirely satisfied, indeed, but for the lasting pang I inflicted upon myself by denying a penny to the ragged wretch who superfluously opened the valves of my hansom for me. My explanation to my soul was that I had no penny in my pocket, and that it would have been folly little short of crime to give so needy a wretch sixpence. But would it? Would it have corrupted him, since pauperize him further it could not? I advise the reader who finds himself in the like case to give the sixpence, and if he cares for the peace of my conscience, to make it a shilling; or, come! a half-crown, if he wishes to be truly handsome. It is astonishing how these regrets persist; but perhaps in this instance I owe the permanence of my pang to those frequent appeals to one’s pity which repeated themselves in Sheffield. As I had noted at Liverpool I now noted at Sheffield that you cannot have great prosperity without having adversity, just as you cannot have heat without cold or day without dark. The one substantiates and verifies the other; and I perceived that wherever business throve it seemed to be at the cost of somebody; though even when business pines it is apparently no better. The thing ought to be looked into.
At the moment of my visit to Sheffield, it happened that many works were running half-time or no time, and many people were out of work. At one place there was a little oblong building between branching streets, round which sat a miserable company of Murchers, as I heard them called, on long benches under the overhanging roof, who were too obviously, who were almost offensively, out of work. Some were old and some young, some dull and some fierce, some savage and some imbecile in their looks, and they were all stained and greasy and dirty, and looked their apathy or their grim despair. Even the men who were coming to or from their work at dinner-time looked stunted and lean and pale, with no color of that south of England bloom with which they might have favored a stranger. Slatternly girls and women abounded, and little babies carried about by a little larger babies, and of course kissed on their successive layers of dirt. There were also many small boys who, I hope, were not so wicked as they were ragged. At noon-time they hung much about the windows of cookshops which one would think their sharp hunger would have pierced to the steaming and smoking dishes within. The very morning after I had denied that man a penny at the theatre door, and was still smarting to think I had not given him sixpence, I saw a boy of ten, in the cut-down tatters of a man, gloating upon a meat-pie which a cook had cruelly set behind the pane in front of him. I took out the sixpence which I ought to have given that poor man, and made it a shilling, and put it into the boy’s wonderfully dirty palm, and bade him go in and get the pie. He looked at me, and he looked at the shilling, and then I suppose he did as he was bid. But I ought to say, in justice to myself, that I never did anything of the kind again as long as I remained in Sheffield. I felt that I owed a duty to the place and must not go about corrupting the populace for my selfish pleasure.
III
Between our hotel and the main part of the town there yawned a black valley, rather nobly bridged, or viaducted, and beyond it in every direction the chimneys of the many works thickened in the perspectives. It was really like a dead forest, or like thick-set masts of shipping in a thronged port; or the vents of tellurian fires, which send up their flames by night and their smoke by day. It was splendid, it was magnificent, it was insurpassably picturesque. People must have painted it often, but if some bravest artist-soul would come, reverently, not patronizingly, and portray the sight in its naked ugliness, he would create one of the most beautiful masterpieces in the world. On our first morning the sun, when it climbed to the upper heavens, found a little hole in the dun pall, and shone down through it, and tried to pierce through the more immediate cloud above the works; but it could not, and it ended by shutting the hole under it, and disappearing.
Beyond the foul avenues thridding the region of the works, and smelling of the decay of market-houses, were fine streets of shops and churches, and I dare say comely dwellings, with tram-cars ascending and descending their hilly slopes. The stores I find noted as splendid, and in my pocket-book I say that outside of the market-house, before you got to those streets, there are doves and guinea-pigs as well as a raven for sale in cages; and the usual horrible English display of flesh meats. The trams were one story, like our trolleys, without roof-seats, and there were plenty of them; but nothing could keep me, I suppose, till I had seen one of the works. Each of these stands in a vast yard, or close, by itself, with many buildings, and they are of all sorts; but I chose what I thought the most typical, and overcame the reluctance of the manager to let me see it. He said I had no idea what tricks were played by other makers to find out any new processes and steal them; but this was after I had pleaded my innocent trade of novelist, and assured him of my congenital incapability of understanding, much less conveying from the premises, the image of the simplest and oldest process. Then he gave me for guide an intelligent man who was a penknife-maker by trade, but was presently out of work, and glad to earn my fee.
My guide proved a most decent, patient, and kindly person, and I hope it is no betrayal of confidence to say that he told me the men in these multitudinous shops work by the piece. The grinders furnish their grindstones and all their tools for making the knives; there is no dry grinding, such as used to fill the lungs of the grinders with deadly particles of steel and stone, and bring them to an early death; but sometimes a stone, which ordinarily lasts six months, will burst and drive the grinder through the roof. The blade-makers do their own forging and hammering, and it is from first to last apparently all hand-work. But it is head-work and heart-work too, and the men who wrought at it wrought with such intensity and constancy that they did not once look up or round where we paused to look on. I was made to know that trade was dull and work slack, and these fellows were lucky fellows to have anything to do. Still I did not envy them; and I felt it a distinct relief to pass from their shops into the cool, dim crypt which was filled with tusks of ivory, in all sizes from those of the largest father elephant to those of the babes of the herd; these were milk-tusks, I suppose. They get dearer as the elephants get scarcer; and that must have been why I paid as much for a penknife in the glittering showroom as it would have cost me in New York, with the passage money and the duties added. Because of the price, perhaps, I did not think of buying the two-thousand-bladed penknife I saw there; but I could never have used all the blades, now that we no longer make quill pens. I looked fondly at the maker’s name on the knife I did buy, and said that the table cutlery of a certain small household which set itself up forty years ago had borne the same: but the pleasant salesman did not seem to feel the pathos of the fact so much as I.
IV
There is not only a vast deal of industry in Sheffield, but there is an unusual abundance of history, as there might very well be in a place that began life, in the usual English fashion, under the Britons and grew into municipal consciousness in the fostering care of the Romans and the ruder nurture of the Saxons, Danes, and Normans. Lords it had of the last, and the great line of the Earls of Shrewsbury presently rose and led Sheffield men back to battle in France, where the first earl fell on the bloody field, and so many of the men died with him in 1453 that there was not a house in all the region which did not mourn a loss. Which of the Roses Sheffield held for, White or Red, I am not sure; but we will say that it duly suffered for one or the other; and it is certain that the great Cardinal Wolsey rested eighteen days at Sheffield Manor just before he went to die at Leicester; and Mary Queen of Scots spent fourteen years of sorrowful captivity, sometimes at the Manor and sometimes in Sheffield Castle. This hold was taken by the Parliamentarians in the Civil War; but the famous industries of the place had begun long before; so that Chaucer could say of one of his pilgrims,
“A Sheffield thwytel bare he in his hose.”
Thwytels, or whittles, figured in the broils and stage-plays of Elizabethan times, and three gross of them were exported from Liverpool in 1589, when the Sheffield penknife was already famed the best in the world. Manufactures flourished there apace when England turned to them from agriculture, and Sheffield is now a city of four hundred thousand or more. Apparently it has been growing radical, as the centres of prosperity and adversity always do, and the days of the Chartist agitation continued there for ten years, from 1839 till it came as near open rebellion as it well could in a plot for an armed uprising. Then that cause of the people, like many another, failed, and liberty there, as elsewhere in England, was fain to