Rides on Railways Part 18

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 Inst.i.tutions 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' Inst.i.tution 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 Inst.i.tution, opened in 1843, for affording a first-cla.s.s 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 Athenaeum in Church Street, which was founded by purchases from the library of William Roscoe, contain a number of valuable works of reference.

The Royal Inst.i.tution 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 AEgina and Phigaleian marbles, and a collection of philosophical instruments, with a laboratory and a theatre in which lectures are occasionally delivered.

This Inst.i.tution 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 inst.i.tutions of a town with nearly 400,000 inhabitants; but, in the greater number, resemble all other inst.i.tutions 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 s.e.xes 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 b.u.t.terfly 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.

| | Population. 800 | 8,168 | About 400,000 | | Tonnage {151} 268 | 12,636 | 3,336,337 | | Number of 15 | 334 | 20,457 Vessels | | | | Dock Dues. - | 600 | 211,743 pounds | | Income of 20 | 1,115 | 139,152 pounds Corporation | | | | Customs Dues 272 | 70,000 | 3,366,284 pounds

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 pa.s.sage 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 ca.n.a.l 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 warehous.e.m.e.n 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 inst.i.tutions in Grecian temples.

This Dock was constructed in 1708, and twelve others have since been added, occupying the sh.o.r.e from north to south for several miles, including one which will accommodate steamers of the largest cla.s.s. 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 ca.n.a.l 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 ca.n.a.l 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 munic.i.p.al 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 s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sport 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 sh.o.r.e 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 sh.o.r.e 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 pa.s.sengers 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-gra.s.s, 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 b.u.t.ter 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.