The visit requires no distant journey. It is a bare six miles from the heart
of Manchester to Middleton. Nine times a-day omnibuses ply there. These
original, if not primitive vehicles, are constructed to carry forty-five
passengers, and on crowded market-days may sometimes be seen loaded with
seventy specimens of a note-worthy class.
Middleton, lately a dirty straggling town, of 15,000 inhabitants, a number at
which it has remained stationary for ten years, built without plan, without
drains, without pavement, without arrangements for common decency, stands on
the borders, and was the manorial village, of the Middleton and Thornham
estates, which had been in the family of the late Lord Suffield for many
hundred years. In the village, land was grudgingly leased for building, and
no steam-engine manufactories were permitted. The agricultural portion of
some 2500 acres of good land for pasturage and root crops, celebrated for its
fine supplies of water and for its (unused) water-power, was divided into
little farms of from twenty to seventy acres, very few exceeding fifty acres,
inhabited by a race of Farmer-Weavers, who, from generation to generation,
farmed badly and wove cleanly in the pure atmosphere of Middleton.
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