Don't hold back, say what you mean

[RichardB]

To all those tourists, enterprising and unenterprising alike, who may be ever led at any future time to investigate the beauties in which Yorkshire and Derbyshire abounds, there is one piece of advice that, in a spirit of philanthropy and sincerity, I would give – avoid Sheffield.

Do anything rather than enter its grimy, smoky precincts.

Be circuitous when you might go straight ahead; take six hours where you might take three; put up with the countriest of country inns; endure to remain dinnerless and tobaccoless; submit, in fact, to anything rather than go to Sheffield.

A hideous conglomerate of tall, unshapely chimneys, of stunted blackened houses, perpetually overhung by dense layers of smoke, which would seem almost to take solid form and substance in the heaven above; a collection of narrow, ill-arranged streets, whose atmosphere forcibly reminds you of that ascribed to the Black Hole at Calcutta; streets which literally teem with children of one uniform size – uniformly squalid, miserable and viscious in appearance; streets at whose corners may be seen knots of ill-conditioned-looking men, haggard, desperate, ill-fed, ill-clothed, up to murder, stratagem, or midnight plots of any kind, judging from their counternance; streets, near the doors of the beershops and pawnshops of which you meet with women the exact counterparts of the men, with faces from which all trace of feminine sentiment or shame has long since departed; engrained with misery and crime; women whom it makes one sick and sad to gaze at; whose faces tell you that they receive blows and bruises from their lords, and whose lips, every time they open, tell you that they have long since lost any thought of decency, any regard or God.

Imagine all this and you will have a very fair idea of Sheffield.

It has been my lot to have been, at one time of another, in most of the manufacturing towns of England and Wales – Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds to the great industrial centres of Staffordshire, Wolverhampton, Wednesbury, Bilston; to Merthyr Tydvil, and to a hundred others: and as one who has been to these places, I have seen much misery, much squalor, much sin; but in none have I ever seen a population that strikes the stranger as being uniformly so irredeemably low in the scale of humanity as Sheffield.