a town of eighty thousand inhabitants, which, properly speaking,
is one large working-men's quarter, penetrated by a single wide avenue.
Salford, once more important than Manchester, was then the leading town
of the surrounding district to which it still gives its name, Salford
Hundred. Hence it is that an old and therefore very unwholesome, dirty,
and ruinous locality is to be found here, lying opposite the Old Church
of Manchester, and in as bad a condition as the Old Town on the other
side of the Irwell. Farther away from the river lies the newer portion,
which is, however, already beyond the limit of its forty years of cottage
life, and therefore ruinous enough. All Salford is built in courts or
narrow lanes, so narrow, that they remind me of the narrowest I have ever
seen, the little lanes of Genoa. The average construction of Salford is
in this respect much worse than that of Manchester, and so, too, in
respect to cleanliness. If, in Manchester, the police, from time to
time, every six or ten years, makes a raid upon the working-people's
districts, closes the worst dwellings, and causes the filthiest spots in
these Augean stables to be cleansed, in Salford it seems to have done
absolutely nothing. The narrow side lanes and courts of Chapel Street,
Greengate, and Gravel Lane have certainly never been cleansed since they
were built. Of late, the Liverpool railway has been carried through the
middle of them, over a high viaduct, and has abolished many of the
filthiest nooks; but what does that avail? Whoever passes over this
viaduct and looks down, sees filth and wretchedness enough; and, if any
one takes the trouble to pass through these lanes, and glance through the
open doors and windows into the houses and cellars, he can convince
himself afresh with every step that the workers of Salford live in
dwellings in which cleanliness and comfort are impossible. Exactly the
same state of affairs is found in the more distant regions of Salford, in
Islington, along Regent Road, and back of the Bolton railway. The
working-men's dwellings between Oldfield Road and Cross Lane, where a
mass of courts and alleys are to be found in the worst possible state,
vie with the dwellings of the Old Town in filth and overcrowding. In
this district I found a man, apparently about sixty years old, living in
a cow stable. He had constructed a sort of chimney for his square pen,
which had neither windows, floor, nor ceiling, had ob