The Cathedral Towns and Intervening Places of England, Ireland and Scotland:: A Description of Cities, Cathedrals, Lakes, Mountains, Ruins, and Watering-places.Silloway, Thomas W. (Thomas William)
History
The Cathedral Towns and Intervening Places of England, Ireland and Scotland:: A Description of Cities, Cathedrals, Lakes, Mountains, Ruins, and Watering-places.
Silloway, Thomas W. (Thomas William)
Great Britain -- Description and travel
In 1865 there were 724 steam-engines in the place, with 9,910
horse-power. There were 1,013 smelting and casting furnaces, and
20,000 families were engaged in manufactures. The value of hardware
and cutlery exported in 1864 was $20,000,000. There were also exports
of firearms, glass, leather, machinery, iron and steel wire, plate,
copper, brass, zinc, tin, and coal, to the amount of $185,000,000.
History says that 5,000,000 firearms were furnished during the
Napoleonic wars; and during the first two years of the Civil War in
America, 1,027,336 were exported to the United States. 30,000 wedding
rings have in a single year passed through the assay office. This city
is noted for its steel pens. At the Gillott establishment 500 workmen
are employed, and 1,000,000 gross are produced annually. The whole
number of pens made in the city is 9,000,000 annually, and 500 tons of
steel are consumed in their manufacture. Every kind of manufacture in
metals is carried on here, and to name the items would bewilder us.
Birmingham is the workshop of Great Britain, and we may say of the
world, for no other place approaches it in the extent and variety of
metallic work. Our next move was for
LICHFIELD.
We reached it after an hour's ride from Birmingham, arriving at 3
P. M. Valises deposited at a very homelike chateau, not far
from the station, we were out for sights. Through a couple of short and
narrow streets, where the brick buildings were painted in light colors,
we passed into an opening dignified by the name of Square, measuring
perhaps a hundred feet on each side. On the right-hand corner is an
ancient Gothic church. On our left, making another corner, is the house
in which, on the 18th of September, 1709, was born Samuel Johnson, the
great lexicographer, son of "Michael Johnson, bookseller and stationer,
sometime magistrate of Lichfield," and who died, leaving his family
in poverty. The house is three stories in height, with a hipped roof.
It has nothing striking about it, and is forty feet or so square, of
stone or brick, plastered on the outside, and painted cream-color. In
the youth of Johnson, it contained a store, but has long since been
remodelled, and the store is now the common room of the dwelling-house.
The houses about it are closely built; no yard, garden, or tree is in
sight.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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