It is not, however, all culture at Manchester: there are all sorts here, as in every great city. Some think the Cheetham Hill suburb the last word in dignity and ease: others extol Whalley Range, but all unite in reviling the Redbank district and Angel Meadow, or Angel Street as I believe it is now styled. Any intimate acquaintance with large towns and the flagrant purlieus in them, usually styled Providence Place, Pleasant View, and the like, will prepare the reader for the statement that angels do not inhabit Angel Meadow, any more than they do Seven Dials in London. Culture does not linger here. There is oblique testimony to this in a recent resolution of the Watch Committee to supply a police-constable with a new “set of teeth, to take the place of those he has lost in the discharge of his duty.” They were the celestials of the Angel Meadow district who knocked the constable’s teeth out. Hallelujah! The place is not so far from the Cathedral and the Strangeways Gaol, but neither the promise of present punishment that the gaol holds forth for evil courses, nor the hope of Heaven for the repentant that the Cathedral typifies, suffices to blanch the scarlet sins of Redbank, or to win the inhabitants of Angel Meadow to a better life. If one thing is more certain than another in any great town, it is that the stranger should not explore back streets. Civic pride will see eye to eye with me there. For, indeed, the stranger in back streets sees strange sights, hears weird language, and smells still weirder odours that are not mentioned in conventional council chambers. The back streets converse in a speech of their own: they read a literature their own, and feed on food of which the front streets know nothing. In fact, in back streets and front you have two worlds that are entirely dissimilar, and know little, and would probably like to know even less, of one another. IX