In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons; all
the holders of houses above a certain rent are women. If a married
couple come to settle in the town, somehow the gentleman
disappears; he is either fairly frightened to death by being the
only man in the Cranford evening partie ...
I have always been much interested by the traditions which are
scattered up and down North Wales relating to Owen Glendower (Owain
Glendwr is the national spelling of the name), and I fully enter into
the feeling which makes the Welsh peasant still look upon him as the
hero of his country. The ...
Half a life-time ago, there lived in one of the Westmoreland dales a
single woman, of the name of Susan Dixon. She was owner of the small
farm-house where she resided, and of some thirty or forty acres of
land by which it was surrounded. She had also an hereditary right to
a sheep-walk, exten ...
When Death is present in a household on a Christmas Day, the very
contrast between the time as it now is, and the day as it has often
been, gives a poignancy to sorrow--a more utter blankness to the
desolation. James Leigh died just as the far-away bells of Rochdale
Church were ringing for mor ...
There are some fields near Manchester, well known to the inhabitants
as "Green Heys Fields," through which runs a public footpath to a
little village about two miles distant. In spite of these fields
being flat, and low, nay, in spite of the want of wood (the great
and usual recommendation of l ...
I am an old woman now, and things are very different to what they
were in my youth. Then we, who travelled, travelled in coaches,
carrying six inside, and making a two days' journey out of what
people now go over in a couple of hours with a whizz and a flash, and
a screaming whistle, enough to ...
December 12th, 1747.--My life has been strangely bound up with
extraordinary incidents, some of which occurred before I had any
connection with the principal actors in them, or indeed, before I
even knew of their existence. I suppose, most old men are, like me,
more given to looking back upon ...
To begin with the old rigmarole of childhood. In a country there was a shire,
and in that shire there was a town, and in that town there was a house, and in
that house there was a room, and in that room there was a bed, and in that bed
there lay a little girl; wide awake and longing to get up, ...
We have our prejudices in England. Or, if that assertion offends any
of my readers, I will modify it: we have had our prejudices in
England. We have tortured Jews; we have burnt Catholics and
Protestants, to say nothing of a few witches and wizards. We have
satirized Puritans, and we have d ...
My mother was twice married. She never spoke of her first husband,
and it is only from other people that I have learnt what little I
know about him. I believe she was scarcely seventeen when she was
married to him: and he was barely one-and-twenty. He rented a small
farm up in Cumberland, s ...
My mother was twice married. She never spoke of her first husband,
and it is only from other people that I have learnt what little I
know about him. I believe she was scarcely seventeen when she was
married to him: and he was barely one-and-twenty. He rented a small
farm up in Cumberland, s ...