Sheffield, in the Eighteenth Century

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VI. Amusements, Learning, And Literature. what has been said in previous chapters as to the social condition of Sheffield, it will easily be understood that, in the eighteenth century, the tone of the town intellectually was low, while any signs of culture and refinement were rare. That part of the...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VI. Amusements, Learning, And Literature. what has been said in previous chapters as to the social condition of Sheffield, it will easily be understood that, in the eighteenth century, the tone of the town intellectually was low, while any signs of culture and refinement were rare. That part of the community which affected anything of the cultivation and graces of Society was small and narrow. The chief function in which it asserted itself was the Assemblies, held in their earlier days in two rooms of the Boys' Charity School, where, Mr. Hunter tells us, the company enjoyed conversation, or the mazy dance, by light, not of wax, which beamed from sconces of tin. It was not the tallow candles that shocked the feelings of the benevolent Samuel Roberts, but the fact that the master of the school farmed the children and made his profit out of famishing them, pocketing everything he could save from the sixteen pence per head per week allowed for their maintenance. And it was further to enlarge his income that this worthy was allowed to hire out the rooms in which the boys 'ought to have slept, for the dancing and card assemblies. That it was possible for the beauty and fashion of Sheffield to disport itself 'to the detriment of young lives, gives us a vivid insight into the callous state of public feeling?but perhaps it may be charitably ascribed rather to want of thought than to lack of heart. The scandal was stopped in 1762, when the subscribers erected for themselves the Assembly Rooms at the corner of Norfolk Street and Arundel Street, where, in our own day, the Town Council was accustomed to meet, before it migrated to what had been the lecture hall of the Mechanics' Institution, now the Free Library. Lists of the subscribers in the years 1747-175o, together...