On this page
-
Text (1)
-
Untitled Article
Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
-
-
Transcript
-
Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
Additionally, when viewing full transcripts, extracted text may not be in the same order as the original document.
Untitled Article
building-, contrivance would have been successful in making the same thing a subject of taxation to the amount of about a hundred thousand pounds . The men of Birmingham know how these matters are managed well enough ; and so , by escaping from the aid of royal , ministerial , and aristocratic patronage , they saved their fellow-townsmen some seventy thousand pounds .
But the imposing grandeur and gratifying beauty vanishes when you have entered the building . The poetry is gone . Imposing effect is utterly sacrificed to the sheerest utility , i . e . the anti-utilitarian ' s utility . Yet do I opine that even more utility might have been maintained if attention to poetical effect had not been so entirely superseded . Those galleries appear like hasty excrescences—a defect which , certainly , is diminished when they are occupied by some eight hundred or a thousand
persons : but then they have a look of unsafeness , capable and strong as a close inspection convinces us they are . There is about them a character of heavy fragility ; it is ponderousness resting on filagree . The coup- < Tceil 9 perhaps , would have been much more satisfactory and grand , if , instead of the ugly excrescences and projections , which now constitute the galleries , gradations of seats had risen directly from the floor , exactly at the lines from which the front seats of the galleries are
perpendicular with the base . Such a construction would not only have given a reality , but , what is almost equally necessary , also an appearance of satisfactory strength and stability , besides an increase of accommodation , as to number , of sitters , for all seek to avoid the spaces under the galleries . Jngress and egress , too , would have been no less , perhaps more , easy than at present ; though , in respect of egress from the ground-floor , I know no public building for popular assemblages that
surpasses it ; the alarm on the nomination day tried the case thoroughly . Good people of Birmingham , let all strangers see the inside of your noble building , ( that building of which you justly may be proud , ) when it is crammed full of your fellow-townsmen on some great and stirring occasion . Get up a Wellington farce ; and while he scoffs at you , you may despise him and a squadron of dragoons at his back . Let the spaces which allow of two thousand people to arrange unruffled
their gala-dresses , to stretch out legs and take good elbow-room , be quintuply packed , showing a sea of faces and heads as closely piled and wedged as if they have been rammed together by paviers' rods , just as they were crowded , and crammed , and rammed , and wedged on Wednesday , January 7 , 1835 , and the eye will sweep over a spectacle which is equalled by nothing but old Niagara—a spectacle at once awful , sublime , and heart-throbbing . Then ail excrescence , all incongruity , littleness , and disappointed expectation are swept away .
On that day there were ten or perhaps twelve thousand people packed together . The seats being removed , left the great floor clear ; and every avenue , aisle , and accessible window-place was filled with bodies crushed up into the smallest dimensions ; thousands of arms were literally wedged to the sides by the pressure . The organ-loft , from which my
view is taken , was occupied by the committees and friends , who were admitted by ticket . From this station the eye ran over the whole plain and mountains of hats and faces ; up from which rose , on every occasion of circumstantial or verbal appeal to their approving een&es , cheers that would have made silent the loudest thunder ; rattling , and ringing ,
Untitled Article
136 Notes on the Newspapers .
-
-
Citation
-
Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Feb. 2, 1835, page 136, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2642/page/56/
-