The Manchester Man. By Mrs. G. Linnaeus Banks. 3 vols.
(Hurst and Blackett.)—This is an excellent story, in which a very genuine and, as far as we can judge from little instances happening to come within our own range, very close knowledge of interesting local history is cleverly worked up into a tale of the usual form. Jabez Clegg starts in life as a foundling washed down in the great flood which deluged Man- chester at the end of the last century, and rises to be a citizen, prosper- ous in fortune and love. His boyhood and youth coincided with the troubled quarter of a century which saw the long Napoleonic wars, and the dismal reaction after a false prosperity that followed the peace of 1815. It included the tragical incident of the Peterloo massacre, which is here told with uncommon picturesqueness and force. With the "Manchester man," the old city grows into the new, and the reader is made to realise the process. The hero's own fortunes are related with admirable truth. Here there is no harlequin change of the servant into the master, but the slow, sometimes painful, upward struggle is depicted just as it really happens in a world where, though ability and love can do much, yet social prejudices are strong, and social chasms hard to overleap. If the novel had nothing else of merit in it—and it has, unless we are deceived very much—the single sketch of Parson Joshua Brookes would make it worth reading.
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