Edwin Clayhanger stood on the steep-sloping, red-bricked canal bridge, in the valleybetween Bursley and its suburb Hillport. In that neighbourhood the Knype and Mersey canalformed the western boundary of the industrialism of the Five Towns. To the east rosepitheads, chimneys, and kilns, tier above tier, dim in their own mists. To the west,Hillport Fields, grimed but possessing authentic hedgerows and winding paths, mountedbroadly up to the sharp ridge on which stood Hillport Church, a landmark. Beyond theridge, and partly protected by it from the driving smoke of the Five Towns, lay the fineand ancient Tory borough of Oldcastle, from whose historic Middle School Edwin Clayhangerwas now walking home. The fine and ancient Tory borough provided education for the wholeof the Five Towns, but the relentless ignorance of its prejudices had blighted thedistrict. A hundred years earlier the canal had only been obtained after a viciousParliamentary fight between industry and the fine and ancient borough, which saw in canalsa menace to its importance as a centre of traffic. Fifty years earlier the fine andancient borough had succeeded in forcing the greatest railway line in England to runthrough unpopulated country five miles off instead of through the Five Towns, because itloathed the mere conception of a railway. And now, people are inquiring why the FiveTowns, with a railway system special to itself, is characterised by a perhaps excessiveprovincialism. These interesting details have everything to do with the history of EdwinClayhanger, as they have everything to do with the history of each of the two hundredthousand souls in the Five Towns. Oldcastle guessed not the vast influences of its sublimestupidity.
It was a breezy Friday in July 1872. The canal, which ran north and south, reflected ablue and white sky. Towards the bridge, from the north came a long narrow canal-boatroofed with tarpaulins; and towards the bridge, from the south came a similar craft,sluggishly creeping. The towing-path was a morass of sticky brown mud, for, in the way ofrain, that year was breaking the records of a century and a half. Thirty yards in front ofeach boat an unhappy skeleton of a horse floundered its best in the quagmire. The honestendeavour of one of the animals received a frequent tonic from a bare-legged girl of sevenwho heartily curled a whip about its crooked large-jointed legs. The ragged and filthychild danced in the rich mud round the horse’s flanks with the simple joy of one whohad been rewarded for good behaviour by the unrestricted use of a whip for the firsttime.
Edwin, with his elbows on the stone parapet of the bridge, stared uninterested at thespectacle of the child, the whip, and the skeleton. He was not insensible to the piquancyof the pageant of life, but his mind was preoccupied with grave and heavy matters. He hadleft school that day, and what his eyes saw as he leaned on the bridge was not a willingbeast and a gladdened infant, but the puzzling world and the advance guard of its problemsbearing down on him. Slim, gawky, untidy, fair, with his worn black-braided clothes, andslung over his shoulders in a bursting satchel the last load of his schoolbooks, and onhis bright, rough hair a shapeless cap whose lining protruded behind, he had theextraordinary wistful look of innocence and simplicity which marks most boys of sixteen.It seemed rather a shame, it seemed even tragic, that this naïve, simple creature,with his straightforward and friendly eyes so eager to believe appearances, this creatureimmaculate of worldly experience, must