Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> This town of Sheffield is very populous and large the streets nar- row and the houses dark and black occasioned by the continued smoke of the forges which are always at work. Here they make all sorts of cutlery-ware. Thus wrote Daniel Defoe in A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-26). Sheffield has changed a good deal since then. It is still populous and large some of the streets are narrow and a few houses are dark and black but the tourist arriving in Sheffield today would be greeted by a very different scene one dominated by motor- ways offices shopping arcades high-rise flats and derelict facto- ries. A visitor would be hard pressed to discover that this was once the leading cutlery centre in the world. Above all there are no signs of Sheffield’s old craftsmen-the ‘little mesters’-whose skills made the city so famous. In some respects perhaps we should not lament their passing. Sheffield’s expertise in cutlery-like its skill in steelmaking edge tool manufacture and silverplate-was a by-product of a brutal and degrading industrial system. As one nineteenth-century cutler com- mented: The dirty shops the disregard of sanitary demands and the arbitrary way the workmen were treated all tended to low ideals of life. Mechanisation has destroyed all that and brought us a cor- nucopia of knives at a price that everyone can afford. In any case most of us now have less need of a sharp blade: we no longer go hunting tackle desperadoes work the land hook stones from horses’ hooves or even sharpen our pencil. Once almost everyone carried a pocket-knife-a cherished and indispensable part of their daily lives. Now it has become an object hardly worth consideration.