Seven English Cities — Inside the Classic

A Self-Conscious Traveler's Voice

Howells frequently inserts himself into the narrative, not as an omniscient guide but as a fallible observer. In Liverpool, he admits his interest in the docks was 'perfunctory' because he had come to meet a steamer, not to take one. This honesty about his own motives—and the limits of his attention—gives the prose a conversational, almost confiding quality. He uses parentheses to add asides, as when he notes that Liverpool 'unambitiously calls its elevated road' an overhead railway. Such touches reveal a writer attentive to local language and unafraid to mock pretension, including his own. The voice is that of a seasoned traveler who has learned that guidebooks are often wrong and that the best discoveries come from wandering.

Architecture as Character Witness

Buildings in Howells's account are never merely described; they are interrogated for what they reveal about a city's soul. St. George's Hall in Liverpool is 'of a singularly noble presence,' but the city 'has moments of failing in the promise of this classic edifice.' The architecture becomes a measure of civic character, one that can disappoint as well as delight. In Manchester, the smoke-stained buildings tell a story of industry and its costs. Howells reads the urban landscape like a text, noting where a city lives up to its own monuments and where it falls short. His eye for detail—the coal smoke on Greek columns, the rusted spits in a Guildhall kitchen—turns physical description into social commentary.

The Pilgrims and the Unknowing Schoolboy

In Boston, Howells recounts the imprisonment of Pilgrims in dungeons adjacent to the Guildhall kitchens, where they could smell roasting food while on bread and water. He resists the temptation to call this 'a refinement of cruelty,' instead noting that the cells are now full of earthen jars and the basement scattered with agricultural implements. The most striking moment comes when he and his companion ask a schoolboy where the Pilgrims were tried: the boy does not know and has apparently never heard of them. Howells speculates wryly that the boy might have 'heard too much of the Pilgrims, and had purposely forgotten them.' This anecdote encapsulates the tension between American reverence for Pilgrim history and English indifference—a theme that runs through the travelogue.

Humor in the Gap Between Expectation and Reality

Howells's wit often emerges from the mismatch between what he expects and what he finds. The docks that are supposed to be impressive but are 'sometimes unimpressive'; the schoolboy who should know local history but does not; the guidebook that promises wonders but delivers only perfunctory interest. He is particularly good at deflating his own pretensions, as when he quotes his notebook's phrase 'wonderful and almost endless' with a hint of self-mockery. This humor is gentle rather than caustic, and it serves to humanize the narrator. The reader is invited to share in the joke rather than be lectured. Howells's tone suggests that travel is as much about the traveler's foibles as about the places visited.

Howells's account rewards readers who enjoy a narrator who is both observant and self-aware. His prose moves between description, anecdote, and reflection, often within a single paragraph. The seven cities are not treated as a checklist but as occasions for meditation on character, history, and the quirks of travel. Readers should expect a leisurely pace and a willingness to follow digressions—the schoolboy who never heard of the Pilgrims, the docks that refuse to be seen. The pleasure lies not in the destinations but in the company of a writer who finds meaning in the ordinary and humor in the unexpected.

That damp afternoon, Howells’ wry eye on Manchester’s smoke made me long for softer skies, and my fingers drifted to the shelf, pulling down Wanderings in Wessex An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter — A Closer Reading. His grimy cities faded into chalk streams and quiet lanes, a gentler kind of wandering altogether.