The story of our books: Manchester Ripples

Interpretations below were written by the Portico Library volunteers as part of Bookends and Beginnings: Stories from our collections by our volunteers exhibition.

Workers’ worlds: Cultures and communities in Manchester and Salford 1880 – 1939, 1992 Edited by Andrew Davies and Steven Fielding

Professor Melanie Tebbutt was the contributing writer for this chapter on the role of ‘women’s words’, also known as gossip, in working-class neighbourhoods of Manchester.                                                                                                  

Her research interests include the history of childhood and youth; gender and working-class masculinities; sense of place and regional identities, and so on. More recently, she has been researching and teaching the history of youth and exploring its implications for young people growing up in the present day.

“If industrialisation created two nations in Britain, they were first detected in Manchester.”

Manchester was admired for its technical and organisation achievements in cotton production and urban evolution during the industrial revolution.

With this immense growth spurt came an astonishing increase in the population and, thus, the beginning of two nations within one city. In this book, historians explore the co-existence of opposing classes, opposing genders, and opposing age groups, as Manchester ballooned into a British megalopolis.

Sade Omeje

Ripples and Breakers, a volume of verse, 1878 by Mrs G. Linnaeus Banks Illustrated by John Proctor and G.C. Banks 

The Manchester Man, the most well known of Isabella Banks’ novels, was my father’s favourite book. He kept it on a table beside his chair. At the Portico I discovered Isabella was a poet previously, her first poem published when she was sixteen. Ripples and Breakers was her third and last volume of poetry. Novels were more profitable. 

Isabella’s poems range in themes from the rise of industry and its benefits for the working class to imagistic nature verses. This charmingly illustrated book includes tales of valour, romance, grief and a few poems that perhaps reflect Isabella’s concerns for women in nineteenth-century society.