Read "A Life for a Life, Volume II" by Dinah Mulock online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
_Dec. 31st,_ 1855. The merry-making of my neighbours in the flat above -- probably Scotch or Irish, both of which greatly abound in this town -- is a sad counteraction of work for to-night. But why grumble, when I am one of the few people who pretend to work at all on this holiday -- a night which used to be such a treat to us boys. The sounds overhead put me in mind of that old festival of Hogmanay, which, for a good many things, would be "more honoured in the breach than the observance."
This Liverpool is an awful town for drinking. Other towns may be as bad; statistics prove it; but I know no place where intoxication is so open and shameless. Not only in bye streets and foul courts, where one expects to see it, but everywhere. I never take a short railway journey in the after part of the day, but I am liable to meet at least one drunken "gentleman" snoozing in his first-class carriage; or, in the second class, two or three drunken "men," singing, swearing, or pushed stupidly about by pale-faced wives. The sadness of the thing is, that the wives do not seem to mind it, that everybody takes it quite as a matter of course.