The week-end was very sociable, hence I have gained a pound in weight (I couldn't resist the cheese!) and achieved a bare minimum on the knitting and spinning front:
Spent last night checking out more info for the family tree, and found out that my great great grandmother - and her parents - lived in Rock Park Estate, Rock Ferry (Birkenhead). The American author Nathaniel Hawthorne was there briefly, and described the estate in Passages from The English Notebooks:
'September 2d. 1854--We got into our new house in
Rock Park yesterday. It is quite a good house, with
three apartments, beside kitchen and pantry on the
lower floor; and it is three stories high, with four
good chambers in each story. It is a stone edifice,
like almost all the English houses, and handsome in
its design. The rent, without furniture, would probably
have been one hundred pounds; furnished, it is
one hundred and sixty pounds. Rock Park, as the
locality is called, is private property, and is now
nearly covered with residences for professional people,
merchants, and others of the upper middling class;
the houses being mostly built, I suppose, on speculation,
and let to those who occupy them. It is the
quietest place imaginable, there being a police station
at the entrance, and the officer on duty allows
no ragged
or ill-looking person to pass. There being a
toll, it precludes all unnecessary passage of carriages;
and never were there more noiseless streets than those
that give access to these pretty residences. On either
side there is thick shrubbery, with glimpses through
it of the ornamented portals, or into the trim gardens
with smooth-shaven lawns, of no large extent, but
still affording reasonable breathing-space. They are
really an improvement on anything, save what the
very rich can enjoy, in America. The former occupants
of our house (Mrs. Campbell and family) having
been fond of flowers, there are many rare varieties
in the garden, and we are told that there is
scarcely a month in the year when a flower will not
be found there.
The house is respectably, though not very elegantly,
furnished. It was a dismal, rainy day yesterday, and
we had a coal-fire in the sitting-room, beside which I
sat last evening as twilight came on, and thought,
rather sadly, how many times we have changed our
home since we were married. In the first place, our
three years at the Old Manse; then a brief residence
at Salem, then at Boston, then two or three years at
Salem again then at Lenox, then at West Newton,
and then again at Concord, where we imagined that
we were fixed for life, but spent only a year. Then
this farther flight to England, where we expect to
spend four years, and afterwards another year or two
in Italy, during all which time we shall have no real
home. For, as I sat in this English house, with the
chill, rainy English twilight brooding over the lawn,
and a coal-fire to keep me comfortable on the first
evening of September, and the picture of a
stranger--the dead husband of Mrs. Campbell--gazing
down at
me from above the mantel-piece,--I felt that I
never should be quite at home here. Nevertheless,
the fire was very comfortable to look at, and the
shape of the fireplace--an arch, with a deep
cavity--was an improvement on the square, shallow opening
of an English coal-grate.'
