the attacks of bigotry and envy; but the obscurity which ensured peace, prevented his plans from obtaining the notice to which they were entitled; nor did their acknowledged success obtain for him any higher character, than that of an amiable visionary, who, in toys given to his scholars, foolishly squandered the profits of his profession. A small volume containing an account of the school, rules of English grammar, and a spelling dictionary, is, as far as the writer of this knows, the only memorial left to a man, whose unwearied and disinterested zeal in the cause of education, would, in other circumstances, have raised him to distinction.6
Such was the person from whom Mary Ann received her formal schooling, and the place where her subsequently advanced views on education were no doubt nurtured. Much, too, was learnt at home. Her practical mother would instruct her in all the skills of housekeeping, which included, in those days, spinning as well as sewing, knitting and cooking and the preparation of simple medicinal remedies. Like all the McCrackens Mary Ann was clever with her hands. It is said that while still a child she made dresses for the Poorhouse children, the stout homespun being purchased with money which she collected from her friends. Dancing would be fitted in somewhere, and in that musical family music lessons would be a matter of course.
As for the small compact town of Belfast in which she was growing up – it, too, was beginning to expand. The population in 1782 is given as 13,105, having risen from 8,549 thirty years earlier.7 The High Street, with the Farset River flowing down the centre of it from Bridge Street to the “Key”, was still the main thoroughfare, flanked on either side by Waring Street and Ann Street and connected with them by Bridge Street and the Corn-market and by numerous Entries then the home of the smaller shopkeepers. In Bridge Street, Samuel Neilson, the oncoming son of a presbyterian manse in County Down, was building up the woollen drapery business that was shortly to be one of the largest concerns in the town, and in the adjoining North Street was the goldsmith’s shop of Robert Joy’s friend Thomas McCabe. Many of the dwellings in these streets still had thatched roofs, but at the Four Corners – the junction of Bridge Street, Waring Street, North Street and Rosemary Lane – stood the imposing Exchange, to which was added in 1777, as the first storey, the beautiful Assembly Rooms, designed by Sir Robert Taylor, whose name is perpetuated in the Taylorian Museum at Oxford. For this lovely gift the town was indebted to the munificence of the Donegall family.
An extensive development scheme was taking shape at the southern end of the town, where New Street [later Linenhall Street and later still Donegall Place] was being laid out to accommodate the splendid houses of the few very wealthy families. Here the Lord Donegall of the day was to have his town residence, the early family castle in the centre of the town having been destroyed by fire in the beginning of the century. So exclusive was this street that when it was completed no horse drawn traffic was permitted to pass along it, and on Sundays it was the fashionable parade for the well-to-do. After 1783 Mary Ann must sometimes have been taken by Uncle Henry Joy to watch the building of the White Linenhall at the end of the long vista up New Street.
This was not the first ambitious scheme for developing Belfast. As early as 1671 George Macartney, the foremost citizen of his day, on returning from a visit to Italy planned to make it a second Venice by utilising the extensive water-front and the various rivers that entered the Lough at this point. His scheme, however, did not materialise.
The Mall and the Bank were other favourite walks, which blossomed into finery on Sunday afternoons. The former ran from the site on which the White Linenhall was to be built towards Joy’s paper mill, along the pleasant Blackstaff, or Owen-varra, River, with trees and fields beyond. The Bank stretched from the present Arthur Square towards the Lagan, also amid rural surroundings. In Millfield corn was still being ground by the water wheel set up in the time of Elizabeth.
The older streets were ill-lighted and badly kept, and pigs from many styes wandered about at will. On market days the chief thoroughfares were crowded with booths and stalls. Second-hand clothing, imported from Glasgow and sold in the streets, was a profitable trade in times of depression and gave rise to many complaints from the more hygienically minded citizens. Samuel Foote might have included the beggars of Belfast when he remarked that “till he had seen the beggars in Dublin he could never imagine what the beggars in London did with their cast off cloaths.”8 In 1780 a gentleman travelling from Dublin to Scotland via Belfast wrote as follows to the News-Letter:
I was vastly surprised and hurt to see a long string of falling cabins and tattered houses all tumbling down with a horrid aspect, and the seeming prelude to a pitiful village, which was my idea of Belfast until I got pretty far into the town, when I found my error, for indeed with some trifling improvements it might be made to vie with any town in Ireland, save Dublin and Cork.9
And in 1785 another correspondent in the same paper inquires
if it is not inconsistent in the inhabitants to be daily giving proof of taste and increasing opulence in opening new streets, in public erections, etc. when they never once turn their eyes to shambles that for nastiness have not their equal in the meanest village in Ireland – tho’ they have been noticed by travellers and by some of them recorded to our discredit?
Leaving aside its beautiful situation, the Belfast of those days was a practical little town with few embellishments. By the 1790s Robert Joy’s slender spire on the Poorhouse, the cupola of the new Parish Church in Donegall Street, and the belfry of the Market House alone broke the low sky line, and when Captain McCracken’s ship was in port her masts, along with those of other vessels, were clearly visible from the opposite end of High Street.
In Rosemary Lane three Presbyterian Meeting-houses [two of them adhering to the “New Light” principles] clustered together, testifying to the growing numbers and differing views of that community, and in 1784 the first Roman Catholic chapel in the town was opened, an occasion made memorable by the attendance of the 1st Company of the Belfast Volunteers as a mark of their goodwill. As members of this company Francis and William McCracken were there and we can be sure that the event was much discussed in their household. So also would be the visits of John Wesley. Nine different times he came to Belfast on his journeyings through Ireland, preaching in the open air, or in the Market House, though on the last occasion, in 1789, the use of First Meeting-house was granted ‘in the most obliging manner”.
It is, [Wesley wrote in his Journal] the completest place of public worship I have ever seen … It is very lofty, and has two rows of large windows, so that it is as light as our new chapel in London. And the rows of pillars, with every other part, are so finely proportioned, that it is beautiful in the highest degree. The House was crowded both within and without (and indeed with some of the most respectable persons in the town) that it was with the utmost difficulty I got in; but I then found I went not up without the Lord; Great was my liberty of speech among them: Great was our glorying in the Lord, so that I gave notice contrary to my first design of my intending to preach there again in the morning; but soon after the sexton sent me word it must not be, for the crowds had damaged the House, and some of them had broke off and carried away the silver which was on the Bible on the pulpit; So I desired one of our Preachers to preach in our little House [the first Methodist chapel in Belfast was opened in 1787 in Fountain Street], and left Belfast early in the morning.10
Behind a rather sober exterior the town provided a great deal of gaiety and sociability. Dances, balls and card parties were held in the beautiful Assembly Rooms. A coterie met regularly here, and another in the Donegall Arms. There was a great deal of card playing, sometimes for very high stakes, and hard drinking was regarded as an accomplishment rather than a vice. A description of the festivities of “that old and very respectable meeting known as the Card Club of Belfast” at an anniversary celebration in 1784 of the Glorious Revolution, mentions no less than twenty-nine toasts and indicates that others followed: the toasts illustrate clearly the wide interest in liberal movements among the “respectable” citizens of the town.11 Festivities of this kind were very popular, and commemorations and rejoicings were often accompanied by fireworks and illuminations, particularly on the King’s birthday. The Adelphi Club,
