An Infant Hercules (c.NZ494210)

Yes, “Middlesbrough in 1832”.  To the uninitiated, it seems incredible.  The former medieval village had shrunk to little more than a farmstead by the turn of the nineteenth century, but would soon see its population boom beyond belief in the ensuing decades…

Yarm was, Stockton is, Middlesbrough will be.

[Old Teesside proverb, believed to have been uttered by industrialist Joseph Pease in the 1830s]

Population of Middlesbrough:

1801:   25

1829:   40

1831:   131

1841:   5,500

1851:   7,600

1861:   19,000

1871:   40,000

1881:   58,000

1891:   75,000

1901:   90,000

1932:   139,000

Present:  c.140,000

A growth rate believed to be unprecedented in Victorian England.

This remarkable place, the youngest child of England's enterprise, is an infant, but if an infant, an infant Hercules.

[William Gladstone, 1862]