It is of course a silly question, because we will never know.
He left no letters expressing his opinions, nor did anyone else leave a record of what he said, and in all there are just a handful official documents which carry his name.
These include two census returns, a marriage certificate, and an entry in the burial records of All Saints Church in Chorlton Upon Medlock.
All of which amounts to slim pickings and clearly offer no insight into what he thought about anything, let alone Victoria Terrace, which was a row of 14 back to back properties set back from Fairfield Street and bordered on two sides by the River Medlock.
Together with another ten houses, they were home to 102 people in 1851, and of these number 5 was rented out to John Duckworth.
He shared the house with his wife, Esther, their son William, and John’s brother. Both John and his brother were mechanics and on the 1851 census John described himself as a spindle maker.
He had been born in 1821 and was from Chorlton on Medlock, but by the 1840s was living on Travis Street, just a few minutes’ walk from London Road Railway Station.
Esther, who was from Altrincham had been living on St James Street which was behind Mosley Street when the couple married in 1850.
But number 5 Victoria Terrace,was not their first marital home, the Rate Books show that they had moved in sometime between January and April of 1851, after the previous tenant had moved on.
And here there is a little mystery, because according to the census return their son William was 7 years old, which fits with a record of his baptism from 1845 at the parish church.
Of course, there may have been another John and Esther Duckworth with a son called William.
Either way their stay at Victoria Terrace appears to have been a short one and within two years John had died, and was buried in All Saints Church in Chorlton on Medlock.
Which leaves us none the wiser about what he thought about the small enclave of homes, which consisted of Victoria Terrace and Coronation Square.
The houses date from around the old Queen’s coronation in 1837, and the first record of them appears in the Rate Books two years later when they were owned by William Walker, who sold them on to a Sarah Glossop.
We know that the properties which made up Victoria Terrace each consisted of four rooms and the remaining properties were a mix of four three and two roomed houses.
What might have struck us, would have been the range of different accents of those who lived there, for while over half of the resident had been born in Manchester, Chorlton on Medlock or Hulme, there for those from Ireland, Scotland and Wales, as well London, Yorkshire and the Lake District.
Added to this, the enclave was young, with over a quarter of the population under the age of 15, and almost another quarter between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four.
And over the course of the next few weeks, we shall look at the occupations of the 102 residents, and just how many of them had been here a decade earlier or indeed ten years later.
For now I will just ponder in a very unhistorical way of what it might have been like to live there, on those cold dark nights with perhaps the occasional noise from the railway viaduct as a train went by, or the distinctive clunk of wagons being shunted around the nearby goods yard.
Or the powerful smell from the river, on a hot and still August day.
But that, like the speculation of what John Duckworth thought about Victoria Terrace is idle tosh.
Location; Fairfield Street
Pictures; detail of Victoria Terrace and Coronation Square, in 1904, m11492, & nos 14 & 16 Victoria Terrace, July 1900, A. Bradburn, m11490, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass and in1851, from Adshead’s map of Manchester, 1851, courtesy of courtesy of Digital Archives Association http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/
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