Addressing the electors in 1826, Abel Rous Dottin recalled his first visit to Southampton some 30 years earlier, when

it was, compared with its present appearance, little better than a village. Now, it was one of the most elegant towns in England; its commerce had improved; it was brilliantly lit with gas ... Majestic steam vessels were seen floating on their beautiful river, magnificent baths were erecting [and] rows of elegant buildings were rising round the town and its vicinity. Southampton Herald, 12 June 1826.

Tamworth, which lay partly in Staffordshire and partly in Warwickshire, had ‘extensive wharfs and warehouses on the canal’, two large wool stapling establishments and numerous corn and cotton mills, including that of the Peel family on the River Tame. PP (1831-2), xl. 13; Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1828-9), 736; Staffs. Dir.

‘This Wiltshire is a horrible county’, wrote William Cobbett† after passing through Cricklade in 1821: ‘fine fields and pastures all around, and yet the cultivators of those fields so miserable’.Cobbett’s Rural Rides ed. G.D.H. and M. Cole, i. 15. It was nominally divided into northern and southern districts by a line running to the south of Devizes.

A market town and seaport situated on the banks of the tidal River Parrett, in a plain of ‘very rich and productive’ agricultural land, Bridgwater was described in 1822 as ‘large, populous [and] flourishing ... a place of extensive trade [and] a great thoroughfare’. The Parrett divided the town into two, the western part being ‘larger and better built’ than the eastern, known as Eastover. Bridgwater’s role as an important distribution centre for the South West of England was boosted by the opening of the link, via Taunton, with the Grand Western Canal in 1827.

Staffordshire was celebrated both for the production of earthenware (known as Staffordshireware) at its Potteries in the north-west, and for the manufacture of iron and hardware in the densely populated ‘black country’ around Walsall and Wolverhampton in the south; but the ‘greater part of it’ was ‘a highly cultivated agricultural district, abounding in wood, water and game’.PP (1833), xxxvii. 604; White’s Staffs. Dir.

Caernarvonshire was dominated by the mountains of Snowdonia (Eryri). The main industries were quarrying and mining for slate, lead and copper in the hills above the new town of Porthmadog, in the neighbourhoods of Bethesda, Dolwyddelan, Llanberis and Llanllechid, and at Llanrwst on the Denbighshire border, where the 1812 Enclosure Act had proved impossible to implement and had to be revised in 1821. For administrative purposes the county was divided into ten hundreds: Cymydmaen; Creuddyn; Dinllaen; Eifionydd; Gafflogion; Isaf; Is-Gwyrfai; Uwch-Gwyrfai; Nant Conwy and Uchaf.

Monmouthshire was a maritime county on the south-eastern edge of the South Wales iron and coalfields. Between 1821 and 1831 its population increased from 71,833 to 98,130, reflecting the continued industrialization of the Sirhowy valley and growth of the iron towns of Pontypool and Tredegar.

Hampshire retained its predominantly rural and agrarian character during this period. Between 1821 and 1831 its population rose by 14 per cent, but the proportion living in the main urban centres of Portsmouth, Southampton and Winchester, the county town and venue for the elections, remained virtually constant at just under a quarter. PP (1822), xv. 341; (1833), xxxvii. 24-25. Politically, it was notable among counties for the presence of a government interest which, according to the reformer Oldfield, was ‘so great as to supersede aristocracy itself’.

The freeholders of the marcher county of Hereford on the Welsh border had been polled three times between 1796 and 1818. Party organization was well developed and the squirearchy, who resented their exclusion from the representation of Leominster, expected their Members to be resident gentlemen of rank, committed to promoting the county’s agricultural and allied interests.

Wycombe, the ‘handsomest’ town in Buckinghamshire, was situated in the south of the county, 29 miles from London on one of the main roads to the west. It had some cotton lace manufacturing, but was notably a centre of paper making, with several mills operating in and around it. Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1823-4), 159-60; (1830), 95-96. Dissent was well established, and the Quaker families of Edmonds, Lucas, Wheeler and others were prominent. R.W.