Down, which was sometimes referred to as the ‘Yorkshire of Ireland’, had a population of over 350,000 in 1831 and was one of the wealthiest Irish counties. In addition to the disfranchised boroughs of Bangor, Hillsborough, Killyleagh and Newtownards, it contained several prosperous market towns and ports, including Newry and Downpatrick, where the county elections were held.S. Lewis, Top. Dict. of Ireland (1837), i.
Worcestershire was ‘extremely irregular’ in shape, ‘having upon every side small portions detached and insulated by the adjoining counties’. PP (1831-2), xxxvi. 309; Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1822-3), 568. Its agriculture, which suffered periodically from distress, provided a living for 14,954 (33 per cent) of the county’s 45,512 resident families, but 19,030 (42 per cent) depended on the trade, handicraft and manufacturing concerns of its larger unfranchised towns. PP (1833), xxxvii.
The 1832 Reform Act split Yorkshire into its constituent Ridings for elections, thereby ending the united representation of Britain’s largest county. By this time its interests had become so diverse as to make it virtually impossible that any one Member could adequately address them all. The predominantly agricultural North Riding, which also encompassed shipping at Scarborough and Whitby, contained 14 per cent of the county’s total population of 1.4 million in 1831 and was home to much of the county’s aristocracy and gentry.
Kildare produced mainly oats, wheat and potatoes. There were several market towns, including Maynooth, home to the Catholic seminary, and Rathangan, and the disfranchised boroughs of Athy, Kildare, Naas and Harristown. The venue for county elections was that of the assizes, held at Athy in winter and Naas in spring and summer. S. Lewis, Top. Dict. of Ireland (1837), ii.
Fermanagh, ‘hilly, rugged and uneven’, was a small agricultural county in which the dominant Protestants clashed regularly with the equally numerous Catholic population.Oldfield, Rep. Hist. (1816), vi. 232; S. Lewis, Top. Dict. of Ireland (1837), i. 618-22; P. Livingstone, Fermanagh Story, 158-61, 169. The representation was effectively controlled by a handful of prominent Orange families, who invariably provided the Members from among their own number throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Lord Belmore, Parl. Mems.
Clare mostly belonged to a large number of ‘absentees and needy proprietors’, whose conflicting electoral ambitions provoked frequent contests both before and after the Union. NLI, Smith O’Brien mss 427/141; S. Lewis, Top. Dict. of Ireland (1837), i. 329-35; Hist. Irish Parl. ii.
Glasgow, situated on the banks of the River Clyde, had been transformed since 1750 into a ‘major centre of international commerce and industry’. The North American tobacco trade, the source of much of the town’s prosperity in the eighteenth century, had collapsed by 1800, but the profits helped to finance industrial development, particularly in textiles. Since the 1790s the application of steam power had encouraged the concentration of cotton spinning and weaving into mills in and around the town, a process that was assisted by Glasgow’s proximity to the Lanarkshire coalfield.
Shropshire, bisected north-south by the navigable River Severn, was rich in coal, iron and other mineral formations and had industrialized early. Attempts to diversify the economy in this period were largely unsuccessful, and according to Charles Hulbert of Shrewsbury, writing in 1837, the 30 square miles from Newport to Brosley, Coalport, Dawley, Ironbridge and Madelely Wood resembled the neighbourhoods of Birmingham, Manchester and Stockport, where mines, canals, railways, foundries, smoke and populous towns ‘rush into existence as if by power of magic’. B.
A poor county of backward cultivation and limited manufactures, including the benighted Arigna iron works, Leitrim was sparsely populated and boasted few towns apart from Carrick-on-Shannon, where the elections were held, and Jamestown, the county’s other disfranchised borough, while Leitrim village was said to be a ‘miserable little place’.Oldfield, Rep. Hist. (1816), vi. 238-9; H.D. Inglis, Ireland in 1834, ii. 144; S. Lewis, Top. Dict. of Ireland (1837), ii.
Rutland, the smallest English county, was entirely agrarian. It contained the small market towns of Oakham, the venue for elections, and Uppingham.Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1822-3), 350, 351. Since 1747 the Noels, earls of Gainsborough, of Exton Park, near Oakham had combined with the Cecils, earls of Exeter, of Burghley House, just over the Lincolnshire border, to exclude from a share in the representation the Finches, earls of Winchilsea. The county had last been contested in 1761.
