Commons 1820-1832

Reigate, a ‘small but remarkably neat’ market town, was situated on a branch of the River Mole, in the east of county, on the London to Brighton road. Apart from its ‘thoroughfare importance’, it was ‘a place of but little trade’ and there were ‘no manufactures’. However, it was reported in 1831 that the town contained a disproportionately large number of gentlemen’s residences. Ibid. 35-37; Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1832-4), 990, 991. The borough covered only a small area, about 65 acres, at the centre of the parish, the remainder of which was known as ‘the foreign’.

Tregony, a once flourishing seaport and market town, situated on the ‘main arm’ of the River Fal about seven miles south-east of Truro, had been ‘reduced ... to abject poverty’ by the eighteenth century as the river had silted up and the tide no longer reached the harbour. A large woollen cloth manufactory had ‘long since been abandoned’ and the market was ‘very small’, owing to competition from Truro and St. Austell. The population consisted ‘chiefly of the labouring poor’, who were ‘almost exclusively employed in agriculture’, and many of the houses were ‘small and wretched’. S.

Plymouth, ‘one of the largest seaports in England’, was the easternmost of three adjoining towns situated on a peninsula between the Plym and Tamar estuaries, where they entered the English Channel. On the west bank was Plymouth Dock, renamed Devonport in 1824, the site of a major naval base and dockyard, which had grown spectacularly during the eighteenth century so that by 1801 its population exceeded that of Plymouth.

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.

Ludlow, the former seat of the council of the Marches, was a castellated town overlooking the confluence of the Rivers Corve and Teme, 24 miles north of Hereford and 25 south of Shrewsbury on the Herefordshire-Shropshire border. Its principal industry, glove making, was in decline. Parl. Gazetteer of England and Wales (1844), iii. 312, 313. The borough had not polled since the Oakly Park interest, held by the Herberts and Clives, began its long ascendancy in 1727, and representation was generally reserved for their family members and close connections.

The brick-built cathedral city and county town of Hereford on the north bank of the River Wye, to which the radical John Thelwall retreated in 1798, had a strong libertarian tradition counterbalanced by the Tory-Anglican influence of the chapter clergy. E.P. Thompson, ‘Hunting the Jacobin Fox’, P and P, cxlii (1994), 112-40. The city, or liberties, encompassed six parishes, parts of two others, and extended ‘far beyond the mass of the town’, which in 1831 was described as ‘a place neither advancing nor receding’, with respectable shops and a well-clad population.

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.

Great Marlow was ‘a respectable and well-built’ unincorporated borough on the southern border of Buckinghamshire, situated on the north bank of the Thames opposite the Berkshire parish of Bisham, which contained the Temple House home and copper mills of Owen Williams, Member since 1796 and possessor of the dominant electoral interest. There was some paper and lace making in the town. Municipal government was in the parish, which extended beyond the parliamentary borough; the two constables were the returning officers. Pigot’s Commercial Dir.

Newton was a small manufacturing town with one main street, five miles from Warrington and seven from Wigan. It had no corporation and was governed by the borough steward and the bailiff of the manor, who held a court baron and court leet three times a year and were the returning officers.E. Baines, Hist. Lancs.(1824), ii. 433; J.P. Earwacker, E. Cheshire, ii. 161-3; PP (1831-2), xxxvi.