The borough of Malmesbury, ‘very pleasantly situated on an eminence’ in the hundred of the same name, comprised the parish of the Abbey and parts (known as ‘in-parishes’) of St. Paul, Malmesbury and St. Mary, Westport. According to the boundary commissioners, it was
Cobbett remarked of ‘that villainous hole’ Cricklade, a market town on Wiltshire’s northern border, that ‘certainly, a more rascally place I never set my eyes on’. The countryside around he found pleasant enough, but the people were in a wretched condition, and ‘everything had the air of the most deplorable want’.Cobbett’s Rural Rides ed. G.D.H. and M. Cole, i. 15; ii. 414; Pigot’s Commercial Dir.
Ireland’s ‘second city’ of Cork, a county of itself, boasted an ‘almost matchless’ natural harbour, in which a vast shipbuilding and naval supply industry had developed during the Napoleonic wars, situated around the victualling yards at Cobh (Cove) on Great Island, providing local contractors with large fortunes. The impact of the navy’s gradual withdrawal during this period was countered by the growth of an ‘extensive trade in corn and flour’ and the establishment of cutlery, glass and glove manufactories. S. Lewis, Top. Dict. of Ireland (1837), ii.
The borough of Carrickfergus, the county town of Antrim, was coextensive with the parish of the same name and formed a county of itself. A seaport eight miles north-west of Belfast, it was largely dependent on its fisheries. By the 1830s it was ‘of no importance whatsoever’ and it was remarked that ‘it is the situation, more than anything within the town, that renders the place interesting’.PP (1831-2), xliii. 21; H.D. Inglis, Ireland in 1834, ii. 270, 271; S. Lewis, Top. Dict. of Ireland (1837), i.
The county corporate of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the county and assize town of Northumberland, was an important port, commercial, cultural and manufacturing centre on the north bank of the River Tyne. Parl. Gazetteer of England and Wales (1844), iii.
Warwickshire’s population increased by 23 per cent from 274,392 in 1821 to 336,610 in 1831, when almost 60 per cent of its 72,357 families were employed in trade, manufacture and handicraft, and 22 per cent in agriculture. Census Enumeration Abstract (1831), ii.
The small and nondescript town of Wareham, which had a ‘particularly neat appearance’, sent clay to the Potteries, but its port was too shallow for it to compete with its larger neighbour Poole. The inhabitants consisted of ‘persons of middling circumstances, and a few retired officers and independent persons, retail tradesmen and those deriving a subsistence from the small craft’.Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1830), 297-8; PP (1831-2), xxxviii. 151-2; (1835), xxiv. 699, 702; J. Hutchins, Dorset, i (1861), 77-78; Procs. Dorset Natural Hist. and Antiq.
Clackmannanshire was the smallest Scottish county (55 square miles). The county town, Clackmannan, had long been eclipsed in importance by the small port of Alloa, two miles away, which had a population of 3,482 in 1831. Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland (1895), i. 42-43, 262-4. The electoral influence of the Abercrombys of Tullibody, near Alloa, who had occupied the seat since 1788, was not challenged in this period.
Weymouth, as this constituency was usually known, and Melcombe Regis, which was in fact the larger and more important of the two towns, lay on either side of the River Wey, on a handsome bay at the centre of the Dorset coast. Though the port’s trade had much declined, improvements were made by the Acts of 1820, by which was rebuilt the bridge (opened in 1824) linking the two banks, and of 1825, by which the damage done to the harbour in the storm of November 1824 was repaired.G. Kay, Weymouth and Melcombe Regis New Guide (1823), 3-4, 11-12, 15-18; G.A. Ellis, Hist.
Ireland’s largest county of Cork, with an overwhelmingly Catholic population, had a valuable copper and mineral mining industry and extensive farms producing wheat, oats and barley, much of which was exported, but the condition of its numerous peasantry, who subsisted mainly on potatoes, was ‘very wretched’. There were several market towns, including the disfranchised boroughs of Baltimore, Castlemartyr, Charleville, Clonakilty, Doneraile, Midleton, and Rathcormack, and the parliamentary boroughs of Bandon Bridge, Cork, the venue for county elections, Kinsale, Mallow and Youghal.
