Commons 1820-1832

Dysart, on the northern shore of the Firth of Forth, ten miles north of Leith and 16 miles south-south-east of Cupar, was dominated by Dysart House, the subsidiary seat of James St. Clair Erskine†, 2nd earl of Rosslyn, of Ravenscraig Castle, the owner of most of the properties and valuable coal seams nearby. The harbour and wet dock serving its coal and coarse linen trades, however, belonged to the town council, a self-elected body of 24, all resident in 1822, when 21 had property in the burgh.Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland (1895), ii. 455-6; PP (1823), xv. 703; J.

Milborne Port, a ‘very irregularly built’ town with the appearance ‘more of a village’, which had been ‘anciently ... of importance’, was situated on a branch of the River Yeo close to the Dorset border. Agriculture was crucial to the town’s economy, employing 283 families in 1821, but 159 worked in trade and manufacturing and 26 in other occupations. In the eighteenth century it had been a centre for the production of linen, sailcloth and the coarser types of woollens, but these industries were in serious decline by the 1820s and the market house had long been closed up.

Aberdeenshire’s staples were an improving agriculture and fishing, and there was a thriving linen industry in Aberdeen. Besides the royal burghs of Aberdeen, Inverurie and Kintore, its principal centres of population were the ports of Fraserborough and Peterhead and the inland settlements of Aboyne, Alford, Ballater, Ellon, Huntly, Meldrum, Pitsligo and Turriff.Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland (1895), i.

Antrim, which had a population of over 300,000 by 1831, was a prosperous and mostly Protestant Ulster county on the north-east Ulster coast. There were several market towns, including the disfranchised boroughs of Antrim and Randalstown, and a number of ports, notably Ballycastle, Larne and Portrush, but Belfast was the economic epicentre of its flourishing cloth trades.S. Lewis, Top. Dict. of Ireland (1837), i. 30-35. Except in the lively politics of its biggest borough, not much attention was attracted by elections for the county, which took place at Carrickfergus.

Londonderry, a ‘very grand’ and ‘extremely imposing’ city on the west bank of the Foyle, was a thriving port and expanding commercial centre, which had a lively populace and in this period boasted three newspapers, the Chronicle, Journal and Sentinel. J.C. Curwen, Observations on State of Ireland (1818), i. 222-6; H.D. Inglis, Ireland in 1834, ii. 195-205; S. Lewis, Top. Dict. of Ireland (1837), ii. 297, 300-2; PP (1831-2), xliii. 99; (1836), xxiv.

Belfast, ‘a sort of metropolis of the north’, as Anne Plumptre observed, was already in the early nineteenth century a byword for economic prosperity and genteel, overwhelmingly Protestant, society.Strangers to that Land ed. A. Hadfield and J. McVeagh, 225-7; Hist. Irish Parl. ii. 168, 169. Its opulence derived from its rapidly expanding linen manufactures, but it also benefited from the production of cotton, yarn, butter, glass and shipbuilding, and it was a busy and profitable seaport. Pigot’s Commercial Dir.

Huntingdonshire was almost entirely agricultural. In addition to the county town and parliamentary borough of Huntingdon, it contained the small market towns of Kimbolton, Ramsey, St. Ives and St.

Huntingdon, the birth place of Oliver Cromwell, was separated from the borough of Godmanchester by the River Ouse.Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1823-4), 369-70. It lacked the ‘stir and bustle’ usually associated with a county town, but continued to flourish in this period. William Cobbett† described it as ‘one of those pretty, clean, unstenched, unconfined places that tend to lengthen life and make it happy’. Cobbett’s Rural Rides ed. G.D.H. and M. Cole, i.

As befitted the long-standing ambiguity of the cultural status of the Irish capital, which was at once both constitutionally and economically dependent and socially and intellectually irrepressible, Dublin after the Union witnessed both the depths of electoral chicanery which marked out its politics as those of a colonial sewer and the heights of inspirational fervour which brought Ireland’s great causes into the heart of the imperial Parliament. T.C.

Armagh, the seat of the primate of Ireland, was dismissed as a ‘mere village’ in one radical source, but was, in fact, in ‘a very improving state’, partly owing to its linen market, which was rebuilt in 1829.Peep at the Commons (1820), 20; PP (1831-2), xliii. 1; (1835), xxviii. 242; S. Lewis, Top. Dict. of Ireland (1837), i. 66-69. In addition to the cathedral and archiepiscopal palace, it boasted a public library and observatory, and, according to Henry David Inglis, was