The ragged hills all round about this town are bespangled with groups of houses inhabited by the working cutlers. They have not suffered like the working weavers; for, to make knives, there must be the hand of man. Therefore, machinery cannot come to destroy the wages of the labourer. The home demand has been very much diminished; but still the depression has here not been what it has been, and what it is, where the machinery can be brought into play. We are here just upon the borders of Derbyshire, a nook of which runs up and separates Yorkshire from Nottinghamshire. I went to a village, the day before yesterday, called Mosborough, the whole of the people of which are employed in the making of sickles and scythes; and where, as I was told, they are very well off even in these times. A prodigious quantity of these things go to the United States of America. In short, there are about twelve millions of people there continually consuming these things; and the hardware merchants here have their agents and their stores in the great towns of America, which country, as far as relates to this branch of business, is still a part of old England.
Upon my arriving here on Wednesday night, the 27th instant, I by no means intended to lecture until I should be a little recovered from my cold; but, to my great mortification, I found that the lecture had been advertised, and that great numbers of persons had actually assembled. To send them out again, and give back the money, was a thing not to be attempted. I, therefore, went to the Music Hall, the place which had been taken for the purpose, gave them a specimen of the state of my voice, asked them whether I should proceed, and they, answering in the affirmative, on I went. I then rested until yesterday, and shall conclude my labours here to-morrow, and then proceed to “fair Nottingham,” as we used to sing when I was a boy, in celebrating the glorious exploits of “Robin Hood and Little John.” By the by, as we went from Huddersfield to Dewsbury, we passed by a hill which is celebrated as being the burial-place of the famed Robin Hood, of whom the people in this country talk to this day.
At Nottingham, they have advertised for my lecturing at the play-house, for the 3rd, 4th, and 5th of February, and for a public breakfast to be given to me on the first of those days, I having declined a dinner agreeably to my original notification, and my friends insisting upon something or other in that sort of way. It is very curious that I have always had a very great desire to see Nottingham. This desire certainly originated in the great interest that I used to take, and that all country boys took, in the history of Robin Hood, in the record of whose achievements, which were so well calculated to excite admiration in the country boys, this Nottingham, with the word “fair” always before it, was so often mentioned. The word fair, as used by our forefathers, meant fine; for we frequently read in old descriptions of parts of the country of such a district or such a parish, containing a fair mansion, and the like; so that this town appears to have been celebrated as a very fine place, even in ancient times; but within the last thirty years, Nottingham has stood high in my estimation, from the conduct of its people; from their public spirit; from their excellent sense as to public matters; from the noble struggle which they have made from the beginning of the French war to the present hour: if only forty towns in England equal in size to Nottingham had followed its bright example, there would have been no French war against liberty; the Debt would have been now nearly paid off, and we should have known nothing of those manifold miseries which now afflict, and those greater miseries which now menace, the country. The French would not have been in Cadiz; the Russians would not have been at Constantinople; the Americans would not have been in the Floridas; we should not have had to dread the combined fleets of America, France, and Russia; and, which is the worst of all, we should not have seen the jails four times as big as they were; and should not have seen Englishmen reduced to such a state of misery as for the honest labouring man to be fed worse than the felons in the jails.
EASTERN TOUR.
“You permit the Jews openly to preach in their synagogues, and call Jesus Christ an impostor; and you send women to jail (to be brought to bed there, too), for declaring their unbelief in Christianity.”—King of Bohemia’s Letter to Canning, published in the Register, 4th of January, 1823.
Hargham, 22nd March, 1830.
I set off from London on the 8th of March, got to Bury St. Edmund’s that evening; and, to my great mortification, saw the county-election and the assizes both going on at Chelmsford, where, of course, a great part of the people of Essex were met. If I had been aware of that, I should certainly have stopped at Chelmsford in order to address a few words of sense to the unfortunate constituents of Mr. Western. At Bury St. Edmund’s I gave a lecture on the ninth and another on the tenth of March, in the playhouse, to very crowded audiences. I went to Norwich on the 12th, and gave a lecture there on that evening, and on the evening of the 13th. The audience here was more numerous than at Bury St. Edmund’s, but not so numerous in proportion to the size of the place; and, contrary to what has happened in most other places, it consisted more of town’s people than of country people.
During the 14th and 15th, I was at a friend’s house at Yelverton, half way between Norwich and Bungay, which last is in Suffolk, and at which place I lectured on the 16th to an audience consisting chiefly of farmers, and was entertained there in a most hospitable and kind manner at the house of a friend.
The next day, being the 17th, I went to Eye, and there lectured in the evening in the neat little playhouse of the place, which was crowded in every part, stage and all. The audience consisted almost entirely of farmers, who had come in from Diss, from Harleston, and from all the villages round about, in this fertile and thickly-settled neighbourhood. I stayed at Eye all the day of the 18th, having appointed to be at Ipswich on the 19th. Eye is a beautiful little place, though an exceedingly rotten borough.