COBBETT'S POLITICAL REGISTER. VOLUME LXXVIII. FROM OCTOBER 6, TO DECEMBER 29, 1832, Printed and Published by the Author at 11, Bolt Court, Fleet Street. VOL. 78.-No. 1.] LONDON, SATURDAY, OCTOBER 6TH, 1832. PROGRESS IN THE NORTH. [Price Is. 2d. there is the Custom-house; and there is the Billingsgate, only with the fish a little fresher, and with fishwomen not quite so drunken nor quite so nasty; and there is the " Fish-street-hill," just as much like "t'other place" as if it had been spit out of its mouth, only that it has not a lying monument as t'other place has. NEWCASTLE is a really solid fine town; just such streets as the city of London; just such shops; andjust such industrious and busy-looking I CAME here this forenoon, and am to people. Nor is it (worse is its luck!) lecture at the theatre this evening. This destitute of a corporation, yielding, as place is about eight miles from New-far as I can find, in point of wisdom, castle, down the river TYNE towards justice, honesty, fair dealing with the the sea; and as much like Wapping it people, not one jot to CHARLEY PEARis as any two peas were ever like each SON, FIGGINS the printers' tinker, and other. SOUTH SHIELDS is just opposite, the rest of the THING under which we on the other side of this "LITTLE have the happiness to live in Middlesex. THAMES," called the TYNE; and such To be sure, there is here not such ample places for stir and bustle, on the scope for guttling and guzzling; but sides of the river and on the river, this corporation, too, is allowed to raise never were seen, except at London it- taxes on the river; it has the fingering self; and, really, these places seem to of public property of various descripsurpass even London in this respect. tions; and I am well assured, that the To describe to an inhabitant of London manner of its management, and the apthis famous group of towns, NEWCASTLE, plication and distribution of the funds, NORTH SHIELDS, GATESHEAD, and are such, that CHARLEY PEARSON'S SOUTH SHIELDS, a very few words are Common Council and HUGHES necessary; the Tyne is the Thames; HUGHES's Court of Aldermen have no Newcastle is the city of London reason to blush at hearing the corporaGateshead is Southwark; the bridge tion of NEWCASTLE called their legitithat connects these is old London-mate offspring. Not to be deficient in bridge; North Shields is Wapping; anything belonging to the parent, the and South Shields is Deptford: and all child has a DEBT, too; a funded debt; these are so precisely like the big thing and, like t'other THING, which, again, in Middlesex and Surrey, that it would resembles the great THING of all at almost make one believe that the WESTMINSTER, it can never pay off! former place had bred, and that this So that in all things this famous town was a young one. As you go over the of Newcastle resembles the city of bridge from GATESHEAD to Newcastle, London; and GATESHEAD and the two there are the ships innumerable, lying SHIELDSES resemble those bustling apbelow the bridge as far as you can see pendages before-mentioned It is imdown the river; and there are the possible, by the use of any words, to barges and the boats above the bridge; give an adequate idea of the stir and and all the same sort of people at work, bustle upon this river, of which there and all the same sort of work going on. seems to be scarcely any square yard of When you get over the bridge there is water which experiences one half hour the Thames-street turning round the at a time without something or other corner to the right and to the left; and being floating upon it, 1 B Sunderland, 26. Sept. 1832. ple of this district of the country in seems to have been always famous for men of great genius and energy. In going from SOUTH SHIELDS to SUNderLAND we went near to JARROW, so famous as the birth-place of "the venerable BEDE; to be sure, as to venerable there was some difference between him and the two SCOTTS, ELDON and SrowELL, and that MITFORD who was afterwards Lord REDESDALE; but they also were natives of NEWCASTLE and the neighbourhood; and having had the good luck to go to the South, they astonished the natives, and became great men, which they never would have been if they had remained here: and so conscious do they appear to have been of this, that they have all taken special From NORTH SHIELDS you look Durham and Northumberland, which across the water to SourH SHIELDS; and there is a steam-boat taking passengers across every half hour. By this steam-boat I crossed at twelve o'clock to-day, and got to this place about two. SUNDERLAND is seven miles from SOUTH SHIELDS, in a south-easterly direction, near the mouth of a river called the WEAR, on the right bank of which, going downwards, the greater part of the town lies. To go into the town you go over an iron bridge of very beautiful architecture. The river is narrow, running down between rocks which are nearly perpendicular and of great height. The bridge crosses this river from rock to rock, and is so far above the water that ships of considerable size go under the bridge by only lowering their top-good care never to come back to settle gallant-mast. The main street at SUNDERLAND is, they say, a mile and three quarters long; and it has innumerable shops, finer, on an average, than those of the STRAND, FLEET-STREET, and CHEAPSIDE ; so that, though there are nothing but coals produced here, they cause the other parts of the world to bring hither all manner of conveniences and fineries. There are considerable glass manufactories here and in the neighbourhood of NEWCASTLE; but these also are occasioned by the coals. But the most interesting and valuable product of this part of England is, the people, of whom it is impossible to speak too much in praise. My readers will remember well the famous speeches and petitions sent up from NEWCASTLE during the discussions on the Reform Bill. They will remember well how much we admired the speeches of Messrs. ATTWOOD, DOUBLEDAY, LARKIN, FIFE, and others. Not a man of my readers, I dare say, has not wished that he could have seen or heard these men, whose speeches and proceedings absolutely gave a tone to the whole country, and whose names became familiar in the mouths of even the chopsticks of Sussex and Kent. I have now seen these nien with my own eyes; and they are a fair sample, perhaps rather a picked sample, of the whole of the peo here again. They have sent their new and fine names to be put up at the corners of the streets, which have hitherto escaped the fate of that of WELLINGTON; and in all probability will now continue to escape it. Let me now give my readers in the South, if I can, something like an adequate idea of the face of the country, of the farming, and of the collieries, and of the state of the working people, which last is always the most interesting object with every man of sense, writing upon the state of a country. Observe, that, in going from NEWCASTLE to NORTH SHIELDS, you go a road pretty nearly parallel with the river, and get seven miles nearer to the sea. Along this seven miles the farming is excellent; fine corn-fields, large and beautiful fields of turnips of both kinds, sowed in rows with inter-cultivation; and I saw not one field of turnips which was not fine; the pastures very fine; the haystacks, containing from forty, perhaps, to seventy tons of hay each, made even neater than those in Middlesex, and thatched with greater care. No barley, but prodigious quantities of wheat and of oats; the stacks much larger than those on the road from Leeds to Newcastle, and in some cases from twenty to thirty of them in one farm-yard. The cows, the finest that man ever set his eyes on; a good deal of white in their of very little else; such men ought to colour; some quite white; short horns; have known this; but they did not strait back; just like those in the HOL- know it, therefore they spread about DERNESS Country of Yorkshire, and in error instead of spreading what ought to great abundance as to numbers though be called knowledge. the proportion of pasture land has been, unwisely, so considerably diminished. Durham, 27. Sept. 1832. The turnips are for winter food in the In coming from SUNDERLAND to stall for the cattle. DURHAM, a distance of fourteen miles, From SOUTH SHIELDS. to SUNDER-I came from the sea-beach to the cenLAND the country still the same, or tre of the county, and gradually to inrather better as it lies nearer the sea. ferior land. I perceive, that the county There are no barns such as we have in of DURHAM, along by the sea-side, the South. All the farm buildings are has a strip of land, varying in width of stone; each has a place sufficiently from five miles to ten or twelve, relarge for beating out the corn by a sembling the HOLDERNESS country in thrashing-machine; and there appears the East-Riding of Yorkshire, to which, to be no such thing as a barn's floor or a indeed, it joins it at the southern exflail in the whole of these counties. tremity of the former. The HOLDERThe terrific word "SWING," which was NESS country is separated from the rich at once a signature and a signal, is the part of Lincolnshire by the HUMBER; name of that part of the flail which the and thus this fine land runs all along by thrasher brings into contact with the the sea-side from LYNN, in Norfolk, to straws. Therefore Mr. SWING never the mouth of the TYNE; and then it was heard of in this county; but his goes all along the sea-coast to the doings would have been heard of had it TWEED, including in its way the estates not been for a reason very different in- of Lord GREY at the hamlet of Howdeed from that of any difference that ICK; and from the TWEED, it continues there is in the character, in the morality, or in the intelligence, or understanding, or education in those who labour on the land. SCOTT ELDON and Dr. BLACK used to prate away about the good sense of the labourers in the North, and about This eastern part of the county of the poor-rates not being excessive in the DURHAM is, like all the rest of these North. They did not seem to know, counties, generally level; or, at least, that here agriculture is only a small much more so than the counties in the part of the business of the county, South and the West. The country is and that in the southern, eastern, and fine, but not pretty: the harvest was all western counties it is the sole business. in; but the stubbles and the stacks They did not seem to know that there proved it to have been good; and, as were no farm labourers living in cot-to the pastures, the turnips, and the tages here; and that there was scarcely cows, they exceed everything of which a an instance in this part of England of a person working upon the land, not living, or, at least, boarding, in the house of the farm on which he worked. A man who has been paid as a statesman for pretty nearly fifty years, and another who has been a professed enlightener of the people for twenty years, ought to have known that there was no such thing as a village purely agricultural to the north of LEEDS, while the southern, eastern, and western counties consist on to the FRITH of FORTH, taking in the fine farming countries of Berwickshire and EAST LOTHIAN, to behold which is a pleasure that I yet have to come. Southern, or Western, or Eastern, farmer can have an idea. The sheep appear to be of the LEICESTER breed, the CHEVIOT-HILL sheep not having found their way into these rich pastures, But the great business of life here relates to the produce of the sub-soil still more than to that which comes from the surface. The collieries are the chief part of the property of this county. SUNDERLAND, the two SHIELDSES and GATESHEAD, and NEWCASTLE itself, have E |