J. Ewing Ritchie

“ They would rather live on their past glories—Bungay, with its renowned castle, Framlingham with its castle still more renowned, Bury with its memories of its martyr king, Woodbridge mildly illuminated by the fame of Bernard Barton, the Quaker poet, Beccles with its fine church, Halesworth where Archbishop Whateley was for many years the rector. They are all places to live in happily if you have had enough of excitement and would shun the wicked world and its ways. ”

“ A grand old city is Norwich, with its castle, now a museum, looking over it all, with its St. Andrew’s Hall, now utilised for concerts and public meetings, with its great markets, with its Colman’s Mustard Mills, with its old houses and narrow streets. The workman, with his strikes, has driven away from Northampton a good deal of its boot and shoe manufacture. What Northampton has lost Ipswich, Colchester, and especially Norwich, have gained. There is beautiful country round Norwich; and Norwich ought to be eminently holy, for there are forty churches there, many of them very ancient. ”

“ Lying in a valley surrounded by hills, up which the town is gradually climbing, and watered by the picturesque Orwell, which elevates the town to the dignity of a port, and within little more than an hour and a half’s run from London by the Great Eastern Railway, Ipswich may claim to be a place well worth visiting, while to the trader it is known and appreciated as a busy and thriving town. ”

“ I have built upon sandy foundations all my life long. All I know is that I live at a full thousand a year’s expense, and will work hard and do my best to get through withal; and if that will not do let them take their lot of blame and suffering that fall short of their duty both towards me and themselves. Had I been blessed with your penetration and blind eyes towards foolish pleasures, I had steered my course better; but we are born with different passions and gifts, and I have only to hope that the great Giver of all will make better allowances for us than we make for one another. ”

“ About fifty miles away from London—you can run down in an hour by the Great Eastern—stands an ancient, if not the most ancient, city in England, where the mother of Constantine is said to have lived, where, at any rate, she founded a chapel, which still remains, and where Constantine the Great is said to have been born, and where old King Cole, that merry old soul, is reported to have reigned in all his glory. ”

“ Humphrey Gainsborough, the painter’s second brother, settled as a Dissenting Minister at Henley-on-Thames. Of him, the celebrated Edgeworth, the father of the equally celebrated daughter, says he had never known a man of a more inventive mind. Thomas, the artist, must have inherited something of his artistic skill from his mother, for she herself loved to paint fruit and flowers, but with the boy, painting became the one great object of his life, and he was always at it, even when he should have been studying at the ancient grammar school where he was a pupil ”

“ But Chelmsford is of the present rather than the past. Its men and women move with the times, perhaps in consequence of their nearness to the great metropolis. It has literary and scientific tastes, of which the sette of Odde Volumes is an illustration; and it is further known to fame as the head-quarters of the Essex Bee-keeping Association, established in 1880, which has done much to develop the taste for, and the growth of, honey—an article not unknown to the ancients, and an industry by means of which many a careful cottager may pay his rent. ”

“ Now that the tumult of the strife is over, it is evident that they gave new life to the Church; that they saved it—for a time.
The world of art also is indebted to Hadleigh. It was the birthplace of Thomas Woolner, the great sculptor. “There is” wrote a critic in The Century, “no living artist, whose work a man of letters approaches with more instructive interest than that of Mr. Woolner, himself, almost as eminent as a poet as a sculptor. His place in literature as the author of My Beautiful Lady, and Pygmalion, has long been decided, and needs no re-illustration. ”

“ Ritchie, known to the numerous readers of the Christian World as “Christopher Crayon,” has the pen of a ready, racy, refreshing writer. He never writes a dull line, and never for a moment allows our interest to flag. In the work before us, which is not his first, he is, I should think, at his best. The volume is the outcome of extensive reading, many rambles over the districts described, and of thoughtful observation. We seem to live and move and have our being in East Anglia. ”

“ In these days culture and education are supposed to work wonders. In the career of Gainsborough, we note the success of one who had little of either, but who did wonders, nevertheless, by his industry and genius alone. We may note that after Gainsborough left his native town he rarely seems to have visited the place, only occasionally to give his vote on the Tory side. ”

“ The fact is, in dull days one is glad of any excuse for going out and having a chat with one’s friends, and it does one good to hear bishops and Dissenting ministers, as they did at Colchester, talk in favour of Christian unity, or the local M.P.’s talk of national ditto, or the mayors of the leading Essex towns vindicate that local self-government which we all hold to be an important element in the preservation and expansion of our national life. ”

“ It is the privilege of the Mayor of Colchester for the time being to provide for all the expenses of the feast except a portion of the oysters, which are found by the Fishery Board, and the Mayor sends out all the invitations. The feast always takes place about October 22nd. Those who do not care for oysters had better stop away, as little else besides oysters and brown bread and butter is provided. Only a few ham sandwiches were added, but the oyster was, as it deserved to be, the staple of the feast ”

“ The more we send such men to America on international visits, and the more America sends such men to us—whatever politicians on both sides the Atlantic may say or do to create bad feeling—the stronger and more lasting will be the tie that makes England and America—mother and daughter—one in heart and aim. Haverhill is deeply associated with Puritan History and the Pilgrim Fathers. Its greatest preacher was the Rev. John Ward, who is still commemorated by a tomb in Haverhill Church. One of his sons, Samuel, was a town preacher to the Corporation of Ipswich for thirty years. ”

“ A hundred years ago its annual shipping revenue was only exceeded by the ports of London, Liverpool, Bristol and Hull. It is also easily available by means of railway communication, which renders it accessible from all quarters—the Great Northern, the Midland, and the Great Eastern all find their way to Lynn. The population has rather declined since the last census; but still the town is a large one—upwards of 18,000 in population—and one wonders how all the people hidden away in its shops and narrow streets can manage to find a living. ”

“ Education prospers in the old city. I found a junior institute in connection with the Church where the classes are well attended; and the Board School educates 12,000 children, while the denominational schools between them muster but 6,000. The School Board has established one of a higher grade, which is a great success, while the great Norwich publishers, Jarrold and Son, by their publications have done much to supply the people with healthy and popular literature. ”

“ Haverhill rejoices in a Town Hall, one of the handsomest of its kind in New England, and twenty-four church organisations divided among eleven different denominations. No city in the commonwealth has grown so fast within the last ten years. I learn from a local paper that its population is “energetic, prosperous, and cultivated.” One of the things which seem to have struck p. 60Mr. Alderman Gurteen, as indeed it would some of us, was a handsome and commodious building known as the Old Ladies’ Home, intended to provide for such women as need it, a home in their declining years. ”

“ Be that as it may, the Ipswich traders, like John Gilpin, were men of credit and renown, and Fuller, in the seventeenth century, spoke of the number of wealthy merchant houses in Ipswich. It was in the reign of Elizabeth, remarks Mr. Glyde, that Ipswich seems to have attained the zenith of its fame. There is scarcely a branch of foreign commerce carried on at the present time, with the exception of trade with China, that was not prosecuted with more or less entirety in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. At that time Ipswich was much richer in shipping than Yarmouth, Southampton, or Lynn. ”

“ For another thing the Chelmsford of the past was distinguished, and that was by a mock election, a very proper thing, when election was a farce, and not as now, the opportunity of the free and independent democracy to utter their political opinions, and to send the wisest of the wise and the purest of patriots to Westminster p. 5as Members of Parliament. An election is no farce now when the eyes of all England are on the electors, and orators from every corner of the land come to call on the electors to do their duty. In old times men were merry, and made fun even of an election ”

“ He was a native of that nursery of the Anglo-Saxon race whose energy he so truly inherited—Norfolk. He was born at Lynn in 1822. “His father,” writes his biographer, “also a man of considerable energy, was the master of a small vessel belonging to that port, and no doubt his marine life, as well as the striking scenery of the Norfolk coast, gave a tinge to the early artistic tendencies of his son.” As was the case with our great painter of cattle, it was while he was learning coach painting that he became an artist. ”

“ Dissent does not fare badly in the town. The Congregational body rejoices in two ministers, and the chapel, a very handsome one, is well attended. It will seat a thousand hearers. The Salvation Army have just commenced preaching in the town, and, as usual, they have drawn some of the people away. The Primitive Methodists and the Baptists have also places of worship at Hadleigh. The parish church can hold 1,200 people, but I do not hear that it is better attended than the Congregational chapel. Congregationalism has a long history in Hadleigh. ”

“ One of the best things I saw in Lynn, as I was groping my way in the uncertain light, was the fine schoolroom of the Congregational Church, filled with a cluster of clean, happy looking girls, all hard at work sewing. I knew no living soul. I felt I was an intruder, and popped out as speedily as I popped in; but I have the picture p. 47before me as I write, of happy girls under the sanction of the Christian Church, preserved from the contagion of the streets, learning to work. Christianity has been dogmatic long enough, a little mild and benevolent socialism will not do it much harm. ”

“ Ritchie, in regard to political and theological questions, they cannot fail to gain much enjoyment from his excellent delineation of old days in East Anglia.’—Norwich Mercury.
‘“East Anglia” has the merit of not being a compilation, which is more than can be said of the great majority of books produced in these days to satisfy the revived taste for topographical gossip. Mr. Ritchie is a Suffolk man—the son of a Nonconformist minister of Wrentham in that county—and he looks back to the old neighbourhood and the old times with an affection which is likely to communicate itself to its readers. ”

“ Christ Church is now on sale. Ultimately it is to be hoped it will be purchased by the Corporation for a people’s palace and park.
In the old times Ipswich must have been a much more picturesque place than it is to-day. All its old records are religiously preserved by a worthy townsman, Mr. John Glyde, in his Illustrations of Old Ipswich, a handsome work, which is a credit to the town, and which ought to find a place in the library of East Anglians wealthy enough to purchase it. ”

“ The practice of the firm has been to take into their employ young girls leaving school, who soon acquire much dexterity in their work, and who, when they marry, can be—and many of them are supplied with sewing machines to use at home. p. 40Be that as it may, he has done more than any one in the great work of showing how a factory can be rendered healthy, and is to be held in reverence as one of our greatest practical sanitary reformers. One word more. Norwich is the centre of a great agricultural district, and its cattle market may be described as the largest of the kind in all England. ”

“ For instance, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, we find the Maldon electors petitioning their representatives on their sufferings from Prelatic parsons. “They are crueller,” so they affirm, “than the ostriches of the wilderness, and more unkind than the dragons.” They ask to be relieved of the teaching of ungodly men such as have been “Popish priests, taylors, fletchers, serving-men, wheelwrights, and many of these alehouse haunters, dicers, quarrellers, whoremongers, and full of gross sins.” ”

“ Another well-known name connected with Bury was that of Calamy, the elder, a rigid Presbyterian, who, about 1630, was one of the town lecturers at Bury. Subsequently he became Rector of Aldersmanbury, London, and one of the Assembly of Divines, and frequently preached before Parliament. He lived to see London in ashes, the sight of which broke his heart. His son Edmund was born at Bury, became a distinguished preacher, was ejected, and formed a congregation in Currier’s Hall, near Cripplegate, London. ”

“ Field-Marshal Conway, the friend of Horace Walpole, was the most distinguished man Bury St. Edmunds ever returned to Parliament. It is an anomaly that gives Bury the right to return the one member left it by recent legislation. But we rejoice in anomalies. For instance, look at Ireland. Ireland is inferior to the great metropolis, either in regard to population or property, but Ireland rejoices in nearly double the number of legislators it sends to the Imperial Parliament. ”

“ For instance, I made my way to Brandon Wood, where the poet loved to go sketching. If the town is improved so as to be almost unrecognisable, the features of the country remain the same; nature builds more enduringly than man. There are trees in Brandon Wood that might have been there in Gainsborough’s time. Over the Essex border, a couple of miles off, is a landscape which still remains as it is drawn in our National p. 56Gallery. His paintings of a view near Sudbury and a neighbouring church are more or less still true to life. ”