‘We cordially recommend Mr. Ritchie’s book to all who wish to pass an agreeable hour and to learn something of the outward actions and inner life of their predecessors.  It is full of sketches of East Anglian celebrities, happily touched if lightly limned.’— East Anglian Daily Times . ‘A very entertaining and enjoyable book.  Local gossip, a wide range of reading and industrious research, have enabled the author to enliven his pages with a wide diversity of subjects, specially attractive to East

PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS and HISTORICAL ASSOCIATIONS . by J. EWING RITCHIE. ‘Behold, there came wise men from the East to Jerusalem.’ Matthew . SECOND EDITION , revised , corrected , and enlarged . LONDON: JARROLD & SONS, PATERNOSTER BUILDINGS, E.C. 1893....

The chapters of which this little work consists originally appeared in the Christian World Magazine , where they were so fortunate as to attract favourable notice, and from which they are now reprinted, with a few slight additions, by permission of the Editor.  In bringing out a second edition, I have incorporated the substance of other articles originally written for local journals.  It is to be hoped, touching as they do a theme not easily exhausted, but always interesting to East Anglians, th

Distinguished people born there—Its Puritans and Nonconformists—The country round Covehithe—Southwold—Suffolk dialect—The Great Eastern Railway. In his published Memoirs, the great Metternich observes that if he had never been born he never could have loved or hated.  Following so illustrious a precedent, I may observe that if I had not been born in East Anglia I never could have been an East Anglian.  Whether I should have been wiser or better off had I been born elsewhere, is an interesting qu

Reydon Hall—The clergy—Pakefield—Social life in a village. As I write I have lying before me a little book called ‘Hugh Latimer; or, The School-boy’s Friendship,’ by Miss Strickland, author of the ‘Little Prisoner,’ ‘Charles Grant,’ ‘Prejudice and Principle,’ ‘The Little Quaker.’  It bears the imprint—‘London: Printed for A. R. Newman and Co., Leadenhall Street.’  On a blank page inside I find the following: ‘James Ewing Ritchie, with his friend Susanna’s affectionate regards.’  Susanna was a si

Yarmouth bloaters—George Borrow—The town fifty years ago—The distinguished natives. ‘I’m a-thinking you’ll be wanting half a pint of beer by this time, won’t you?’ Such were the first words I heard as I left the hotel where I was a temporary sojourner about nine o’clock.  Of course I turned to look at the speaker.  He wore an oilskin cap, with a great flap hanging over the back of the neck; his oilskin middle was encased in a thick blue guernsey; his trousers were hidden in heavy jack-boots, whi

Homerton academy—W. Johnson Fox, M.P.—Politics in 1830—Anti-Corn Law speeches—Wonderful oratory. About 1830 there was, if not a good deal of actual light let into such dark places as our Suffolk village—where it was considered the whole duty of man, as regards the poor, to attend church and make a bow to their betters (a rustic ceremony generally performed by pulling the lock of hair on the forehead with the right hand), and to be grateful for the wretched station of life in which they were plac

Bungay Nonconformity—Hannah More—The Childses—The Queen’s Librarian—Prince Albert. In the beginning of the present century, a disgraceful attack on Methodism—by which the writer means Dissent in all its branches—appeared in what was then the leading critical journal of the age, the Edinburgh Review .  ‘The sources,’ said the writer, a clergyman (to his shame be it recorded) of the Church of England—no less distinguished a divine than the far-famed Sydney Smith—‘from which we shall derive our ext

Great Yarmouth Nonconformists—Intellectual life—Dawson Turner—Astley Cooper—Hudson Gurney—Mrs. Bendish. When David Copperfield, Dickens tells us, first caught sight of Yarmouth, it seemed to him to look rather spongy and soppy.  As he drew nearer, he remarks, ‘and saw the whole adjacent prospect, lying like a straight, low line under the sky, I hinted to Peggotty that a mound or so might have improved it, and also that if the land had been a little more separated from the sea, and the town and t

Brigg’s Lane—The carrier’s cart—Reform demonstration—The old dragon—Chairing M.P.’s—Hornbutton Jack—Norwich artists and literati—Quakers and Nonconformists. Many, many years ago, when wandering in the North of Germany, I came to an hotel in the Fremden Buch, of which (Englishmen at that time were far more patriotic and less cosmopolitan than in these degenerate days) an enthusiastic Englishman had written—and possibly the writing had been suggested by the hard fare and dirty ways of the place: ‘

The Orwell—The Sparrows—Ipswich notabilities—Gainsborough—Medical men—Nonconformists. Those who imagine Suffolk to be a flat and uninteresting county, with no charms for the eye and no associations worth speaking of, are much mistaken.  There are few lovelier rivers in England than the Orwell, on which Ipswich stands, up which river the fiery Danes used to sail to plunder all the country round, and on the banks of which Gainsborough learned to love Nature and draw her in all her charms.  The tow

Woodbridge and the country round—Bernard Barton—Dr. Lankester—An old Noncon. The traveller as he leaves the English coast for Antwerp or Rotterdam or the northern ports of Germany, may remember that the last glimpse of his native land is the light from Orford Ness, which is a guiding star to the mariner as he ploughs his weary way along the deep.  Of that part of Suffolk little is known to the community at large.  When I was a boy it was looked upon as an ultima Thule , where the people were in

Stowmarket—The Rev. Thomas Young—Bishop Hall and the Smectymnian divines—Milton’s mulberry-tree—Suffolk relationships. ‘My father destined me,’ writes John Milton, in his ‘Defensio Secunda,’ ‘while yet a little boy, for the study of humane letters, which I served with such eagerness that, from the twelfth year of my age, I scarcely ever went from my lessons to bed before midnight, which, indeed, was the first cause of injury to my eyes, to whose natural weakness there were also added frequent he

East Bergholt—The Valley of the Stour—Painting from nature—East Anglian girls. Charles Kingsley was wont to glorify the teaching of the hills, and to maintain that the man of the mountain is more imaginative and poetical than the man of the plain.  There are many Scotch people, mostly those born in the Highlands, who tell us much the same.  If the theory be true—and I am not aware that it is—the exceptions are striking and many.  Lincolnshire is rather a flat country, but it gave us (I can never

Suffolk cheese—Danes, Saxons, and Normans—Philosophers and statesmen—Artists and literati. Abbo Floriacencis, who flourished in the year a.d. 910, describes East Anglia as ‘very noble, and particularly because of its being watered on all sides.  On the south and east it is encompassed by the ocean, on the north by the moisture of large and wet fens which, arising almost in the heart of the island, because of the evenness of the ground for a hundred miles and more, descend in great rivers into th