Editing Black Country (section)

== Toponymy ==

The first recorded use of the term "the Black Country" may be from a toast given by a Mr Simpson, town clerk to [[Lichfield]], addressing a Reformer's meeting on 24 November 1841, published in the ''Staffordshire Advertiser''. He describes going into the "black country" of Staffordshire – Wolverhampton, Bilston and Tipton.<ref>{{Cite news|url=http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0000252/18411127/049/0002|title=Reform dinner at Lichfield|date=27 November 1841|work=Staffordshire Advertiser|access-date=17 June 2016}}</ref>

In published literature, the first reference dates from 1846 and occurs in the novel ''Colton Green: A Tale of the Black Country''<ref>{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=szRkAAAAcAAJ|title=Colton Green, a tale of the black country |last=Gresley |first=William |publisher=J. Masters |year=1846 |location=London }}</ref> by the Reverend [[William Gresley (divine)|William Gresley]], who was then a [[prebendary]] of [[Lichfield Cathedral]].<ref>{{cite news |first=Chris |last=Upton |title=And so it came to pass... |url=http://www.birminghampost.co.uk/lifestyle/came-pass-3920518 |newspaper=Birmingham Post |publisher=Trinity Mirror Midlands |date=18 November 2011 |access-date=18 November 2013}}</ref> Gresley's opening paragraph starts "On the border of the agricultural part of Staffordshire, just before you enter the dismal region of mines and forges, commonly called the 'Black Country', stands the pretty village of Oakthorpe",{{sfn|Gresley|1846|p=[https://books.google.com/books?id=szRkAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA1 1]}} "commonly" implying that the term was already in use.<ref name="Jones-Bugle">{{cite news|first=Gavin|last=Jones|title='Black Country' in print over twenty years before Elihu Burritt|url=http://www.blackcountrybugle.co.uk/News/Black-Country-in-print-over-twenty-years-before-Elihu-Burritt-03042013.htm|archive-url=https://archive.today/20131118213041/http://www.blackcountrybugle.co.uk/News/Black-Country-in-print-over-twenty-years-before-Elihu-Burritt-03042013.htm|url-status=dead|archive-date=18 November 2013|newspaper=Black Country Bugle|publisher=Staffordshire Newspapers Limited|date=4 April 2013|access-date=18 November 2013}}</ref> He also writes that "the whole country is blackened with smoke by day, and glowing with fires by night",{{sfn|Gresley|1846|p=34}} and that "the 'Black Country' ... is about twenty miles in length and five in bredth{{not a typo}} reaching from north to south".{{sfn|Gresley|1846|p=35}}

The phrase was used again, though as a description rather than a [[proper noun]], by the ''[[Illustrated London News]]'' in an 1849 article on the opening of the [[South Staffordshire Railway]].<ref name="Jones-Bugle" /> An 1851 guidebook to the [[London and North Western Railway]] included an entire chapter entitled "The Black Country", including an early description:<ref name="Jones-Bugle" />
{{Blockquote|In this Black Country, including West Bromwich, Dudley, Darlaston, Bilston, Wolverhampton and several minor villages, a perpetual twilight reigns during the day, and during the night fires on all sides light up the dark landscape with a fiery glow. The pleasant green of pastures is almost unknown, the streams, in which no fishes swim, are black and unwholesome; the natural dead flat is often broken by high hills of cinders and spoil from the mines; the few trees are stunted and blasted; no birds are to be seen, except a few smoky sparrows; and for miles on miles a black waste spreads around, where furnaces continually smoke, steam engines thud and hiss, and long chains clank, while blind gin horses walk their doleful round. From time to time you pass a cluster of deserted roofless cottages of dingiest brick, half swallowed up in sinking pits or inclining to every point of the compass, while the timbers point up like the ribs of a half decayed corpse. The majority of the natives of this Tartarian region are in full keeping with the scenery – savages, without the grace of savages, coarsely clad in filthy garments, with no change on weekends or Sundays, they converse in a language belarded with fearful and disgusting oaths, which can scarcely be recognised as the same as that of civilized England.|[[Samuel Sidney]]|Rides on Railway|}}
This work was also the first to explicitly distinguish the area from nearby [[Birmingham]], noting that "On certain rare holidays these people wash their faces, clothe themselves in decent garments, and, since the opening of the South Staffordshire Railway, take advantage of cheap excursion trains, go down to Birmingham to amuse themselves and make purchases."<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.ajhw.co.uk/books/book234/book234.html|title=Rides on Railways|access-date=18 November 2013|last=Sidney|first=Samuel|publisher=AJH Computer Services}}</ref>

The geologist [[Joseph Jukes]] made it clear in 1858 that he felt the meaning of the term was self-explanatory to contemporary visitors, remarking that "It is commonly known in the neighbourhood as the 'Black Country', an epithet the appropriateness of which must be acknowledged by anyone who even passes through it on a railway". Jukes based his Black Country on the seat of the great iron manufacture, which for him was geographically determined by the ironstone tract of the coalfield rather than the thick seam, running from Wolverhampton to Bloxwich, to West Bromwich, to Stourbridge and back to Wolverhampton again.<ref name="Jones-Bugle" /> A travelogue published in 1860 made the connection more explicit, calling the name "eminently descriptive, for blackness everywhere prevails; the ground is black, the atmosphere is black, and the underground is honeycombed by mining galleries stretching in utter blackness for many a league".<ref name="Jones-Bugle" /> An alternative theory for the meaning of the name is proposed as having been caused by the darkening of the local soil due to the outcropping coal and the seam near the surface.<ref name=distinctly>{{Cite web |url=http://distinctlyblackcountry.org.uk/ |title=distinctly black country |access-date=27 September 2011 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120108100252/http://distinctlyblackcountry.org.uk/ |archive-date=8 January 2012 |url-status=dead  }}</ref>

It was however the American diplomat and travel writer [[Elihu Burritt]] who brought the term "the Black Country" into widespread common usage<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.smabs.co.uk/projects/blkcoun/mappingtheblackcountry.pdf|title=Mapping The Black Country|access-date=22 November 2013|last=Mugridge|first=Stuart|year=2007}}</ref> with the third, longest and most important of the travel books he wrote about Britain for American readers, his 1868 work ''Walks in The Black Country and its Green Borderland''.<ref name="DNB">{{cite encyclopedia|last=Marsh|first=Peter T.|encyclopedia=Oxford Dictionary of National Biography|title=Burritt, Elihu (1810–1879), peace campaigner and American consul|url=http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/105131|access-date=22 November 2011|date=Sep 2013|publisher=Oxford University Press|location=Oxford|doi=10.1093/ref:odnb/105131|isbn=978-0-19-861411-1}}</ref> Burritt had been appointed [[List of diplomatic missions of the United States|United States consul]] in Birmingham by [[Abraham Lincoln]] in 1864, a role that required him to report regularly on "facts bearing upon the productive capacities, industrial character and natural resources of communities embraced in their Consulate Districts" and as a result travelled widely from his home in [[Harborne]], largely on foot, to explore the local area.<ref>{{cite news|first=Gordon|last=Chapman|title='Ackle' – a word causing some hassle!|url=http://www.blackcountrybugle.co.uk/News/145Ackle146-a-word-causing-some-hassle-2.htm|newspaper=Black Country Bugle|publisher=Staffordshire Newspapers|date=23 February 2006|access-date=22 November 2013|archive-url=https://archive.today/20131123065516/http://www.blackcountrybugle.co.uk/News/145Ackle146-a-word-causing-some-hassle-2.htm|archive-date=23 November 2013|url-status=dead}}</ref> Burritt's association with Birmingham dated back 20 years and he was highly sympathetic to the industrial and political culture of the town as well as being a friend to many of its leading citizens, so his portrait of the surrounding area was largely positive.<ref name="DNB" /> He was the author of the famous early description of the Black Country as "black by day and red by night", adding appreciatively that it "cannot be matched, for vast and varied production, by any other space of equal radius on the surface of the globe".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.bclm.co.uk/media/pages/library/Press_pack.pdf|title=Press Pack|access-date=23 November 2013|publisher=Black Country Living Museum|page=3|archive-date=3 December 2013|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131203021709/http://www.bclm.co.uk/media/pages/library/Press_pack.pdf|url-status=dead}}</ref> Burritt used the term to refer to a wider area than its common modern usage, however, devoting the first third of the book to Birmingham, which he described as "the capital, manufacturing centre, and growth of the Black Country", and writing "plant, in imagination, one foot of your compass at the Town Hall in Birmingham, and with the other sweep a circle of twenty miles [30&nbsp;km] radius, and you will have, 'the Black Country" (this area includes [[Coventry]], [[Kidderminster]] and [[Lichfield]]).<ref>{{cite wikisource |title=Walks in the Black Country and its Green Border-Land |wslink=Walks in the Black Country and its Green Border-Land/Chapter 1 |last=Burritt |first=Elihu |author-link=Elihu Burritt |date=1868 |publisher=Sampson Low, Son, and Marston |location=London |pages=1,6 |scan=}}</ref><ref>{{cite news|first=Walden |last=Ian |title=Keeping history alive; Ian Walden, Director of The Black Country Living Museum in Dudley, explains why he thinks Birmingham and the West Midlands needs more of a vision. |url=http://www.thefreelibrary.com/ANALYSIS%3A+Keeping+history+alive%3B+Ian+Walden,+Director+of+The+Black...-a0165796504|newspaper=Birmingham Post|publisher=Trinity Mirror Midlands|date=29 July 2007|access-date=23 November 2013}}</ref>