Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/626

574 N O R N O R NORTHWICH, a market town of Cheshire, England, is situated at the confluence of the rivers Weaver and Dane, near the Trent and Mersey Canal, and near the main line of the London and North- Western Railway in the Chester branch of the Cheshire lines, 18 miles north-east of Ches ter and 22 south-west from Manchester. The streets are narrow and irregular, and many of the houses are screwed and bolted together to keep them secure from subsidences arising from the dissolving of the salt strata (180 feet in thickness), caused by the pumping of brine for the pur pose of evaporation. Among the public buildings are the market-house, the drill-hall, and the Victoria club. Salt springs in Northwich were known to the Romans. By the Britons it was called the Black Salt Town. The substratum of rock-salt upon which the town rests was first discovered in 1670. It consists of two beds, a lower and an upper, which lie horizontally, the lower about 330 feet from the surface. In the lower stratum there exist several mines in the neighbourhood of the town. From two of these, each 40 acres in extent, the rock-salt is pro duced. The average quantity of salt exported from the town annually amounts to over 500,000 tons. Many of the inhabitants are engaged in building flat boats to convey the salt to Liverpool ; and shipbuilding, rope and sail making, brick making, iron and brass founding, and tanning are also carried on. One mile from the town the river Weaver trustees have constructed an hydraulic lift to connect their navigation with the Trent and Mer sey Canal on the higher level. By the river- vessels of 500 tons burden can approach the town. The population of the urban sanitary district (area 1920 acres) in 1881 was 12,246. At the time of the Xorman survey Northwich constituted part of the demesne of the earls of Chester. In the reign of Richard III. it passed to the crown, and afterwards was granted to the Derby family, who sold it a century ago ; in recent years the manor was acquired by the local board by purchase. The town in 1643 was fortified by the Parliament, was taken by the Royalists, but was retaken by the Parliamentarians. NORTON,Hox. MRS CAROLINE ELIZABETH (1808-1877), afterwards Lady Stirling -Maxwell, ranks high among the women of letters of the 19th century. She was born in 1808. One of the three beautiful granddaughters of Sheridan, daughters of his son Thomas, "three Graces" of London society in the reign of George IV., she showed literary ambition and faculty before she was out of her teens. Her first publication, made at the age of seventeen, was a merry satire, The Dandies Rout, illustrated by herself, full of girlish high spirits and wit. The preference shown for mournful and tender themes in her subsequent writings is in strange contrast with this opening jeu cC esprit. Her first essay in serious verse was made in 1829 with The Sorrows of Rosalie, the next in 1831 with The Undying One, a version of the legend of the Wandering Jew. Fluent melody of versification, richness and felicity of language, great tenderness of sentiment, and rhetorical luxuriance of illustration showed that she had inherited no small portion of her grandfather s genius, and brought her at once into fame. Her portrait appeared in Fraser s Magazine in 1831 as that of " the leader of the female band." Curiously enough, the author of the accompanying notice describes her as "happy in all the appliances of wealth and fame," and asks, " Of a life like hers what can be told?" at the very time when, according to her own subsequent account, she was "learning the law respecting women, piecemeal, by suffering from every one of its defects of protection." She had made an unfortunate marriage in 1827 with the Hon. George Norton, brother of Lord Grantley ; then, after three years of protests on her part and good promises on his, she had taken the decisive step of leaving his house for her sister s, had "condoned" on further good promises, and had returned, to find matters worse. The husband s unmanly persecutions culminated in 1836 in an action brought against Lord Melbourne for seduction of his wife, which the jury decided against Mi- Norton s claims without leaving the box. Mrs Norton made her own unhappy experience a plea for addressing to the queen in 1855 an eloquent letter on the law concern ing divorce, and her writings had considerable influence in ripening opinion for recent changes in the legal status of married women. During the reign of William IV., Mrs Norton was at the height of her literary reputation, con tributing many criticisms, sketches, tales, and songs to various periodicals and annuals, and using pencil as well as pen. She was not a mere writer of elegant trifles ; she was one of the priestesses of the "reforming" spirit; she appeared at her best in such works as A Voice from the Factories (1836), a most eloquent and rousing condemna tion of child labour. In a similar vein of warm sympathy with the unfortunate, she addressed a poem in 1845 to the prince of Wales, exhorting this Child of the Islands to use his power for social reforms. Aunt Carry s at lads, dedicated to her nephews and nieces, are written with playful tenderness and grace of the most charming kind. Later in life she produced three novels, Stuart of Dunleath (1851), Lost and Saved (1863), and Old Sir Douglas (1868). All three are written with great power and freshness of style, enthusiastic facility in the exposure of social impostures and in the exhibition of ideals of generous conduct. Her heroines are too painfully tried by calami tous misunderstandings and injuries, especially Eleanor Raymond, the heroine of the first, whose long series of misfortunes finds hardly any relief from childhood till death. This may have been due to the writer s moral pur pose, originating in her own bitter experience, of cham pioning the wrongs of her sex ; but it is a singular fact, pointing to temperament as the cause, that Johnson made the same complaint about the novel of her great-grand mother, Frances Sheridan. Mrs Norton s last poem was the Lady of La Garaye (1861), her last publication the half humorous, half heroic story of The Rose of Jericho in 1870. She died on the 14th of June 1877. Mr Norton died in 1875; and Mrs. Norton in the last year of her life was married to Sir W. Stirling-Maxwell. NORWALK, a township of the United States, in Fair- field county, Connecticut, on Long Island Sound, 43 miles north-east of New York, at the terminus of the Danbury and Norwalk Railroad. It contains the borough of Nor- walk, dating from 1836, and the city of South Norwalk, incorporated in 1870, the population of township, borough, and city in 1880 being respectively 13,956, 5308, and 3726. Vessels drawing 6 feet of water ascend the Nor walk river at low tide, and there is regular steamboat communication with New York. The shallow waters of the bay at the mouth of the river form a good locality for oyster-culture, and about three hundred families in South Norwalk are engaged in this industry. Locks, knobs (of New Jersey clay), and iron bolts and screws are manufac tured in the township on a very extensive scale ; and there are also iron-foundries, shipyards, flour-mills, planing-mills, felt factories, hat factories, carriage-works, shoe factories, &c. Norwalk was settled about 1640 and incorporated as a town in 1653. The settlement was burned by Governor Tryon s Hessians in 1779. NORWALK, a post-village of the United States, capital of Huron county, Ohio, 58 miles east of Toledo by the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway and also on the Wheeling and Lake Erie Railroad, is a flourishing little place of 5704 inhabitants (1880), containing planing- mills, grist-mills, manufactories of sewing-machines, organs, carpet-sweepers, and shoes, and breweries.