Stourbridge Fair - Visitors

Visitors

During the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the fair's national status was underlined by writers such as Samuel Pepys and Edward Ward who wrote of the experience. John Bunyan used the event as the inspiration for the Vanity Fair in Pilgrim's Progress, which in turn was used by William Makepeace Thackeray for his most celebrated novel.

During his time at the University in 1665, Isaac Newton visited the fair and is known to have bought a copy of Euclid's Elements which he used to teach himself mathematics. He is also believed to have acquired optical instruments including a pair of prisms - which he used to demonstrate that white light could be split into the colours of the spectrum.

Daniel Defoe visited the fair and wrote at length of it in his Tour through the whole island of Great Britain, stating:

"this fair, which is not only the greatest in the whole nation, but in the world; nor, if I may believe those who have seen the mall, is the fair at Leipzig in Saxony, the mart at Frankfort-on-the-Main, or the fairs at Nuremberg, or Augsburg, any way to compare to this fair at Stourbridge."

He described the huge variety of merchandise, with stalls including "goldsmiths, toyshops, brasiers, turners, milliners, haberdashers, hatters, mercers, drapers, pewterers, china-warehouses, and in a word all trades that can be named in London."