The Sun.
London, England, 1862-11-06 00:00:00

SALE OF A WIFE A 7 CARLISLE.

The Annual Register of 1832 gives an account of a wife
sale which took place on the 7th of April in that year in
Carlisle. Joseph Thomson, a farmer, had been married for
throe years without finding his happiness advanced, and he
and his wife at length agreed to separate. It is a DrAvahmt
notion amongst the rude and ignorant in England that a
man, by setting his wife up to public auction, and so parting
with her, legally dissolves the marriage tie, and escapes
from all its obligations. Thomson, under this belief, came
into Carlisle with his wife, and by the bellman announced
that he was about to sell her. At twelve o'clock, at noon,
the sale commenced in the presence of a large number of
persons. Thomson placed his wife on a large oak chair, with
a rope or halter of straw round her neck. He then spoke as
follows :,—“ Gentlemen, I have to offer to your notice my
wife, Mary Anne Thomson, otherwise Williams, whom I
mean to sell to the highest and fairest bidder. Gentlemen,
it is her wish as well as mine to part for ever. She has
been to me only a born serpent. I took her for my comfort,
and the good of my home ; but she became my tormentor,
a domestic curse, a night invasion, and a daily devil.
Gentlemen, I speak truth from my heart when I say—may
God deliver us from troublesome wives and frolicsome
women I Avoid them as you would a mad dog, a roaring
lion, a loaded pistol, cholera morbus, Mount Etna, or any
pestilential thing in nature. Now I have shown you the
dark side of my wife, and told you her faults and failings,
I will introduce the bright and sunny side of her, and ex-
Vain her qualifications and goodness. She can read novels
and milk cows ; she can laugh and weep with the same ease
that you could take a glass of ale when thirsty. Indeed,
gentlemen, she reminds me of what the poet says of women
in general :
' Heaven gave to women the peculiar grace,
To laugh, to weep, to cheat the human race.'

She can make butter and scold the maid ; she can sin
Moore's melodies, and plait her frills and caps ; she cannot
make rum, gin, or whisky, but she is a good judge of the
quality from long experience in tasting them. I therefore
offer her with all her perfections and imperfections, for the
sum of 505." If this speech is correctly reported, the man
must have been a humorist in addition to his other quali-
ties. The account concludes with the statement that, after
waiting about an hour, Thomson knocked down the lot to
one Henry Mears, for 20s. and a Newfoundland dog; they
then parted in perfect good temper—Mears and the woman
going one way, Thomson and the dog another.—Chambers's
"Book of Days."

AMERICA.

LIVERPOOL, WEDNESDAY.

The Inman steamship City of New York has ar-
rived with advices from New York of the 25th ult.,
and 868,784 dols. in specie.
A despatch of the 24th from Cincinnati says :
I have it on good authority that the Governors
of the loyal States are to assemble in convention at
Washington in the early part of next week for the
purpose—

us to arraign and denounce the recent Emancipa-
tion Proclamation of the President as n wise in
policy and bad in principle. It incites he slave

population of the United States to rise ag -Cnst exist-
ing laws, or it proposes to annul those laws by an
Executive decree. It punishes the innocent for the
crimes of the guilty, It secures a united South, and
makes a disunited North. It denies the propositions
of international law to which the United States is
pledged by the most solemn ads, and subjects us to
the reproach of asserting in our own behalf what we