Origin of the Black Country Name

There are two main ideas as to how the name, Black Country, came about historically: either from the blackening of the soil and streams due to rain leaching coal dust from outcrops at the surface or due to the soot and black smoke from the many furnaces, kilns, foundries and forges in the area.  When both occurred at once they gave the whole of the land, water, atmosphere and buildings a blackened appearance.  Another idea is that the name came from Charles Dickens who when he visited Dudley looked towards Netherton, Old Hill and Cradley Heath covered in a pall of smoke and said 'God help those poor people in that Black Country'.  This idea is not as fanciful as it may seem in that Charles Dickens had an association with the Black Country: his grandmother Elizabeth Ball came from near Wolverhampton and Dickens visited the Black Country and Birmingham on a number of occasions.

Samuel Sidney in his 1851 guidebook to the London and Northwestern Railway gives this description of the Black Country:​

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.

Not very complimentary to your possible ancestors: “savages without the grace of savages” I am afraid, and Samuel Sidney came from nearby Birmingham so was familiar with grim living conditions; perhaps this quote suffers from a little literary license but from it you can get some idea of the conditions under which Black Country working people lived in Victorian times.  A similar view of the Black Country, particularly of the nail making trade and coal mining can be found in a book by James Greenwood published in 1874 - well worth a read.