Three years ago I became anxious (from circumstances that need not be
more fully alluded to) to employ myself in writing a work of fiction.
Living in Manchester, but with a deep relish and fond admiration for
the country, my first thought was to find a framework for my story in
some rural scene; and I had already made a little progress in a tale,
the period of which was more than a century ago, and the place on the
borders of Yorkshire, when I bethought me how deep might be the romance
in the lives of some of those who elbowed me daily in the busy streets
of the town in which I resided. I had always felt a deep sympathy with
the care-worn men, who looked as if doomed to struggle through their
lives in strange alternations between work and want; tossed to and fro
by circumstances, apparently in even a greater degree than other men.
A little manifestation of this sympathy, and a little attention to the
expression of feelings on the part of some of the workpeople with whom
I was acquainted had laid open to me the hearts of one or two of the
more thoughtful among them; I saw that they were sore and irritable
against the rich, the even tenor of whose seemingly happy lives appeared
to increase the anguish caused by the lottery-like nature of their
own. Whether the bitter complaints made by them of the neglect which
they experienced from the prosperous—especially from the masters, whose
fortunes they had helped to build up—were well-founded or no, it is not
for me to judge. It is enough to say, that this belief of the injustice
and unkindness which they endure from their fellow-creatures taints what
might be resignation to God’s will, and turns it to revenge in many of
the poor uneducated factory-workers of Manchester.
The more I reflected on this unhappy state of things between those so
bound to each other by common interests, as the employers and employed
must ever be, the more anxious I became to give some utterance to the
agony which, from time to time, convulses this dumb people; the agony
of suffering without the sympathy of the happy, or of erroneously
believing that such is the case. If it be an error that the woes, which
come with ever-returning tide-like flood to overwhelm the workmen in our
manufacturing towns, pass unregarded by all but the sufferers, it is at
any rate an error so bitter in its consequences to all parties, that
whatever public effort can do in the way of merciful deeds, or helpless
love in the way of “widow’s mites” could do, should be done, and that
speedily, to disabuse the work-people of so miserable a misapprehension.
At present they seem to me to be left in a state, wherein lamentations
and tears are thrown aside as useless, but in which the lips are
compressed for curses, and the hands clenched and ready to smite.
I know nothing of Political Economy, or the theories of trade. I have
tried to write truthfully; and if my accounts agree or clash with any
system, the agreement or disagreement is unintentional.
To myself the idea which I have formed of the state of feeling among
too many of the factory-people in Manchester, and which I endeavoured to
represent in this tale (completed above a year ago), has received some
confirmation from the events which have so recently occurred among a
similar class on the Continent.
_October, 1848._