First in the long list of Lancashire manufacturing towns, by reason of
its magnitude and wealth, comes Manchester. By and by we shall speak
of this great city in particular. For the present the name must be
taken in the broader sense, equally its own, which carries with it the
idea of an immense district. Lancashire, eastwards from Warrington,
upwards as far as Preston, is dotted over with little Manchesters, and
these in turn often possess satellites. The idea of Manchester as a
place of cotton factories covers also a portion of Cheshire, and
extends even into Derbyshire and Yorkshire--Stockport, Hyde,
Stalybridge, Dukinfield, Saddleworth, Glossop, essentially belong to
it. To all these towns and villages Manchester stands in the relation
of a Royal Exchange. It is the reservoir, at the same time, into
which they pour their various produce. Manchester acquired this
distinguished position partly by accident, mainly through its very
easy access to Liverpool. At one time it had powerful rivals in
Blackburn and Bolton. Blackburn lost its chance through the frantic
hostility of the lower orders towards machinery, inconsiderate men of
property giving them countenance--excusably only under the law that
mental delusions, like bodily ailments, are impartial in choice of
victims. Bolton, on the other hand, though sensible, was too near to
compete permanently, neither had it similar access to Liverpool. The
old salerooms in Bolton, with their galleries and piazzas, now all
gone, were ninety years ago a striking and singular feature of that
busy hive of spinning and weaving bees.
Most of these little Manchesters are places of comparatively new
growth. A century ago nearly all were insignificant villages or
hamlets. Even the names of the greater portion were scarcely known
beyond the boundaries of their respective parishes. How unimportant
they were in earlier times is declared by the vast area of many of the
latter, the parishes in Lancashire, as everywhere else, having been
marked out according to the ability of the population to maintain a
church and pastor. It is not in manufacturing Lancashire as in the
old-fashioned rural counties,--Kent, Sussex, Hampshire, and appled
Somerset,--where on every side one is allured by some beautiful
memorial of the lang syne. "Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the
plain" is not here. Everything, where Cotton reigns, presents the
newness of aspect of an Australian colony. The archæological
scraps--such few as there may be--are usually submerged, even in the
older towns, in the "full sea" of recent building. Even in the
graveyards, the places of all others which in their tombstones and
inscriptions unite past and present so tenderly, the imagination has
usually to turn away unfed. In place of yew-trees old as York Minster,
if there be anything in the way of green monument, it is a soiled and
disconsolate shrub from the nearest nursery garden.
The situation of these towns is often pleasing enough: sometimes it is
picturesque, and even romantic. Having begun in simple homesteads,
pitched where comfort and safety seemed best assured, they are often
found upon gentle eminences, the crests of which, as at Oldham, they
now overlap; others, like Stalybridge, lie in deep hollows, or, like
Blackburn, have gradually spread from the margin of a stream. Not a
few of these primitive sites have the ancient character pleasingly
commemorated in their names, as Haslingden, the "place of hazel-nuts."
The eastern border of the county being characterised by lofty and
rocky hills, the localities of the towns and villages are there often
really favoured in regard to scenery. This also gives great interest
to the approaches, as when, after leaving Todmorden, we move through
the sinuous gorge that, bordered by Cliviger, "mother of rocks," leads
on to Burnley. The higher grounds are bleak and sterile, but the
warmth and fertility of the valleys make amends. In any case, there is
never any lack of the beauty which comes of the impregnation of wild
nature with the outcome of human intelligence. Manchester itself
occupies part of a broad level, usually clay-floored, and with
peat-mosses touching the frontiers. In the bygones nothing was sooner
found than standing water: the world probably never contained a town
that only thirty to a hundred years ago possessed so many ponds, many
of them still in easy recollection, to say nothing of as many more
within the compass of an afternoon's walk.
Rising under the influence of a builder so unambitious as the genius
of factories and operatives' cottages, no wonder that a very few
years ago the Lancashire cotton towns seemed to vie with one another
which should best deserve the character of cold, hard, dreary, and
utterly unprepossessing. The streets, excepting the principal artery
(originally the road through the primitive village, as in the case of
Newton Lane, Manchester), not being susceptible of material change,
mostly remain as they were--narrow, irregular, and close-built.
Happily, of late there has been improvement. Praiseworthy aspirations
in regard to public buildings are not uncommon, and even in the
meanest towns are at times undeniably successful. In the principal
centres--Manchester, Bolton, Rochdale, and another or two--the old
meagreness and unsightliness are daily becoming less marked, and a
good deal that is really magnificent is in progress as well as
completed. Unfortunately, the efforts of the architect fall only too
soon under the relentless influence of the factory and the foundry.
Manchester is in this respect an illustration of the whole group; the
noblest and most elegant buildings sooner or later get smoke-begrimed.
Sombre as the Lancashire towns become under that influence, if there
be collieries in the neighbourhood, as in the case of well-named
"coaly Wigan," the dismal hue is intensified, and in dull and rainy
weather grows still worse. On sunshiny days one is reminded of a
sullen countenance constrained to smile against the will.
[Illustration: WIGAN]
A "Lancashire scene" has been said to resolve into "bare hills and
chimneys"; and as regards the cotton districts the description is,
upon the whole, not inaccurate. Chimneys predominate innumerably in
the landscape, a dark pennon usually undulating from every
summit--perhaps not pretty pictorially, but in any case a gladsome
sight, since it means work, wages, food, for those below, and a fire
upon the hearth at home. Though the sculptor may look with dismay upon
his ornaments in marble once white as a lily, now under its visitation
gray as November, never mind--the smoke denotes human happiness and
content for thousands: when her chimneys are smokeless, operative
Lancashire is hungry and sad.
In the towns most of the chimneys belong to the factories--buildings
of remarkable appearance. The very large ones are many storeys high,
their broad and lofty fronts presenting tier upon tier of monotonous
square windows. Decoration seems to be studiously avoided, though
there is often plenty of scope for inexpensive architectural effects
that, to say the least, would be welcome. Seen by day, they seem
deserted; after dark, when the innumerable windows are lighted up,
the spectacle changes and becomes unique. Were it desired to
illuminate in honour of a prince, to render a factory more brilliant
from the interior would be scarcely possible. Like all other great
masses of masonry, the very large ones, though somewhat suggestive of
prisons, if not grand, are impressive. In semi-rural localities, where
less tarnished by smoke, especially when tolerably new, and not
obscured by the contact of inferior buildings, they are certainly very
fine objects. The material, it is scarcely needful to say, is red
brick.
All the towns belonging to the Manchester family-circle present more
or less decidedly the features mentioned. They differ from one another
not in style, or habits, or physiognomy; the difference is simply that
one makes calico, another muslins, and that they cover a less or
greater extent of ground. The social, moral, and intellectual
qualities of the various places form quite another subject of
consideration. For the present it must wait; except with the remark
that a Lancashire manufacturing town, however humble, is seldom
without a lyceum, or some similar institution; and if wealthy, is
prone to emulate cities. Witness the beautiful Art Exhibition held not
long ago at Darwen!
[Illustration: WARRINGTON]
The industrial history of the important Lancashire cotton towns,
although their modern development covers less than ninety years, dates
from the beginning of the fourteenth century. As early as A.D. 1311,
temp. Edward II., friezes were manufactured at Colne, but, as
elsewhere in the country, they would seem to have been coarse and of
little value. "The English at that time," says quaint old Fuller,
"knew no more what to do with their wool than the sheep that weare it,
as to any artificial curious drapery." The great bulk of the native
produce of wool was transmitted to Flanders and the Rhenish provinces,
where it was woven, England repurchasing the cloth. Edward III.,
allowing himself to be guided by the far-reaching sagacity of his wise
queen, Philippa, resolved that the manufacture should be kept at home.
Parties of the Flemish weavers were easily induced to come over, the
more so because wretchedly treated in their own country. Manchester,
Bolton, Rochdale, and Warrington, were tenanted almost immediately,
and a new character was at once given to the textile productions both
of the district and the island in general. Furness Abbey was then in
its glory; its fertile pastures supplied the wants of these
industrious people: they seem, however, not to have cared to push
their establishments so far, keeping in the south and east of the
county, over which they gradually spread, carrying, wherever they
went, the "merry music of the loom." The same period witnessed the
original use of coal--again, it is believed, through the advice of
Philippa; the two great sources of Lancashire prosperity being thus in
their rise contemporaneous. The numerous little rivers and waterfalls
of East Lancashire contributed to the success of the new adventurers.
Fulling-mills and dye-works were erected upon the margins: the
particular spots are now only conjectural; mementoes of these ancient
works are nevertheless preserved in the springing up occasionally, to
the present day, on the lower Lancashire river-banks, of plants
botanically alien to the neighbourhood. These are specially the
fullers' teasel, _Dipsacus fullonum_, and the dyers' weed, _Reseda
luteola_, both of which were regularly used, the refuse, with seeds,
cast into the stream being carried many miles down and deposited where
the plants now renew themselves. The retention of their vitality by
seeds properly ripened, when buried too deep for the operation of the
atmosphere, sunshine, and moisture, all at once, is well known to
naturalists, as well as their germination when brought near enough to
the surface of the ground. This ancient woollen manufacture endured
for quite 300 years. Cotton then became a competitor, and gradually
superseded it; Rochdale and a few other places alone vindicating the
old traditions.
The Flemings also introduced the national _sabots_, from which have
descended the wooden clogs heard in operative Lancashire wherever
pavement allows of the clatter, only that while the _sabots_ were
wholly wooden, with a lining of lambskin, the Lancashire clogs have
leathern tops.
In the writings of the period before us, and in others long
afterwards, the Flemings' woollens are called "cottonnes," a
circumstance which has led to much misapprehension as to the date of
the original use in England of cotton _ipsissima_. In 1551-52, temp.
Edward VI., an "Acte" passed for the making of "woollen clothe"
prescribes the length and breadth of "all and everie cottonnes called
Manchester, Lancashire, and Cheshire cottonnes." Leland, in the
following reign, mentions in similar phrase, that "divers villagers in
the moores about Bolton do make cottons." Genuine cotton fabrics
manufactured abroad were known in England, no doubt, though the raw
material had not been seen. Chaucer habits his Knight in "fustian," a
word which points to Spain as the probable source. The truth as
regards the "cottonnes" would seem to be that certain woollens were
made so as to resemble cotton, and called by the same name, just as
to-day certain calicoes have the look of linen given to them, and are
sold as "imitation Irish," and as gloves made of the skins of
uncertain animals are passed off as "French kid"; unless, indeed, as
conjectured by some, the word "cottonnes" was a corruption of
"coatings."
The employment of cotton for manufacturing in England is mentioned
first in 1641, when it was brought to London from Cyprus and Smyrna.
The word "cotton" itself, we need hardly say, is of oriental origin,
taking one back to India, the old-world birthplace of the plant. Used
there as the clothing material from time immemorial, it is singular
that the movement westward should have been so slow. The people who
introduced it, practically, to Europe, were the Moors, who in the
tenth century cultivated cotton in old Granada, simultaneously with
rice, the sugar-cane, and the orange-tree, all brought by themselves
from Asia. In those days Moslems and Christians declined to be
friendly, and thus, although the looms were never still, the
superabundance of the manufacture went exclusively to Africa and the
Levant. The cotton-plant being indigenous also to Mexico and the West
Indies, when commerce arose with the latter, Cyprus and Smyrna no
longer had the monopoly. Precise dates, however, are wanting till the
first years of the eighteenth century, when the United States and the
Mersey of to-day had their prototype in Barbadoes and the Lune,
already mentioned as having been a cotton port long anterior to
Liverpool. Lancaster city itself is not accessible by ships. The
cotton was usually landed on the curious _lingula_ which juts into the
Irish Sea where the estuary disappears, and hither the country people
used to come to wonder at it.[15] The first advertisement of a sale of
cotton in Liverpool appeared in November 1758, but thirty years after
that Lancaster was still the principal Lancashire seat of import. One
of the most distinguished of the "Lancashire worthies," old Mr. John
Blackburne, of Orford Mount, near Warrington, an enthusiastic
gardener, cultivated the cotton-plant so successfully that he was able
to provide his wife with a muslin dress, worn by her on some state
occasion in or about 1790, the material derived wholly from the
greenhouse he loved so fondly. Strange that, except occasionally in
an engine-room, we scarcely ever see the cotton-plant in the county it
has filled with riches--the very place where one would expect to find
it cherished. How well would it occupy a few inches of the space so
generally devoted to the pomps and vanities of mere colour-worship!
Apart from the associations, it is beautiful; the leaves resemble
those of the grape-vine; the flowers are like single yellow roses.
There never was a flood without its ark. One man a few years ago did
his part with becoming zeal--the late Mr. R. H. Alcock, of Bury.
Lancashire, it may be allowed here to remind the reader, is the only
manufacturing district in England which depends entirely upon foreign
countries for the supply of its raw material. One great distinction
between England and other countries is that the latter send away the
whole, or very much, of their natural produce, usually as gathered
together, England importing it and working it up. How terribly the
dependence in question was proved at the time of the Federal and
Confederate war, all who were cognisant of the great Cotton-famine
will remember. Next in order would come sugar and timber, a dearth of
either of which would unquestionably be disastrous; but not like want
of cotton in Lancashire--the stranding of a whole community.
[15] _Vide_ the _Autobiography of Wm. Stout_, the old Quaker
grocer, ironmonger, and general merchant of Lancaster. He
mentions receiving cotton from Barbadoes in 1701, and onwards to
1725, when the price advanced "from 10d. to near 2s. 1d. the
lb."
The Lancashire cotton towns owe their existence essentially to the
magic touch of modern mechanical art. During all the long procession
of centuries that had elapsed since the time of the "white-armed"
daughter of Alcinous, her maidens, and their spinning-wheels, and of
the swarthy weavers of ancient Egypt, the primeval modes of
manufacture had been followed almost implicitly. The work of the
Flemings themselves was little in advance of that of the Hebrews under
Solomon. In comparison with that long period, the time covered by the
change induced by machinery was but a moment, and the growth of the
weaving communities, compared with that of previous times, like a
lightning-flash. The movement commenced about 1760. Up till long after
the time of Elizabeth, the staple manufacture of Lancashire, as we
have seen, was woollen. Flax, in the sixteenth century, began to be
imported largely, both from Ireland and the Continent, and when cotton
at last arrived the two materials were combined. Flax was used for the
"warp" or longitudinal threads, which in weaving require to be
stronger than the "woof," while cotton was employed only for the
latter--technically the "weft."
Fabrics composed wholly of cotton do not appear to have been made in
Lancashire before the time of George II., Bolton leading the way with
cotton velvets about 1756. The cotton weft was spun by the people in
their own cottages, chiefly by the women, literally the "spinsters" of
the family, representative eighteen centuries afterwards, of the good
housewife of the _Æneid_ and of the still older one in the Book of
Proverbs, though as the years rolled on so greatly did the demand
increase that every child had work of one kind or another. Thus began
"infant labour," afterwards so much abused. The employment of children
over thirteen in the modern factory is quite a different thing. Placed
under legal restrictions, it is a blessing alike to themselves and to
their parents, since if not there, the children now earning their
bread would be idling, and probably in mischief. Those, it has been
well said, who have to live by labour should early be trained to
labour. Diligent as they were, the spinsters could not produce weft
fast enough for the weavers. Sitting at their looms, which were also
in the cottages, thoughtful men pondered the possibilities of quicker
methods. Presently the dream took shape, and from the successive
inventions of Whyatt, Kay, Highs, and Hargreaves, emerged the
famous "spinning-jenny,"[16] a machine which did as much work in the
same time as a dozen pair of hands. Abreast of it came the
warping-mill, the carding-engine, and the roving-frame: the latter
particularly opportune, since the difficulty had always been to
disentangle the fibres of the cotton prior to twisting, and to lay
them exactly parallel. Arkwright now came on the scene. He himself
never invented anything; but he had marvellous powers of combination,
such as enabled him to assimilate all that was good in the ideas of
other men, and to give them unity and new vitality. The result was
machinery that gave exquisite evenness and attenuation to the
"rovings," and a patent having been granted 15th July 1769, Arkwright
is properly regarded as the founder of the modern modes of
manufacture. Arkwright possessed, in addition, a thoroughly feminine
capacity for good management and perseverance, with that most
excellent adjunct, the art of obtaining ascendancy over capitalists.
Among the immediate results were the disuse of linen warp, the new
frames enabling cotton warp to be made strong enough; and the
concentration of all the early processes, spinning included, in
special buildings, with employment of horse or water-power. The
weaving, however, long remained with the cottagers, and survives to a
slight extent even to the present day. The Lancashire cotton
manufacture, strictly so called, is thus very little more than a
century old. No further back than in 1774, fabrics made wholly of
cotton were declared by statute to have been "lately introduced," and
a "lawful and laudable manufacture."
[16] That the spinning-jenny was so named after a wife or
daughter of one of the inventors is fable. The original wheel
was the "jenny," a term corresponding with others well known in
Lancashire,--the "peggy" and the "dolly,"--and the new
contrivance became the "_spinning_-jenny."
[Illustration: THE DINNER HOUR]
The following year, 1775, saw the perfecting of Crompton's celebrated
"mule," which produced, at less expense, a much finer and softer yarn
than Arkwright's machine. It was specially suitable for muslins; and
from this date most assuredly should be reckoned the elevation of the
manufacture to its highest platform. Like the jenny, it was used at
first in private houses, but a nobler application was close at hand--a
new revolution--the superseding of hand, and horse, and water power,
all at one moment, by steam. Had the former remained the only
artificial sources of help--even supposing rivers and brooks not
subject to negation by drought, the cotton manufacture must needs have
been confined within narrow limits, and the greatest conceivable
supply of the raw material would not have altered the case. Steam,
which, like Lord Chatham, "tramples upon impossibilities," at once
gave absolute freedom; and manufacturing, in the space of thirty
years, eclipsed its history during 3000. The "mule" was now
transferred to the mill, and the factory system became complete.
Power-looms were first employed in Manchester in 1806. Stockport
followed, and by degrees they became general, improvements going on up
till as late as 1830, when the crowning triumph of cotton machinery
was patented as the "self-acting mule." The pride of Lancashire, it
must be remembered, consists, after all, not in the delicacy and the
beauty of its cottons, for in these respects India has not yet been
out-run; but in the rapidity, the cheapness, and the boundless
potentialities of the manufacture, which enable it to meet, if called
upon, the requirements of every nation in the world. While any human
creature remains imperfectly clad, Lancashire still has its work to
do. To be entrusted with this great business is a privilege, and in
the honourable execution consists its true and essential glory.
"Over-production," while any are naked, is a phrase without meaning.
That which wants correcting is deficient absorption.
[Illustration: PAY-DAY IN A COTTON MILL]
Reviewing the whole matter, the specially interesting point--rendered
so through inciting to profoundest reflection--is that those poor and
unlettered men--Hargreaves, Arkwright, Crompton, and the others--were
the instruments, under Providence (for such things do not happen
fortuitously), by which the world became possessed of an entirely new
industrial power, fraught with infinite capacities for promoting human
welfare; and which, in its application, introduced quite new styles of
thinking and reasoning, and gave new bias to the policy of a great
nation. Hargreaves, Arkwright, Crompton, had no prescience of what
would come of their efforts. In no part of the transformation was
there any precedent or example; it had neither lineage nor
inheritance; it was anticipated in momentousness only by the
inventions of Caxton and Gioia;[17] and if in our own day the electric
telegraph and the telephone reveal natural laws scarcely
distinguishable from those of miracle, it may still be questioned if
these latter discoveries surpass in intrinsic value the three or four
that gave life to the modern cotton manufacture.
[17] Inventor of the mariners' compass.
The interior of a great cotton factory, when at work, presents a
spectacle altogether unimaginable. The vast area of the rooms, or
"flats," filled in every part with machinery, admits of no comparison
with anything else in England, being found in the factory alone. A
thousand great iron frames, exquisitely composite, and kept
fastidiously clean, some by self-acting dusters, are in simultaneous
movement, the arms of some rising and falling, while parts of others
march in and out, and to and fro, giving perfect illustrations of
order, reciprocal adaptation, and interdependence, and seeming not
only alive, but conscious. Nothing is more striking, perhaps, than to
watch the shuttles as they dart alternately right and left, every
movement meaning an added thread to the beautiful offspring. The poets
are supposed by some to concern themselves only with fiction. Men and
women who write verses are poets only when they deal with truth,
though presented in the garb of fable; and assuredly, for a poet's
theme, there is nothing to excel a skilfully conducted human
manufacture. Erasmus Darwin, it will be remembered, describes the
whole series of processes in connection with cotton as observed by him
in Arkwright's original factory upon the Derwent.
A common practice is to have the looms in a "shed" upon the surface of
the ground. To be as near the earth as possible is a desire no less
with the spinner, who, like the weaver, finds the lower atmospheric
conditions much more favourable to his work than the upper. In any
case, where the power-looms are, long lines of slender pillars support
the roof, presenting an unbroken and almost endless perspective; and
between the machinery and the ceiling, connected with the horizontal
shafts which revolve just below it, are innumerable strong brown
leather straps that quiver as they run their courses. According to the
department we may be in, either threads or coils of cotton whiter than
pearl, and of infinite number, give occupation to those thousand
obedient and tireless slaves--not of the ring or the lamp, but of the
mighty engine that invisibly is governing the whole; and in attendance
are men and women, boys and girls, again beyond the counting. Their
occupations are in no degree laborious: all the heavy work is done by
the steam-engine; muscular power is not wanted so much as delicacy and
readiness of hand and finger. Hence in the factory and the cotton-mill
there is opportunity for those who are too weak for other vocations.
Machinery in all cases has the merit of at once increasing the
workman's wages and lessening his fatigue. The precision in the
working of the machinery enforces upon those who attend to it a
corresponding regularity of action. There is no re-twisting or
re-weaving; everything, if done at all, must be done properly and at
the proper moment. Apart from its being a place wherein to earn
creditably the daily bread, if there be anything in the world which
conduces pre-eminently to the acquisition of habits such as lie at the
foundation of good morals,--order, care, cleanliness, punctuality,
industry, early rising,--assuredly it is the wholesome discipline of
the well-ordered cotton factory. Whatever may befall _outside_, there
is nothing deleterious _inside_; the personal intercourse of the
people employed is itself reduced to a minimum; if they corrupt one
another, it is as people _not_ in factories do. In the rooms and
"sheds" devoted to weaving, the rattle of the machinery forbids even
conversation, except when the voice is adjusted to it. In the quieter
parts the girls show their contentedness not infrequently by singing--
"The joyful token of a happy mind."
[Illustration: IN A COTTON FACTORY]
"How often," says the type of the true Lancashire poet, most genial of
his race,--the late Edwin Waugh,--"how often have I heard some fine
psalm-tune streaming in chorus from female voices when passing
cotton-mills at work, and mingling with the spoom of thousands of
spindles." That the girls in particular are not unhappy is shown by
their preference of the cotton-mill to domestic service. Their health
is as good as that of any other class of operatives; and though they
have to keep upon their feet, it is not for so long a time as young
women in city shops. Of course there is a shadowy side to life
identified with the factory. The hands do not live in Elysium, any
more than the agricultural labourer does in Arcadia. The masters, as
everywhere else, are both good and bad: in the aggregate they are no
worse than their fellows in other places, and to expect them to be
better would be premature. In case of grievance or abuse there is an
"inspector" to apply to for remedy. The wages are as good as those
earned by any other large class of English work-people; and if the
towns in which so many abide are unlovely, the Lancashire
cotton-operatives at all events know little or nothing of the vice and
filth of metropolitan St. Giles'.