Part 1

“_Familiar in their Mouths as HOUSEHOLD WORDS._”—SHAKESPEARE.

HOUSEHOLD WORDS. A WEEKLY JOURNAL.

CONDUCTED BY CHARLES DICKENS.

N^{o.} 23.] SATURDAY, AUGUST 31, 1850. [PRICE 2_d._

A PAPER-MILL.

Down at Dartford in Kent, on a fine bright day, I strolled through the pleasant green lanes, on my way to a Paper-Mill. Accustomed, mainly, to associate Dartford with Gunpowder Mills, and formidable tin canisters, illustrated in copper-plate, with the outpourings of a generous cornucopia of dead game, I found it pleasant to think, on a summer morning when all living creatures were enjoying life, that it was only paper in my mind—not powder.

If sturdy Wat Tyler, of this very town of Dartford in Kent (Deptford had the honour of him once, but that was a mistake) could only have anticipated and reversed the precept of the pious Orange-Lodges; if he could only have put his trust in Providence, and kept his paper damp—for printing—he need never have marched to London, the captain of a hundred thousand men, and summarily beheaded the archbishop of Canterbury as a bad adviser of the young king, Richard. Then, would William Walworth, Lord Mayor of London (and an obsequious courtier enough, may be) never have struck him from his charger, unawares. Then, might the “general enfranchisement of all bondmen”—the bold smith’s demand—have come, a long time sooner than it did. Then, might working-men have maintained the decency and honour of their daughters, through many a hazy score of troubled and oppressive years, when they were yet as the clods of the valley, broken by the ploughshare, worried by the harrow. But, in those days, paper and printing for the people were not; so, Wat lay low in Smithfield, and Heaven knows what became of his daughter, and the old ferocious wheel went driving round, some centuries longer.

The wild flowers were blowing in these Dartford hedges, all those many summertimes; the larks were singing, high in air; the trees were rustling as they rustle to-day; the bees went humming by; the light clouds cast their shadows on the verdant fields. The pleasant little river Darent ran the same course; sparkled in the same sun; had, then as now, its tiny circles made by insects; and its plumps and plashes, made by fish. But, the river has changed, since Wat the Blacksmith, bending over with his bucket, saw his grimy face, impatient of unjust and grievous tribute, making remonstrance with him for his long endurance. Now, there are indeed books in the running brooks—for they go to feed the Paper-Mill.

Time was, in the old Saxon days, when there stood a Mill here, “held in ferm by a Reve,” but _that_ was not a Paper-Mill. Then, came a Nunnery, with kings’ fair daughters in it; then, a Palace; then, Queen Elizabeth, in her sixteenth year, to sojourn at the Palace two days; then, in that reign, a Paper-Mill. In the church yonder, hidden behind the trees, with many rooks discoursing in their lofty houses between me and it, is the tomb of Sir John Spielman, jeweller to the Queen when she had grown to be a dame of a shrewd temper, aged fifty or so: who “built a Paper-Mill for the making of writing-paper,” and to whom his Royal Mistress was pleased to grant a license “for the sole gathering for ten years of all rags, &c., necessary for the making of such paper.” There is a legend that the same Sir John, in coming here from Germany, to build his Mill, did bring with him two young lime-trees—then unknown in England—which he set before his Dartford dwelling-house, and which did flourish exceedingly; so, that they fanned him with their shadows, when he lay asleep in the upper story, an ancient gentleman. Now, God rest the soul of Sir John Spielman, for the love of all the sweet-smelling lime-trees that have ever greeted me in the land, and all the writing-paper I have ever blotted!

But, as I turn down by the hawthorn hedge into the valley, a sound comes in my ears—like the murmuring and throbbing of a mighty giant, labouring hard—that would have unbraced all the Saxon bows, and shaken all the heads off Temple Bar and London Bridge, ever lifted to those heights from the always butchering, always craving, never sufficiently-to-be-regretted, brave old English Block. It is the noise of the Steam Engine. And now, before me, white and clean without, and radiant in the sun, with the sweet clear river tumbling merrily down to kiss it, and help in the work it does, is the Paper-Mill I have come to see!

It is like the Mill of the child’s story, that ground old people young. Paper! White, pure, spick and span new paper, with that fresh smell which takes us back to school and school-books; can it ever come from rags like these? Is it from such bales of dusty rags, native and foreign, of every colour and of every kind, as now environ us, shutting out the summer air and putting cotton into our summer ears, that virgin paper, to be written on, and printed on, proceeds? We shall see presently. Enough to consider, at present, what a grave of dress this rag-store is; what a lesson of vanity it preaches. The coarse blouse of the Flemish labourer, and the fine cambric of the Parisian lady, the court dress of the Austrian jailer, and the miserable garb of the Italian peasant; the woollen petticoat of the Bavarian girl, the linen head-dress of the Neapolitan woman, the priest’s vestment, the player’s robe, the Cardinal’s hat, and the ploughman’s nightcap; all dwindle down to this, and bring their littleness or greatness in fractional portions here. As it is with the worn, it shall be with the wearers; but there shall be no dust in our eyes then, though there is plenty now. Not all the great ones of the earth will raise a grain of it, and nothing but the Truth will be.

My conductor leads the way into another room. I am to go, as the rags go, regularly and systematically through the Mill. I am to suppose myself a bale of rags. I _am_ rags.

Here, in another room, are some three-score women at little tables, each with an awful scythe-shaped knife standing erect upon it, and looking like the veritable tooth of time. I am distributed among these women, and worried into smaller shreds—torn cross-wise at the knives. Already I begin to lose something of my grosser nature. The room is filled with my finest dust, and, as gratings of me drop from the knives, they fall through the perforated surface of the tables into receptacles beneath. When I am small enough, I am bundled up, carried away in baskets, and stowed in immense bins, until they want me in the Boiling-Room.

The Boiling-Room has enormous cauldrons in it, each with its own big lid, hanging to the beams of the roof, and put on by machinery when it is full. It is a very clean place, “coddled” by much boiling, like a washer-woman’s fingers, and looks as if the kitchen of the Parish Union had gone into partnership with the Church Belfry. Here, I am pressed, and squeezed, and jammed, a dozen feet deep, I should think, into my own particular cauldron; where I simmer, boil, and stew, a long, long time. Then, I am a dense, tight mass, cut out in pieces like so much clay—very clean—faint as to my colour—greatly purified—and gradually becoming quite ethereal.

In this improved condition, I am taken to the Cutting-Room. I am very grateful to the clear fresh water, for the good it has done me; and I am glad to be put into some more of it, and subjected to the action of large rollers filled with transverse knives, revolving by steam power upon iron beds, which favour me with no fewer than two million cuts per minute, though, within the memory of man, the functions of this machine were performed by an ordinary pestle and mortar. Such a drumming and rattling, such a battering and clattering, such a delight in cutting and slashing, not even the Austrian part of me ever witnessed before. This continues, to my great satisfaction, until I look like shaving lather; when I am run off into chambers underneath, to have my friend the water, from whom I am unwilling to be separated, drained out of me.

At this time, my colour is a light blue, if I have indigo in me, or a pale fawn, if I am rags from which the dyes have been expelled. As it is necessary to bleach the fawn-coloured pulp (the blue being used for paper of that tint), and as I _am_ fawn-coloured pulp, I am placed in certain stone chambers, like catacombs, hermetically sealed, excepting the first compartment, which communicates with a gasometer containing manganese, vitriol, and salt. From these ingredients, a strong gas (not agreeable, I must say, to the sense of smell) is generated, and forced through all the chambers, each of which communicates with the other. These continue closed, if I remember right, some four-and-twenty hours, when a man opens them and takes to his heels immediately, to avoid the offensive gas that rushes out. After I have been aired a little, I am again conveyed (quite white now, and very spiritual indeed) to some more obliging rollers upstairs.

At it these grinders go, “Munch, munch, munch!” like the sailor’s wife in MACBETH, who had chesnuts in her lap. I look, at first, as if I were the most delicious curds and whey; presently, I find that I am changed to gruel—not thin oatmeal gruel, but rich, creamy, tempting, exalted gruel! As if I had been made from pearls, which some voluptuous Mr. Emden had converted into groats!

And now, I am ready to undergo my last astounding transformation, and be made into paper by the machine. Oh what can I say of the wonderful machine, which receives me, at one end of a long room, gruel, and dismisses me at the other, paper!

Where is the subtle mind of this Leviathan lodged? It must be somewhere—in a cylinder, a pipe, a wheel—or how could it ever do with me the miracles it does! How could it receive me on a sheet of wire-gauze, in my gruel-form, and slide me on, gradually assuming consistency—gently becoming a little paper-like, a little more, a little more still, very paper-like, indeed—clinging to wet blankets, holding tight by other surfaces, smoothly ascending Witney hills, lightly coming down into a woolly open country, easily rolling over and under a planetary system of heated cylinders, large and small, and ever growing, as I proceed, stronger and more paper-like! How does the power that fights the wintry waves on the Atlantic, and cuts and drills adamantine slabs of metal like cheese, how does it draw me out, when I am frailest and most liable to tear, so tenderly and delicately, that a woman’s hand—no, even though I were a man, very ill and helpless, and she may nurse who loved me—could never touch me with so light a touch, or with a movement so unerring! How can I believe, even on experience, that, being of itself insensible, and only informed with intellect at second hand, it changes me, in less time than I take to tell it, into any sort of paper that is wanted, dries me, cuts me into lengths, becomes charged, just before dismissing me, with electricity, and gathers up the hair of the attendant-watcher, as if with horror at the mischiefs and desertions from the right, in which I may be instrumental! Above all, how can I reconcile its being mere machinery, with its leaving off when it has cut me into sheets, and NOT conveying me to the Exciseman in the next room, whom it plainly thinks a most unnatural conclusion!

I am carried thither on trucks. I am examined, and my defective portions thrown out, for the Mill, again; I am made up into quires and reams; I am weighed and excised by the hundredweight; and I am ready for my work. Of my being made the subject of nonsensical defences of Excise duty, in the House of Commons, I need say nothing. All the world knows that when the Right Honourable the Chancellor of the Exchequer, for the time being, says I am only the worse by a duty of fifteen shillings per hundredweight, he is a Wrong Honourable, and either don’t know, or don’t care, anything about me. For, he leaves out of consideration all the vexatious, depressing, and preventing influences of Excise Duty on any trade, and all the extra cost and charge of packing and unpacking, carrying and re-carrying, imposed upon the manufacturer, and of course upon the public. But we must have it, in future, even with Right Honourables as with birds. The Chancellor of the Exchequer that can sing, and won’t sing, must be made to sing—small.

My metempsychosis ends with the manufacture. I am rags no more, but a visitor to the Paper-Mill. I am a pleased visitor to see the Mill in such beautiful order, and the workpeople so thriving; and I think that my good friend the owner has reason for saying with an agreeable smile, as we come out upon the sparkling stream again, that he is never so contented, as when he is in rags.

Shining up in the blue sky, far above the Paper-Mill, a mere speck in the distance, is a Paper Kite. It is an appropriate thing at the moment—not to swear by (we have enough of that already) but to hope by, with a devout heart. May all the Paper that I sport with, soar as innocently upward as the paper kite, and be as harmless to the holder as the kite is to the boy! May it bring, to some few minds, such fresh associations; and to me no worse remembrances than the kite that once plucked at my own hand like an airy friend. May I always recollect that paper has a mighty Duty, set forth in no Schedule of Excise, and that its names are love, forbearance, mercy, progress, scorn of the Hydra Cant with all its million heads!

So, back by the green lanes, and the old Priory—a farm now, and none the worse for that—and away among the lime-trees, thinking of Sir John.

CHEERFUL ARITHMETIC.

“Competition is fast crushing us!” the tradesman exclaims as he drives you out to his elegant villa behind his seventy-guinea gelding. “Wheat at forty shillings a quarter is ruin!” groans the farmer, while dallying with his champagne glass. “_We_ are all going to the workhouse.”—“A diamond necklace, my dear?” replies the mill-owner to a lovely Lancashire witch, whose smile is on other occasions law—“What? two hundred pounds for a bauble, while calico is only three farthings a yard, and cotton-spinning on the brink of bankruptcy. Impossible!” Should these gentlemen ever meet it is ten to one that on comparing notes they resolve unanimously that the whole country is going to the dogs; but it is also ten to one that this resolution is passed at a public dinner to which they have each cheerfully contributed one-pound-one: besides another guinea to the occasion of the feast:—some plethoric, bloated, routine charity.

Considering their patriotic despondency in regard to the utterly hopeless condition of the nation, it is wonderful to observe the contented complacency with which these gentlemen eat their filberts and sip their claret. Neither is this stoic philosophy confined to them alone. All sorts of predicted want and impending misery are borne with exemplary fortitude by all sorts of Englishmen. The skilful artisan seldom allows a week to pass without deploring the inadequacy of wages; but, although he manages to get a good Sunday’s dinner some fifty times a year, and once or twice in the twelvemonth indulges his family with a healthful pleasure trip in the country, he is able to scrape up a few pounds in the savings’ bank. Yet if you ask him touching the state of things in his particular line, he will tell you that “Times never were so bad.” So universally is the propensity to depreciate things as they are, that if a commission were appointed to inquire into the state of the nation, their report, if derived solely from the evidence of well-to-do witnesses, would be lugubrious in the extreme. It is only the very poor who gaze cheerfully into the future; for their existence is a condition of hope. They apprehend nothing, for they have nothing to lose; whatever change fortune may bring, must be, they believe, for the better.

Happily, better testimony, to the real condition of the industrious classes is producible than that dark cloud of witnesses who speak out of the fulness of an Englishman’s privilege—grumbling. That testimony has been lucidly sifted, and was adduced by Mr. G. R. Porter at the recent meeting of the British Association in Edinburgh. It consisted—in proof of the well-being and continued progress of our country—of a comparison between the income tax returns in respect of incomes derived from trades and professions in 1812, and the like returns in 1848, excluding from the former period the incomes below one hundred and fifty pounds; which, under the existing law, are allowed to pass untaxed. The total amount thus assessed, after deducting exemptions, was, in 1812, about twenty-one millions and a quarter; while, in 1848, the amount was nearly fifty-seven millions; showing an increase, in thirty-six years, of about thirty-five millions and three-quarters, or one hundred and sixty-eight per cent.; being at the rate of upwards of four and a half per cent., yearly:—an increase very nearly three-fold greater than the increase during the same period of the population of Great Britain; where, alone, the income tax flourishes in full bloom.

But how has this three-fold prosperity been distributed? Have the rich grown richer, and the poor, poorer; or has Fortune taken off her bandage and rewarded honest industry, with a discriminating hand? Have the bulk of the people shared in the productive wealth which thirty-six years have accumulated? In order to answer these questions, Mr. Porter entered into a series of elaborate and interesting calculations, which prove the pleasing fact that the great progressive wealth _has_ been shared among the middle and working classes.

He found that the returns of 1812 as well as those of 1848 gave the sums assessed to Income Tax in various classes; and, for the purpose of his examination, he distinguished the incomes thus given:—those between one hundred and fifty pounds and five hundred pounds; those between five hundred pounds and one thousand pounds; incomes between one thousand pounds and two thousand pounds; incomes between two thousand pounds and five thousand pounds; and those above five thousand pounds. Adhering strictly to these distinctions, Mr. Porter perceived, in 1848, a positive increase in incomes between one hundred and fifty and five hundred pounds per annum, of thirteen millions seven hundred thousand pounds, over the incomes assessed in 1812. Between five hundred pounds and one thousand pounds per annum, the increase since 1812 has been five millions. On incomes between one thousand pounds and two thousand pounds, and incomes between two thousand pounds and five thousand pounds, there is an increase of upwards of four millions respectively; while in the highest class, which includes all incomes above five thousand pounds per annum, the increase is found to be no more than eight millions and three-quarters. Comparing the highest with the lowest class, the increase has been greater in the lowest by nearly five millions—or fifty-six per cent.

This improvement in circumstances, however, descends to no lower a class of society than persons in the receipt of at least one hundred and fifty pounds per annum. It was necessary to dig a little lower in the strata of private circumstances, in order to show the progress of wealth among the working classes; and Mr. Porter had recourse to the returns from savings’ banks; these being chiefly used by the humbler orders. From data thus derived it was ascertained, that, while the deposits in England, Wales, and Ireland, proportioned to the whole population, amounted in 1831 to twelve shillings and eightpence per head; in 1848 they had risen to twenty shillings and eleven-pence per individual. The largest amount of these savings occurred in 1846; when they reached, in England alone, to more than twenty-six millions and three-quarters, and in the three Kingdoms, to more than thirty-one millions seven hundred thousand pounds, being equal to twenty-four shillings per head on the population of England, Wales, and Ireland, and ten shillings and one penny per head on that of Scotland.[1]

Footnote 1:

The comparative smallness of the deposits in Scotland arises from two causes: first, the system of allowing interest upon very small sums deposited in private and joint-stock banks; and, secondly, the more recent connexion of savings’ banks with the Government in that division of the kingdom. Hence, there is no reason for supposing that the labouring-classes of Scotland are less saving than those of England or Ireland.

The exceeding moderation of this estimate will be observed when we mention another description of savings’ banks which Mr. Porter has taken no account of—we mean Friendly Societies. Of these, there are fourteen thousand in Great Britain, regularly enrolled according to Act of Parliament, consisting of one million six hundred thousand members, with a gross annual revenue of two millions eight hundred thousand, and accumulated capital amounting to six millions four hundred thousand pounds sterling. To this must be added the capital belonging to unenrolled benefit societies (exclusive of those in Ireland), which has been estimated at a greater amount than those which exist “as the Act directs;” namely, at nine millions sterling, belonging to two millions and a half of members. It is indeed a most gratifying proof of the prudential, and therefore moral, as well as pecuniary advance which this country has made during the past thirty years, that half our labouring male population belong to Friendly Societies. The operative classes of Great Britain alone possess, at this moment, capital in savings’ banks and friendly societies, the total of which reaches the enormous sum of forty-two millions of money. How very like national ruin _this_ looks!

In further proof of the greater distribution of means among the humbler than the higher orders, we can turn once more to Mr. Porter, who assures us that in proportion as the savings of the industrious poor have augmented, the dividends received at the Bank by the “comfortable” and the rich have decreased.