Part 4

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.

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!

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."

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.

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.