Part 4

So his boyhood sped away, and when his apprenticeship had come to an end he took the great and important step of setting up for himself. He left Preston and went to Bolton. Poor indeed must have been his stock of money at this point in his fortunes. It was no imposing shop he took, with windows and painted sign, but the smallest and poorest place to be had. He rented an underground cellar, but his eager spirit was to be damped neither by poverty nor a dreary outlook. He bent all his powers on getting customers, and as the first step to this he stuck out a placard above his cellar door with the scrawled invitation--

"_Come to the subterraneous barber, he shaves for a penny._"

In the little world of hair-dressing the rude appeal made a small sensation. Here, as in other businesses, there was competition. Arkwright shaved for a penny. At this rate the subterraneous barber would draw away the customers of others! While the underground cellar would be crowded, their shops would be empty. And so they were forced to let down their prices, and others besides Arkwright shaved for a penny.

Young Richard, rising one morning, grasped the fact that he was now not alone in his prices. Others were running him dangerously close. He was merely one of many now, but with the enterprise that outdid others by-and-by in the great world of mechanical invention he resolved to strike out a bold new line. The old placard was taken down and another printed and set up in its stead.

"_A clean shave for a halfpenny!_"

But Arkwright was not content to stand still in shaving people's chins or in anything else. These were the days of wearing wigs, and it struck him that something was to be made out of wigs, or perukes, as they were called, and so he gave up his business of shaving in a measure and began to travel about the country buying and selling human hair. He regularly attended country fairs and bought the locks and tresses of the young girls who came there to be hired out to service. In time he grew to make successful bargains with these, and to add to this he discovered a chemical dye, with which he dyed the hair and sold it to wig-makers, and by-and-by "Arkwright's Hair" came to be known as the best in the market.

It most likely was--at any rate, it may have been in those journeys--going in and out among the houses and cottages in the country that he came to be familiar with the sound of the "weaver's shuttle" and the turning of the "one-thread machine." Long years after he was to find that familiarity stand him in good stead. But, successful and hard-working as he was, life was still a struggle, and with all his efforts he earned but a bare living. It was hard to wrest a fortune from wig-making and chin-shaving, so gradually there grew up in his busy brain a project. It formed very slowly, but it did grow. It was the genius within him struggling with disadvantages and drawbacks that would have "posed" most men. His mind, leaning strongly to the mechanical, groped vaguely at first after something, and then gradually it settled down to the "spinning machine," and from that time onwards all his energies were bent on that.

In his journeys among the cottagers it had been easy enough to see that the yarn could not be made quickly enough for the weaver, that though in thousands of cottages the "one-thread machine" turned from morning till night and again from night till morning, it could not keep pace with the shuttle. What was wanted was a dozen, fifty, a hundred threads to be made by a single pair of hands. Did he perhaps see dimly even then that he was to be the man who should throw out the old-fashioned hand-wheel?

One day he noticed a red-hot bar of iron become elongated as it passed between two iron rollers. In that instant he first saw dimly the tiny seedling that was to grow one day to the mighty tree of the spinning-frame. The idea lodged in his brain and took firm hold of him.

In outward appearance at this time Arkwright was in no way specially attractive or remarkable, but genius is not always outwardly beautiful, and "there were notions in that rough head of his" that were one day to alter England.

But Arkwright was no practical mechanic, and so he called in help from outside--from one Kay, a clockmaker in Warrington, and under his directions Kay made rollers and wheels, and shortly Arkwright had his models ready to hand. Meantime, while his heart beat high with hope and exultation, his pet models being always in his mind though for bread and butter he still made wigs and shaved chins, he received a sudden and unexpected check. His wife--for he was already married--chafing in secret over what she considered his fantastic imaginings and idle dreamings, made up her mind to destroy that which distracted his mind from the business of shaving and money-making. As the surest means to her end she burned his models one day when he was out of the way. Poor Arkwright returned and discovered the mischief. In an instant his whole stubborn nature was up in arms. Indeed, so wrathful was he that he would from that day have nothing more to do with his wife, and the two separated.

And now the great question was--how best to push the new model Kay had made. Poverty handicapped him sadly. It was impossible to push anything without money. He cast about in his mind where the money was to come from, and settled on an old friend in Preston, "a liquor merchant and painter" (probably a house-painter). To Preston he took his way. The friend consented to help him, and together with high hopes and great rejoicing he and Kay set up their model. But their secrecy had roused suspicion. Behind this friend's house there happened to be a closed-in garden with a number of gooseberry bushes. Close by in a neighbouring cottage lived two old ladies. At nights they declared they heard a strange humming noise among the bushes, as if the devil himself were making music, tuning up his bagpipes for Arkwright and Kay to dance a reel! The story got abroad. The people of Preston, excited and curious, were eager to break into the house and discover if Arkwright and Kay were indeed in league with the Evil One.

But after the model had been set up and was about to be shown in the Free Grammar School in Preston, there came a sudden memory of dark stories still fresh in men's minds of how other inventors had been treated in Preston--how they had been mobbed and furiously ill-used, while their inventions had been smashed to atoms by a people panic-stricken because of their dread of machinery, which they believed would throw them out of work and take the bread out of their and their children's mouths. Arkwright remembered all this, and he and Kay finally made up their minds to pack up their models and set off for Nottingham.

While Arkwright had been at Preston engrossed with thoughts of his model a political election took place, and he was called upon to vote. But so poor and so wretchedly clad was the man who was by-and-by to be a knight--the man who was to leave behind him half a million--that before he could present himself at the poll, several people had to club together to exchange the tattered garments for something that would at least be presentable!

Arrived at Nottingham, Arkwright tried to get someone to help him with money. This brave man had firm faith in his invention and firm faith in himself. It was simply impossible to discourage him. But the time of waiting was long and weary before he fell in with a Mr. Strutt, the inventor of the stocking-frame. An inventor himself, perhaps he was the man who could best understand and appreciate Arkwright's invention. The two entered into partnership, and it may have seemed to Arkwright that his time of trial and waiting had at last come to an end.

And now truly enough he had his foot firmly planted on the ladder of success. Behind him was a hard and toilsome boyhood. Before him were still long waiting, difficulties to face, men's opposition to overcome, dislike, distrust, envy, and jealousy to live down and conquer. But the first step had been taken, and never once along the difficult way do we find him flinch.

In 1769, the same year in which James Watt patented his Condensing Steam Engine, Arkwright at the age of thirty-seven took out the patent for his Spinning-Frame. His next step was to erect a cotton mill at Chorley, and following that, one at Cromford, in Derbyshire. No sooner were they finished than men flocked from Lancashire, and indeed from all parts of England, to see them at work. They were the gazing-stock of the country.

But Arkwright's brain was not the only one that had pondered on cardings and rollers and wheels and spindles, and soon there sprang up men who said this invention was not all his. He had taken other men's thoughts and adapted them, and joined them together, and called the whole his own. And now there followed hard years of opposition, fightings, struggles, before which a weaker man than Arkwright would have gone down. But nothing discouraged or defeated him. Not even five years of weary waiting, an expenditure of £12,000, and yet no profit from his invention! His brave spirit was still undaunted. Men did not try to hide their envy and jealousy. They fell upon his mill at Chorley in mobs of hundreds. A strong force of police, and even of the military, was called out to quell the rioters. Two of them were shot dead, one was drowned, and several were wounded; while the rest smashed every machine they could lay hands on, everything that was worked by horse-power or by water-power, sparing only and alone what human hands could undertake. And it was not the workmen only who, with blind or short-sighted eyes, looked on machinery as a curse, believing that it would rob them of their living, but the better, more enlightened classes as well, who regarded Arkwright as an enemy to mankind. They were doubtless at the same time looking to their pockets. If working men were thrown out of work, it meant that _they_ would have larger poor rates to pay, and so they too fell upon Arkwright, not seeing that here was the man ready and anxious, if they would but listen to him, to give thousands of people work where now instead only hundreds had it.

Meantime he faced his opponents, showing always a brave front, and trying to defend himself at every point. He endured the spoiling of his property, and then, not content with browbeating him, they seized upon his patent rights and disputed them. And the upshot was that Arkwright's patent was set aside by Parliament. But even then the great inventor was not overwhelmed. Passing by the hotel where some of his enemies were standing after his defeat, he overheard one say to another--

"Well, we have done for the old shaver at last." Arkwright turned round, ready, cool, immovable.

"Never mind," he said, "I have a razor left in Scotland that will shave you all yet."

He had first tried horse-power for his mills. Now he was trying water-power, and he foresaw that Lanark, in Scotland, so well situated on the Clyde for his purpose, would furnish him with all that was wanted.

Meantime, cotton was gradually growing to a great industry in England. People who had looked suspiciously and enviously on Arkwright at first now reluctantly admitted that his goods were the best to be had, and by-and-by it was he who fixed the prices in the market. It was as if by his own efforts he had created a little world. The originality of each part of his invention, may not entirely have been his. This part or that--a roller, a carding, a crank, a spindle--one of these may have belonged to some other man, but to Arkwright belongs the joining of all together. It was his master mind that collected under one roof the whole series of machines, from the engine that received the cotton-wool, much as it came from the pod, to that which wound it in bobbins--a hard and firm cotton-yarn. It was he who made each thing dovetail into the other, who worked out the one perfect, harmonious whole. His, too, was the strong mind that trained men and boys--never before used to machinery--to its irksomeness, its regularity, its exactitude, taking them from idle, desultory lives, it might be, and accustoming them to system and discipline. In the old days the slow sale of the yarn and the stupidity of workmen had sometimes almost daunted him, but these days were past.

And how the man worked!--with a quick, all-grasping mind. It was the boy over again in his underground cellar, unwilling to be worsted in his "penny a shave," striking out the bold line of a halfpenny one. Riches from his machines--and even more from his mills--flowed in upon him. He was a man of no small account now. England had come to identify the name of Arkwright with an open door to a great source of wealth for the land. King George III. knighted him, and a year later he was made High Sheriff of Derbyshire. But still he went on working, managing, superintending his mills and his machinery--leading a life of sacrifice. As he had done when a boy, so still as a man, he made the very most of his time, even grudging that spent on a journey, and generally travelling with four horses in order to overtake it quickly. He who had lived as a boy in an underground cellar, now occupied a magnificent mansion, and was a man of note in the county and in England. But we remember, and not without sadness, how for long in the midst of his hard work he was a victim to bodily suffering--subject to severe asthma--and how bravely and uncomplainingly he bore up and struggled on in spite of all! Now, already early--while he was but in his sixtieth year--he began to fail. Asthma was complicated with other disorders. There were, too, the strain and stress of a life of hard work, and these reached a climax while the great man was still in the zenith of his mental powers, and he passed away on the 3rd August, 1792.

Arkwright's name was now of world-wide fame. Hundreds and thousands of people, many of whom had come to see his first cotton-mill, crowded the rocks and roads about Cromford, and mingled with the long procession that bore the body of the great inventor to his last resting-place.

They erected a monument in the church of Cromford to his memory. But the name of Arkwright needs no carved memorial of stone. His memorial is of a more lasting kind, for it is he whom England has to thank to-day for an industry that has enriched the land. Not "proud Preston" alone--a small town at his birth, a mighty place of manufacture now--has Arkwright made to grow and flourish.

He was a man of "Napoleon nerve." Where other men saw but a short way ahead, he grasped the end from the beginning; where other minds saw merely a part, his eye was able to take in the whole. He may have gathered up some threads from other men's brains, but it was he who wove them into one great whole. He had a business faculty--he had shown it as a boy--that rose almost to the height of genius. And he believed in himself. He had great notions, great ambitions. Nothing was too big a project for him to attempt. And success was his--great success, as the world counts it. Immense riches, too, were his, for when he died he left behind him half a million. But to us that seems not of so much account as that that great mind of his was the first to grasp what was to put within their reach a source of riches and profit to thousands of working-people in England, and this in face of bitter opposition from the people themselves. He braved their jealousy, he held his own against their prejudices and attacks, and working often in bodily weakness and pain, but with persevering determination, he brought this boon to his country. With untiring courage and long, patient labour, he built up the splendid scheme that has turned out for us to be the Factory System of our country to-day.

JOSIAH WEDGWOOD.

When Josiah Wedgwood was born, some 170 years ago, I daresay the people of the little village of Burslem would have been greatly astonished had they been told that the humble potter's child was by-and-by to change the place, with its few straggling houses, into a flourishing town with thousands of inhabitants. And not this alone, but that he would make for himself such fame that his name should be a household word throughout Great Britain, and indeed throughout the world.

When Josiah came into the world there was already a small army of brothers and sisters awaiting him in the humble little house close by the churchyard of Burslem, for he was the youngest of thirteen.

Although then large towns and places near the sea were marching on with the progress of civilisation, little country places buried inland were shunted into a siding, as it were, and so were left far behind the great world. In this way the midland counties of England were a long time emerging from the darkness of the Middle Ages. Staffordshire, the county of pottery, lagged a long way behind in improvements. Its villages were straggling and dirty. Its houses little better than thatched hovels or mud huts. Heaps of waste and dirt and rubbish blocked their doorways. Broken ware was scattered everywhere. Hollows in the ground, where clay had been scooped out to make ware, gaped close to the doorways, and collected great pools of evil-smelling stagnant water.

Burslem was in something of this sorry state when Josiah Wedgwood opened his eyes on the world. The people of the village for the most part had been potters for upwards of 200 years. That is, they made pots and butter-dishes and porringers--for spoons and plates were still of wood--out of the clay of which their soil was made; not fine and polished and gleaming white, as we know them to-day, but rough-hewn things, for the trade of pottery was yet in its infancy.

A potter's work could be divided among one family. The father and sons made and fired the dishes. The mother and daughters strapped them on the backs of horses and donkeys, driving them along roads so wretched that the poor beasts often stuck in the mud or fell down in the ruts, while the women, with pipes in their mouths and rough words on their lips, urged them on with whip and lash.

It was this sort of life that lay before Josiah. But he had been born with a boy's best blessing--a good mother--a woman who had a heart large enough for thirteen children, and who tried what she could to hand down to them by example a birthright better than riches--to make them patient, industrious, dependent on self.

When the child was little more than a baby, and able only to toddle with uncertain step, he was sent to a dame's school, quite as much to be out of the way as to learn his A B C. For the rest he played about the door of the cottage, his greatest treat to bestride the pack-horse's back, hoisted up by some good-natured packman. When he was seven years old he was sent to school to a place called Newcastle-under-Lyme, some three and a half miles across the fields. In long days of sunshine the walk was full of pleasure to the boy, as he came to know Nature's beauties--her birds and flowers and sweet fragrances--as we best can know things, by close and loving intimacy. Long years afterwards, when he had reached the highest heights of his trade, it was the unforgotten faces of the wild flowers lurking in the fields between Newcastle and Burslem that rose before his mind's eye as he decorated his china services with coloured leaves and flowers.

When Josiah was nine years old his father died, and the mother was left to struggle with her thirteen as best she could. Nor do we find that she failed. She was a woman with a large, loving heart, that rarely quailed before stress or struggle. The old potter had not been able out of his hard-won earnings to leave to his children much--£20 when they reached the age of twenty-one.

"And so," as Josiah used to say long afterwards, "I began on the very lowest round of the ladder."

And now the child's scanty schooling had come to an end. He could write and he could read, and he knew something of the mysteries of arithmetic, but for the rest--that great storehouse of knowledge the world contained--he had to unlock the door of _that_ for himself, and he did it patiently, often in weariness and pain and suffering, as the years went on.

To his eldest son Thomas the father had left the pottery, and now it fell to him to act as father to the family. Josiah, as a matter of course, went into the business, beginning, I suppose, at the humble post of turning what was called "the potter's wheel."

This was a wheel with a strap round it attached to a disc that revolved horizontally and beside which sat a man called "a thrower," shaping with his fingers and hands the moist clay that was to form a bowl or plate or whatever vessel was to be made, copying a pattern in front of him.

The boy worked steadily, but hardly had he reached the stage of "thrower," hardly had people noted and admired the wonderful deftness with which the boyish hands moulded and shaped the clay, when a cloud descended and settled on his life--a cloud that, though he struggled bravely against its depression all through life, never entirely lifted.

The terrible epidemic of small-pox visited Burslem, and the Wedgwood family, living as they did on the edge of the churchyard, were among the first to take it, the youngest so badly that his life was despaired of. However, after long struggle, they pulled him through; but the disease left behind it a knee which gave him hours and days of excruciating pain, and seemed almost as if it would blight his whole life and ruin his career. Every remedy was tried, in vain. At first when he rose in bed, weak and unstrung, he fell back again. When later he began to stand it was with weariness and pain. But the dark cloud had, though all unseen at first, a silver lining. Out of what looked a great calamity there sprang good. The boy when he crawled back to work was no longer fit for the "thrower's" bench. The position he had now to take--with his leg stretched out in front of him--cramped and impeded him. No longer active and able-bodied, he was thrown, as it were, in upon himself, and so took to thinking--not in a gloomy, despondent way, but thinking how best he could improve himself, how best he could succeed in that calling that from the very outset held a charm for him and all through life lay very near to his heart.

At the age of fourteen Josiah was formally bound apprentice to his brother. Here is the form. The quaint words sound ceremonious--almost solemn. The writing provided that he was--

"To learn the Art, Mystery, Occupation or Imployment of throwing and handling which he, the said Thomas Wedgwood, now useth, and with him as an apprentice to dwell, continue and serve."

An apprentice in those days at the pottery works was allowed "his meat, drink, washing and lodging, with suitable apparel of all kinds, both linen and woollen and all other necessaries, both in sickness and in health."

In return the master "was to teach or cause to be taught the art of throwing and handling."

How poor these potters were, and how poorly they paid their apprentices, may be gathered from this:

For the first three years he got 1_s._ a week, for the second three years he got 1_s._ 6_d._ a week, and for the seventh and last 4_s._ a week. Besides this he got, once a year, a pair of shoes. At the end of his apprenticeship, if he chose, he got 5_s._ a week for five years. It was a dreary enough outlook for an eager, ambitious boy anxious to make his way in the world.

But boy though he was, the difficulty of getting on--pain, weakness--none of these obstacles were allowed to overcome Josiah. Then even at that early age he showed the germs of that perseverance that stood out so strongly by-and-by in the character of the man.