[7] Cf. a report of a workhouse in 1701 (catalogued as 816. m. 15. 48 in the Brit. Mus. Library), where ten poor women were employed to teach the children to spin.
[8] Tour in East of England, vol. ii. pp. 75, 81. I am indebted to Mrs. C. M. Wilson for drawing my attention to these passages and for suggesting the remarks immediately following.
[9] Defoe in his Plan of English Commerce says that after the great plague in France and the peace in Spain the run for goods was so great in England, and the prices so high that poor women in Essex could earn 1s. or 1s. 6d. a day by spinning, and the farmers could hardly get dairymaids. This was, however, only for a time; demand slackened, and the spinners were reduced to misery.
[10] James, History of Worsted, p. 289. This pleasant custom may remind us of lines in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, i. 4:
“The spinsters and the knitters in the sun
And the free maids that weave their thread with bones.”
[11] Philip Gaskell, who was, however, so prejudiced against the factory system that his views must be taken with caution, says that the wives of manufacturers who had risen from poverty to affluence were “an epitome of everything that is odious in manners,” their only redeeming point being a profuse hospitality, which however, Grant attributes to “a sense of vain-glory.”—Manufacturing Population, p. 60.
[12] Growth of English Industry and Commerce, Modern Times, p. 654 (ed. 1907).
[13] History of Cotton Manufacture, p. 446.
[14] Factory Inspector’s Report dated August 1835, quoted in Fielden’s Curse of the Factory System, 1836, p. 43.
[15] Country round Manchester, p. 192. Compare Mrs. Gaskell’s descriptions in Mary Barton, fifty years later, for a very similar account.