Abodes of men irregularly massed
Like trees in forests—spread through spacious tracts,
O’er which the smoke of unremitting fires
Hangs permanent, and plentiful as wreaths
Of vapor glittering in the morning sun.”
Thus Wordsworth in The Excursion describes the rise of the manufacturing towns.
Our first concern is with the social conditions existing in these great manufacturing cities. The factory system was first applied to the spinning of yarn; but weaving continued, for a time, as a handicraft. This period was one of great prosperity to the hand-loom weavers. Before the invention of spinning-machinery, several spinners were required to furnish one loom with yarn; and one half of the weaver’s time was spent in waiting for work. This time was employed in farming. But with the establishment of the spinning-mills the situation was reversed, and the weaver, plentifully supplied with yarn, ceased to cultivate the soil and devoted his whole time to the loom, a far more profitable occupation.
Villages of hand-loom weavers sprang up throughout the country adjacent to the manufacturing towns, and hither the master spinners sent their yarn and received back the finished cloth; while sometimes the weaving was done in “dandy” shops containing eight or ten and often as many as twenty looms. These little factories were usually owned by a single weaver who hired others to assist him in his work; but whatever the method, the profits from the business were always great.
“One of the happiest sights in Lancashire life at this time,” writes a contemporary historian, “was the home of a family of weavers.... There could be heard the merry song to the tune of the clacking shuttles and the bumping of the lathes; the cottage surrounded with a garden filled with flowers and situated in the midst of green fields where the larks sang and the throstles whistled their morning adoration to the rising sun. The weaving thus carried on at home, where several persons of the same family and apprentices were employed, made them prosperous small manufacturers and a proud lot of people.” This was about 1800.
“The trade of muslin weaver,” says a Bolton manufacturer of the same period, “was that of a gentleman. The weavers brought home their work in top boots and ruffled shirts; they had a cane and took a coach in some instances, and appeared as well as military officers of the first degree. They used to walk about the streets with a five-pound Bank of England note spread out under their hat-bands; they would smoke none but long churchwarden pipes, and objected to the intrusion of any other craftsman into the particular rooms of the public-houses which they frequented.” This abnormal prosperity, however, preceded their downfall. Two events were preparing it,—the invention of the power loom and the application of steam power to all the processes of manufacture.