Because the Industrial Revolution profoundly influenced the social and political life of England, and later of the whole world, the history of the factory, which contributed so much to its influence, becomes of vast importance. The first chapter relates to brilliant achievements in the field of mechanical invention. Then follows the dismal story of how a multitude of craftsmen were transformed into factory operatives—the untold suffering of oppressed workingmen. Later we see the English yeoman replaced by the master manufacturer who soon became a force in the political life of the nation, finding his way into Parliament and even into the Peerage. For the common people the revolution began with great suffering, but ended in opening new avenues for their social and political advancement. Antagonistic in the beginning to the welfare of the masses, it aided powerfully, in the end, the fulfillment of those ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity which at that moment had taken such a mighty hold upon the thoughts of men.
II
SIR RICHARD ARKWRIGHT
The Shaving of Shagpat, that remarkable allegory with the writing of which George Meredith commenced his literary career, has been given several interpretations; without seriously venturing another, it has seemed to me that this fanciful story deals with the chief events in the Industrial Revolution.
“So there was feasting in the hall and in the city, and over earth”: we read towards the end of the tale, “great pledging the sovereign of Barbers, who had mastered an event and become the benefactor of his craft and of his kind. ’Tis sure the race of Bagarags endured for many centuries, and his seed were the rulers of men, and the seal of their empire stamped on mighty wax the Tackle of Barbers.”
Shibli Bagarag,—could he not well have been Richard Arkwright, the barber, inventor of the spinning-frame, master of an event? In Shagpat the Clothier, we discover the smug and comfortable British aristocracy; in the Identical, that magic hair in Shagpat’s beard which gave him a position of power greater even than the King, we observe Feudal Privilege; the sword of Aklis, with the steel of which the Identical was cut, may well stand for the factory, a weapon gained after many trials by Arkwright, so that of him it might be written as it was of Shibli Bagarag: “Thou, even thou will be master of the event, so named in anecdotes, and histories, and records, to all succeeding generations.”
Richard Arkwright, who first saw the light of day at Preston on the 23d of December, 1732, was the youngest of thirteen children born to humble parents, and he grew to manhood without education, being barely able to read and write. At an early age he was apprenticed to a Preston barber and when he became a journeyman he established himself in the same business.
Fate was in a jesting mood when she decreed that the chief actor in that remarkable social drama, the Industrial Revolution, should be a penny barber; and we may wonder if the governing classes appreciated the irony, when twenty years later, in recognition of his genius, the barber was raised to the honor of knighthood and his lady privileged to walk before the wives of the untitled gentry.
Richard Arkwright, at the age of twenty-eight, was not content day after day to shave the stolid faces of lower class Englishmen, but, having gained a knowledge of a chemical process for dyeing human hair, he commenced to make wigs for upper class Englishmen—wigs dyed to suit any complexion. This occupation took him away from the barber’s chair and sent him traveling about the country. On such a tour in 1761, he met a lady in the city of Leigh,—Margaret Biggins was her name,—and he married her; and in the same city at a somewhat later date he heard of certain experiments which had been made by a man named High in constructing a machine for spinning yarn. He gained this secret from a clock-maker named Kay, with whom he afterwards formed a partnership, by getting Kay—so the gossips said—loquaciously drunk at a public-house. Concerning his wife, history has little to say except that she quarreled with him because of the interest he took in High’s machine; and commencing to make experiments on his own account he became so absorbed in his workshop that his lady, fearing that they might be thrown upon the parish for support, begged him to return to his razor, and because he refused smashed the first model of the spinning-machine and thus precipitated a tremendous family row.
Arkwright is commonly credited with the invention of spinning by rollers, but while to him is undoubtedly due the success of that invention he did not originate it. The inventor of that ingenious process was neither Arkwright nor High, but John Wyatt of Birmingham, who in 1738 took out a patent in the name of Lewis Paul. In 1741 or 1742 these two men set up in Birmingham a mill “turned by two asses walking around an axis,” and in which ten girls were employed; while later a larger mill containing two hundred and fifty spindles and giving employment to twenty-five operatives was built. Wyatt wrote a pamphlet entitled, A Systematic Essay on the Business of Spinning, in which he showed the great profits which would attend the establishment of a plant of three hundred spindles. Wyatt’s factory, however, did not prosper and it seems probable that his machinery also passed into the hands of Arkwright.
It was in the year 1767 that Hargreaves invented the spinning-jenny, and two years later Arkwright took out his patent claiming that he had “by great study and long application invented a new piece of machinery, never before found out, practiced or used, for the making of weft or yarn from cotton, flax, and wool; which would be of great utility to a great many manufacturers, as well as to His Majesty’s subjects in general, by employing a great number of poor people in working the said machinery and in making the said weft or yarn much superior in quality to any heretofore manufactured or made.” However lacking in originality this famous invention may have been, however great may have been the debt which Arkwright owed to Wyatt and Paul, to John Kay and to High, nevertheless, to him belongs all the credit of the first successful introduction of spinning by machinery.