“Yours of the third came safe, which I would have answered before but had not presence of mind enough for some time to lay it before my master; at length a favourable opportunity offering itself, my resolution got the better of my fear, and, after a short introduction gave him your letter which he said showed you to be a man of sense and he thought of honour and honesty; but as to himself he was so surprised, disconcerted and uneasy as I never saw him, and for some time would say nothing more to me. At length he became able to talk freely on that head, bid me consult my own happiness and not think what he suffered. He then offered to make me independent, that so after his death, I might live where I pleased, not at all intending that as a dissuasive from accepting your generous offer, but as a means to prevent my being influenced by any other motive than that alone which is essential to the most lasting, most perfect happiness.
“Such, such is the behaviour of this god-like man; may he meet all the reward that such beneficence deserves in both worlds.
“As to myself was I possessed of any desirable qualification, and had I enjoyed the greatest affluence, I should not then hesitate a moment, but comply with whatever you will desire; but my consciousness of my own inferiority in points of fortune as well as anything else, makes me extremely fearful that you should find cause to repent, when it is too late; if this should be the case, what I must suffer from what in me is the least occasion of pain to you, is not for me to say; but be this as it will, you are and ever will be entitled to the best wishes of your most humble servant
“E. Woollat.
“My service to your father I wish I better deserved his good opinion.”
Many letters afterwards pass between the happy pair; but their course of true love runs very smoothly until all is made ready. At the beginning of September, we find Miss Woollatt coming down from London to Blackwell to be married. It would certainly have seemed more natural that she should be married from her father’s house, but that did not seem to be either possible or advisable under changed circumstances, as her father had married again, and the step-mother, as is often the case, seemed to stand rather in the way of the children being at home.
We now, therefore, see Jedediah Strutt happily settled at Blackwell, apparently ready to remain steadfast to farming, and married to the excellent and most industrious woman of his affections. It must have been, however, about the time his first child, William, was born, that a change came over the scene, and that Jedediah’s strong taste for mechanics obliged him to think of other things besides his farm.
His brother-in-law, William Woollatt, who had been assisting his father in the hosiery trade, and till the second marriage had been living at Findern, knowing Strutt’s bent for mechanics, desired his assistance in connection with an object which he had at heart, viz., the invention of a machine for making ribbed hose.
It will be best and most fitting here to give Mr. Felkin’s account of this invention.[132]
“Mr. William Woollatt was at that time, 1750, a hosier in Derby. His attention was directed to the question of how these ribbed hose could be made, and he brought under the special attention of his brother-in-law, Mr. Jedediah Strutt, who, though an agriculturist, had he knew been from his youth engaged in mechanical pursuits as an occupation of his mind and hands during his leisure time. The reference thus made proved to be a most successful one. The important results could not have been at first anticipated, nor even during the lifetime of Mr. Strutt were they fully understood. But they have been such as to have given him a just prominence amongst the inventors of that age, and to require the more extended personal account about to be given. The very simplicity of the plan he devised and of the mode of its application to the machine of Lee 170 years after its invention added to the fact that no historian of the trade wrote during the next fifty years preclude any very minute details of the obstacles he encountered. Such an account now would be very interesting, if it had been forthcoming. Great difficulties there must have been, for the constructive powers of mechanics in the stocking trade had not a hundred years ago been employed as they have been since; mainly as the effect of this effort of Strutt’s genius.... It was now that he, by Mr. Woollatt’s representations of the difficulty and importance of the matter then occupying the frame-work knitting world, was induced to make himself practically acquainted with the principles and the movements of a stocking frame; probably the most if not the only very complex machine he had ever seen; and this with the idea no doubt at first but a remote one of so dealing with it as to cause it to produce what had hitherto been thought to be beyond its powers. A clergyman had invented it, why should not a farmer increase its capacity for usefulness? After much labour, time, and expense, he succeeded admirably in this by making an addition to it, or rather placing in front of it so as to work in unison and harmony with it a distinct apparatus or machine; thus between them to produce the ribbed web of looped fabric; and not as popularly stated by finding out the defects of Lee’s frame and devoting himself to its improvement.
... The principle of Strutt’s Derby rib machine remains unaltered; its operation has been simplified, however, by its subordination to automatic movement, as will be at once seen on examination of power hosiery frames lately constructed.”