On Cotton Manufacturing

"Cotton is that creative, vivifying, radiating power from which emanate the suns and stars and comets, the life and light and being of Manchester..."
(Wheeler's Manchester Chronicle, 5 October 1833.)

"Whilst the engine runs, the people must work - men, women and children yoked together with iron and steam The animal machine...is chained fast to the iron machine."
(J.P. Kay c1835)

"The Iron Man sprung out of the hands of our modern Prometheus at the bidding of Minerva".
(Andrew Ure on Richard Roberts' self-acting mule, 1824)

"Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it...the Mechanical Age."
(Thomas Carlyle, Sign of the Times, 1829)

On Manchester and suburbs
"...[Manchester] this famous great factory town. Dark and smoky from the coal vapours, it resembles a huge forge or workshop. Work, profit and greed seem to be the only thoughts here. The clatter of the cotton mills and the looms can be heard everywhere..."
(Schopenhauer, Johanna Sammtliche Schriften. Frankfurt, 1830)

"The Age of Ruins is past. Have you seen Manchester? Manchester is as great a human exploit as Athens."
(Benjamin Disraeli in his novel Coningsby published c 1887)

"Manchester...has a stout heart, an independent heart, unbroken...I am proud of it"
(David Lloyd George, 1939)

"...Manchester seemed like the Garden of Eden..."
(Jewish refugee in World War II 1939-1945)

"...on the left side of the Medlock lies Hulme which...is one great working people's district...[and]southward from Great Ancoats Street lies a great straggling working men's quarter...occupied by...rows of houses or squares..."
(Engels, Friedrich. Condition of the Working Class in England. 1845)

"The knight he rode east, t'wards the uprising sun, but the broad heaths of Moston [Manchester] lay silent and dun..."
(Bamford, Samuel. The Wild Rider of Lancashire. c1840)

On food
"Salt butter is moulded into the form of pounds of fresh butter, and cased over with fresh. In other instances a pound of fresh is conspicuously placed to be tasted; but that pound is not sold; and in other instances salt butter, washed is moulded and sold as fresh...pounded rice and other cheap materials are mixed in sugar, and sold at full monopoly price. A chemical substance...the refuse of the soap manufactories...is also mixed with other substances and sold as sugar...chicory is mixed in good coffee. Chicory, or some similarly cheap substance, is skilfully moulded into the form of the coffee berry, and it is mixed with the bulk very liberally...cocoa is extensively adulterated with fine brown earth, wrought up with mutton fat, so as to amalgamate with portions of the real article...the leaves of tea are mingled with sloe levies and other abominations. Used leaves are also re-dried, and re-coloured on hot copper plates, and sold as tea. Pepper is adulterated with dust from husks etc; port wine is altogether manufactured (from spirits, dyes etc.), it being notorious that more port wine is drunk in this country than is made in Portugal. Nasty things of all sorts are mixed with weed tobacco in all its manufactured forms."
(Liverpool Mercury quoted in Engels, Friedrich. Condition of the Working Class in England. 1845)

On working in the cotton mills
"...everything in the factory...happens with admirable precision and neatness and at the same time with great speed...it seemed...as if all these wheels were...really alive and the people occupied with them were machines..."
(Schopenhauer, Johanna Sammtliche Schriften. Frankfurt, 1830)

"A thick black smoke covers the city. The sun appears like a disc without any rays. In this semi-daylight 300,000 people work ceaselessly. A thousand noises rise amidst this unending damp and dark labyrinth...the footsteps of a busy crowd, the crunching wheels of machines, the shriek of steam from the boilers, the regular beat of looms, the heavy rumble of carts, these are the only noises from which you can never escape in these dark half-lit streets..."
(De Toqueville, Alexis. Oeuvres Completes. 1835)

"Who should not rejoice at a return to the simple ways of work which allowed people to be healthy, happy and contented?"
(The Union & Co-operative Intelligencer, March 17th 1832)

On working women
"We visited one of the biggest cotton mills. A steam engine in the basement powers almost all the innumerable wheels and spindles which are fitted on many floors built one above the other like a tower...in all of them we saw some women knotting together the yarns which rarely tore off from the constantly turning spindles, putting nappies on children and winding the yarn which had been spun. In one hall the still unspun cotton was cleaned; it lay on large tables in big square pieces looking like cotton wool; a number of women and girls armed with a thin stick in each hand were happily thrashing it..."
(Schopenhauer, Johanna Sammtliche Schriften. Frankfurt, 1830)

On working children
"The guide remarked 'that...poor children are a burden to their parents and to the parish...here [in a cotton mill] they get their bread almost as soon as they can run about, and by the time they are seven or eight years old bring in money...they come at five in the morning; we allow them half an hour for breakfast, and an hour for dinner; they leave work at six, and another set relieves them for the night; the wheels never stand still...' I was looking, while he spoke, at the unnatural dexterity with which the fingers of these little creatures were playing in the machinery, half giddy myself with the noise and the endless motion; and...I thought that if Dante had peopled one of his hells with children, here was a scene worthy to have supplied him with new images of torment..."
(Southey, Robert. Letters from England. Spain, 1808)


GG