The Factory System in the Yorkshire Woollen Industry

Abstract

The new factories, with their massive wheels churning in the mill-race and their great chimneys towering over the landscape, together provided probably the most potent symbol of the energies of the new industrial order. When Sir George Head visited Leeds in 1835, for example, he made a point of climbing up into one of the engine-houses of a woollen factory, where he found ‘the harmony of the movements of the engine altogether was so perfect, and free from friction, the brilliancy of the polish bestowed on so many of its parts so lustrous, and the care and attention paid to the whole so apparent, that imagination might readily have transformed the edifice to a temple, dedicated by man, grateful for the stupendous power that moved within, to Him who built the universe’. 1 Not everyone had such a vivid imagination, however, and when William Dodd — an old factory-hand — visited the city some five or six years later, he was struck by ‘the many marks by which a manufacturing town may always be known, viz., the wretched, stunted, decrepit and, frequently, the mutilated appearance of the broken-down labourers, who are generally to be seen in the dirty, disagreeable streets; the swarms of meanly-clad women and children, and the dingy, smokey, wretched-looking dwellings of the poor.’

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 59 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.