Lancashire Mills Research Articles

“Like the incense of a bad heart”: The Ethics of Industry in Sophia Hawthorne's and Margaret Fuller's English Travelogues

Margaret Fuller and Sophia Hawthorne aren't often associated with the mid-nineteenth-century debates surrounding transatlantic factory and labor reform, yet both women begin their European travelogues with visits to English textile mills. In her first New-York Daily Tribune dispatch in August 1846, Fuller introduces her readers to an increasingly volatile Europe through a brief discussion of textile mill workers in Manchester and Liverpool. Over two decades later, Hawthorne's 1869 Notes in England and Italy similarly begins with her 1853 visit to a "very ugly" Lancashire mill town that is noticeably absent of workers yet leaves her haunted by the "cost" of industrialization (7-8). These moments are anomalous in both Fuller's and Hawthorne's narratives, yet they are also rare points of commonality in the two projects, which are divergent in many crucial ways. For even as Fuller's work for the Tribune traces her increasingly revolutionary politics, her more frequently discussed dispatches from Risorgimento Italy do not dwell on the effects of industrialization. (1) In contrast, Hawthorne's Notes focuses on ekphrastic descriptions of famous architectural landmarks and Italian masterworks; amid her accounts of museums and churches and interpretations of famous paintings and sculptures, social commentary is rare. (2) While it is important to note the similarities and differences between their texts, I use the women's introductory--and brief--references to English factories and factory workers as a way to think about the larger mid-century, transatlantic conversations surrounding industrialization and ethical labor. (3) Fuller's and Hawthorne's travels may be filled with visits to famous literary and cultural sites, but their (at least partial) "pleasure tours," to borrow William Stowe's term, are all the more striking by beginning in the un-aesthetically pleasing industrial centers of northern England with serious discussions of education and reform (103). Fuller's and Hawthorne's seemingly elliptical descriptions of the mills point to a larger cultural touchstone: they are commentaries on how the increasing pervasiveness of industrialization in the nineteenth century also raises questions about doing fulfilling work and leading meaningful lives. By beginning their respective journeys--and their accounts of those journeys--with these visits, Fuller and Hawthorne reveal how factories and the cloth they produce affect individuals regardless of class, gender, race, and nationality. Moreover, as women visiting northern England, then the industrial center of the Western world, Fuller and Hawthorne call attention to the often invisible labor done, in large part, by women. For if, as Annamaria Elsden suggests, Hawthorne understands her writing as "a way to 'copy' what she sees on her travels and transmit it to readers at home," then perhaps we can understand both Fuller's first dispatch and Hawthorne's Notes as confronting an individual's culpability for the working conditions of the factory operatives--even when physically removed from sites of industrialization and production (74). Ultimately, each woman positions her reflections on her tour as a way to establish common ground with her imagined readers, underscoring the wide-reaching impact of the international textile trade, the growth of factories, and the passage of laws protecting humane working conditions. In fact, Fuller and Hawthorne use their anomalous opening passages as oblique appeals to the middle-class reader--especially the middleclass, American woman reader--urging her to understand how she, too, is affected by these conditions overseas and, in turn, to support industrial reform on both sides of the Atlantic. I explore how Fuller's and Hawthorne's travel narratives are part of a larger mid-century print culture concerned with the transnational textile industry. I first outline Fuller's and Hawthorne's representations of their factory visits and how they pointedly obscure different parts of the industrial landscape: factories for Fuller and people for Hawthorne. …

An epidemiological study of respiratory symptoms in Lancashire mills, 1963-66.

Molyneux, M. K. B., and Tombleson, J. B. L. (1970). Brit. J. industr. Med., 27, 225-234. An epidemiological study of respiratory symptoms in Lancashire Mills, 1963-66. An epidemiological study of card and blowroom workers in 14 cotton spinning and two man-made fibre spinning mills in Lancashire has been carried out on a prospective basis of six-monthly examinations over three years. The number of operatives to be included was decided so as to give a sufficient sample for the statistical assessment of fall in FEV, at the same time allowing for population movement. The examination of each worker included a history, a questionnaire of respiratory symptoms, and a measurement of forced expiratory volume in one second. The results in this paper, which will be followed by others on other aspects of the survey, give the prevalence of both byssinosis and bronchitis, according to the definition given, in the 1 359 cotton workers and 227 man-made fibre workers, seen at least once, and also the dust levels in the mills. Eight of the mills processed coarse and six medium cotton. The total prevalence of byssinosis, as defined, is 26·9%, being higher in coarse than in medium cotton mills, and the occupational groups most affected are strippers and grinders, carders and undercarders, and draw frame tenters. In coarse mills symptoms develop in some men and women within the first four years of exposure, and in medium mills between five and ten years9 exposure. Repeat questionnaires in about half the population, two years after the first questionnaire, showed the development of symptoms of chest tightness in an appreciable number not previously affected. The incidence of bronchitis is increased in operatives with symptoms of byssinosis, but is influenced by age and smoking. Total dust levels averaged 3·1 mg/m 3 in coarse miles and 1·2 mg/m 3 in medium mills. The findings indicate that dust control measures, though they have produced considerable improvement, are not now fully effective with present methods of production.

David Fletcher

Tom Bradley has never lived in a house with a bathroom. Born and bred in the Lancashire mill town of Accrington, he lives in the two‐up and two‐down type of terraced house spawned in their thousands across the face of Northern England in the aftermath of the industrial revolution. The stone‐built house, one of the scores clustered round a former mill, now converted into a dairy, faces on to a cobbled road and footpaths paved with slabs of hewn granite rather than the smooth concrete rectangles familiar to southern city dwellers. There are no trees in sight, no lawns, flowers or shrubs, no front gardens. The house is only one room wide; there is no provision for either a bathroom or a lavatory and there is no running water to either of the two bedrooms. The only lavatory is in a shed at the bottom of the back yard. It has no running water so there is no means of flushing it other than by taking a bucket of water from the house. The smell, summer and winter, is appalling.

Discussion on "Rolling bearing applications" at the Manchester Section of the Institution

The double-row self-aligning roller bearing is also used for the largest rotary kiln in the world?in operation in this country. The load on the four pairs of supporting rollers is 480 tons. A Lancashire mill 500 h.p. steam engine had a spherical roller bearing fitted to the connecting-rod big-end in 1921. Prior to this, 1 1/2 gallons of oil per day were required for the plain bearing but after converting to roller bearings only 1 pint of oil per week was necessary. At the same time, speed was increased from 64 to 70 r.p.m. and occasionally the output was increased to 750 h.p. According to the latest information it is still functioning. Three thrust ball bearings 37 1/2 O.D. to take a load of 200 tons each at 30 r.p.m. were fitted to buffer-heading presses in Sheffield. After 25 years' continuous service they are still giving satisfaction.