Part 12 (1/2)
Having thus noticed the leading processes of the manufacture of cotton, of wool, of silk, of linen, we may conclude this chapter with a brief mention of the art that gives to many of the fabrics produced their chief beauty--the art of printing cloth in colours. This art applies to the finest as well as the commonest productions of the loom; and the science of the British dyer, the beauty of his patterns, and the perfection of his machinery, have now given us an eminence in this department of industry which can only be preserved by constant efforts towards perfection of design and durable brilliancy of colour.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Indigo-harvest in West Indies.]
There is a striking, although natural parallel, between printing a piece of cloth and printing a sheet of a book, or a newspaper. Block-printing is the impress of the pattern by hand; as block-books were made four centuries ago. We have no block-books now; for machinery has banished that tedious process. But block-printing is used for costly shawls and velvets, which require to have many colours produced by repeated impress from a large number of blocks, each carrying a different colour. Except for expensive fabrics, this mode is superseded by block-printing with a sort of press, in which several blocks are set in a frame. Here again is somewhat of a similarity to the operation of the book-press. Lastly, we have cylinder-printing, resembling the rapid working of the book-printing machine, each producing the same cheapness. As the pattern has to be obtained from several cylinders, each having its own colour, there is great nicety in the operation; and the most beautiful mechanism is necessary for feeding the cylinder with colour; moving the cloth to meet the revolving cylinder; and giving to the cylinder its power of impression. But those who witness the operation see little of the ultimate effect to be obtained in the subsequent processes of dyeing.
Fast colours are produced by the use in the pattern of substances called mordants; which may be colourless themselves but receive the colour of the dye-bath, which colour is only fixed in the parts touched by the mordant, and is washed out from the parts not touched. When what is called a substantive colour is at once impressed upon the white cloth, much of the beauty is also derived from subsequent processes. The chemist, the machinist, the designer, and the engraver--science and art--set the calico-printing works in activity; and the carrying on these complicated processes can only be profitably done upon a large scale. In the earlier days of our cotton manufacture there were small print-works in the neighbourhood of London, where the imperfect machinery was turned by water-power. The steam-engine of one Lancas.h.i.+re factory now produces more printed cottons and muslins than all the rivers of southern England in the last century. The calico-printers now number about twenty-seven thousand persons. But no direct enumeration can be made of the employments that are required merely to produce the dyes with which the calico-printer works. The mineral and vegetable kingdoms, and even the animal kingdom, combine their natural productions in the colours of a lady's dress. The sulphur-miner of Sicily, the salt-worker of Ches.h.i.+re, the hewer of wood in the Brazils, the Negro in the indigo plantations of the East and West Indies, the cultivator of madder in France, and the gatherer of the cochineal insect in Mexico, are all labourers for the print-works of England and Scotland. The discoveries of science, in combination with the experience of practice, has set all this industry in motion, and has given a value to innumerable productions of nature which would otherwise be useless and unemployed. But these demands of manufactures do more--they create modes of cultivation which are important sources of national prosperity. Jean Althen, a Persian of great family, bred up in every luxury, became a slave in Anatolia, when Kouli-Khan overthrew the Persian empire. For fourteen years he worked in the cotton and madder-fields. He then escaped to France, carrying with him some madder-seeds. Long did he labour in vain to attract the attention of the government of Louis XV.
to his plans. At length, having spent all the fortune which he had acquired by marriage with a French heiress, he obtained the patronage of the Marquis de Caumont, in his attempts to introduce the cultivation of madder into the department of Vaucluse. His life was closing in comparative indigence when a new branch of industry was developed in his adopted country. The district in which he created a new industry has increased a hundred-fold in value. The debt of grat.i.tude was paid by a tablet to his memory, erected sixty years after he was insensible to human rewards. We starve our benefactors when they are living; and satisfy our consciences by votive monuments. Althen's daughter died as poor as her father. The tablet was erected at Avignon when the family was extinct.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Calico-printing by Cylinder.]
There is a process connected with the production of clothing which we must briefly refer to, as one of the signal examples of the axiom of our t.i.tle--'Knowledge is Power.'
Let us suppose that chemistry had not discovered and organised the modes in which bleaching is performed; and that the thousands of millions of yards of calico and linen which we weave in this country had still to be bleached, as bleaching was accomplished in the last century. We knew nothing about the matter, and our linen was then sent over to Holland to go through this operation. The Dutch steeped the bundles of cloth in ley made by water poured upon wood ashes--then soaked them in b.u.t.termilk--and finally spread them upon the gra.s.s for several months.
These were all natural agencies which discharged the colouring matter without any chemical science. It was at length found out that sulphuric acid would do the same work in one day which the b.u.t.termilk did in six weeks; but the sun and the air had still to be the chief bleaching powers. A French chemist then found out that a new gas, chlorine, would supersede the necessity for spreading out the linen for several months; and so the acres of bleaching ground which we were using in England and Scotland--for we had left off sending the brown and yellow cloth to Holland--were free for cultivation. But the chlorine was poisonous to the workmen, and imparted a filthy odour to the cloth. Chemistry again went to work, and finally obtained the chloride of lime, which is the universal bleaching powder of modern manufactures. What used to be the work of eight months is now accomplished in an hour or two; and so a bag of dingy raw cotton may be in New York on the first day of the month, and be converted into the whitest calico before the month is at an end.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Bleaching-ground at Glasgow.]
[23] Blount's 'Ancient Tenures,' ed. 1784, p. 183.
CHAPTER XVIII.
Hosiery manufacture--The stocking-frame--The circular hosiery-machine--Hats--Gloves--Boots and shoes-- Straw-plait--Artificial flowers--Fans--Lace--Bobbin-net machine--Pins--Needles--b.u.t.tons--Toys--Lucifer-matches-- Envelopes.
Before the invention of the first stocking-machine, in the year 1589, by William Lee, a clergyman, none but the very rich wore stockings, and many of the most wealthy went without stockings at all, that part of dress being sewn together by the tailor, or their legs being covered with bandages of cloth. The covering for the leg was called a ”nether-stock,” or lower stocking. Philip Stubbes, a tremendous declaimer against every species of luxury, thus describes the expensive stockings of his time, 1585:--
”Then have they nether-stocks to these hosen, not of cloth (though never so fine), for that is thought too base, but of jarnsey, worsted, crewell, silk, thread, and such like, or else at the least of the finest yarn that can be got, and so curiously knit with open seam down the leg, with quirks and clocks about the ancles, and sometime, haply, interlaced with gold or silver threads, as is wonderful to behold. And to such impudent insolency and shameful outrage it is now grown, that every one, almost, though otherwise very poor, having scarce forty s.h.i.+llings of wages by the year, will not stick to have two or three pair of these silk nether-stocks, or else of the finest yarn that may be got, though the price of them be a ryall, or twenty s.h.i.+llings, or more, as commonly it is; for how can they be less, when as the very knitting of them is worth a n.o.ble or a ryall, and some much more? The time hath been when one might have clothed his body well for less than a pair of these nether-stocks will cost.”
It is difficult to understand how those who had only forty s.h.i.+llings a year wages could expend twenty s.h.i.+llings upon a pair of knit stockings.
It is quite clear they were for the rich only; and that very few persons were employed in knitting and embroidering stockings.
William Lee struggled to make stockings cheap. He made a pair of stockings by the frame, in the presence of King James I.; but such was the prejudice of those times, that he could get no encouragement for his invention. His invention was discountenanced, upon the plea that it would deprive the industrious poor of their subsistence. He went to France, where he met with no better success, and died at last of a broken heart. The great then _could_ discountenance an invention, because its application was limited to themselves. _They_ only wore stockings: the poor who made them had none to wear. Stockings were not cheap enough for the poor to wear, and therefore they went without. Of the millions of people now in this country, how few are without stockings! What a miserable exception to the comfort of the rest of the English people does it appear when we see a beggar in the streets without stockings! We consider such a person to be in the lowest stage of want and suffering. Two centuries ago, not one person in a thousand wore stockings;--one century ago, not one person in five hundred wore them;--now, not one person in a thousand is without them. Who made this great change in the condition of the people of England, and, indeed, of the people of almost all civilized countries? William Lee--who died at Paris of a broken heart. And why did he die of grief and penury? Because the people of his own days were too ignorant to accept the blessings he had prepared for them.
We ask with confidence, had the terror of the stocking-frame any real foundation? Were any people thrown out of employment by the stocking-frame?
”The knitters in the sun, And the free maids who weave their thread with bones,”
as Shakspere describes the country la.s.ses of his day, had to _change_ their employment; but there was far more employment for the makers of stockings, for then every one began to wear stockings.
The hosiery manufacture furnishes employment to many persons besides those who work at the stocking-machine. The frame-worker, in many cases, makes the knit-work in a piece adapted for a stocking, and does not make a finished stocking; the seamer makes the stocking out of the piece so produced. When we speak of the stocking-frame, we speak of a machine which knits every article of hosiery. In this manufacture there were employed, in 1851, sixty-five thousand five hundred persons, of whom thirty thousand were females.
Suppose that the ignorance and prejudice which prevailed at the time of James I. upon the subject of machinery had continued to the present day; and that not only the first stocking-frame of William Lee had never been used, but that all machines employed in the manufacture of hosiery had never been thought of; and they could not have been thought of if the first machines had been put down. The greater number of us, in that case, would have been without stockings.
But there would have been a greater evil than even this. We might all have found subst.i.tutes for stockings, or have gone without them. But the progress of ingenuity would have been stopped. The inventive principle would have been destroyed.
We have not reached the end of our career of improvement. Civilization is not destined to run a backward race. William Lee's stocking-frame worked well for two centuries and a half. One of the most beautiful contrivances of our time has now greatly superseded it. The circular hosiery machine--more properly called a machine for manufacturing ”looped fabrics”--works at such a rate that one girl attending upon the revolutions of this wonderful instrument can produce in one day the material for two hundred and forty pairs of stockings. She turns a little handle, with the ease with which she would turn a barrel-organ; and, as the machine revolves, hundreds of needles catch the thread and loop it into the chain which forms the stocking-cloth, or it makes the fas.h.i.+oned stocking. The new hosiery-machines have doubled the employment of the stocking-makers, by enabling us to meet the compet.i.tion of foreign countries. The English were working upon the old slow stocking-frame, while the French and Belgians were using the rapid circular machine. The markets of the world would have been soon closed to us if we had clung to the old machine, through the force of any popular prejudice against a new machine. There is no portion of the export trade of this country which has increased with such extraordinary rapidity within the last six years as that of hosiery. The following abstract of the declared value of stockings exported since 1848 will sufficiently indicate the effects of improved machinery in cheapening production:--
------------------------------------------------------------------------ Stockings exported.
1848. 1850. 1852. 1853.
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Cotton
77,095 104,434 243,994 461,494 Silk