ONCE upon a time, a West Indian slave owner was in conversation with three master-spinners and they spoke of labor conditions in the North of England. “Well,” he said, “I have always thought myself disgraced by being the owner of slaves, but we never in the West Indies thought it possible for any human being to be so cruel as to require a child of nine years old to work twelve and a half hours a day, and that, you acknowledge, is your regular practice.”

That, and worse, was the early life of John Bradshaw, son of Reuben Hepplestall. Peter went into Reuben’s factory: he took the meatless bone Reuben contemptuously threw to a dog: he became an overlooker. Once he had been a fighter, when he was raising himself from the ranks into the position of a small factory owner: then contentment had come upon him and fighting power went out of him. Whom, indeed, should he fight? He was not encountering a man but a Thing, a System, which at its first onslaught seemed to crush the spirit of a people.

The later Hepplestalls looked back to Reuben, their founder, and saw him as a figure of romance. The romance of Lancashire is rather in the tremendous fact that its common people survived this System that came upon them from the unknown, that, so soon, they were hitting back at the Thing which stifled life. Capital, unaggravated, had been tolerable; capital, aggravated by steam, made the Factory System and the System was intolerable.

Reuben might have chosen to make exceptions of the Bradshaws, but he did not choose it. They had to be nothing to the husband of Dorothy Hepplestall, they had to go, with the rest, into the jaws of the System. So Peter lost his liberties and found nothing in the steam machines to parallel the easy-going familiarities between master and man which had humanized his primitive factory. A bell summoned him into the factory, and he left it when the engines stopped, which might be twelve and a half or might be fifteen hours later. He gave good work for bad pay and his prayer was that the worst might not happen. The worst was that Phoebe might be driven with him into the factory, and the worst beyond the worst was that Phoebe’s son might be driven with her. So he gave of his best and tried with a beaten man’s despair to hold off the worst results of the creeping ruin that came upon his home.

Reuben was guiltless of personal malignancy. He had decided that the Bradshaws must not be favorites, that they must do as others did, which was a judgment, not a spite, and Reuben did not control the system, but was controlled by it. He, like the Bradshaws, must do as others did. He could, of course, have got out: his difference from them was that he could abjure cotton. But he did not do that, and so long as he stayed in, a competitor with other manufacturers, he was obliged, if he would survive commercially, to use the methods of the rest. They may or may not have been methods that revolted him by their barbarity, and it is probable that, even in that callous age, what of the true gentleman was left in him was, in fact, revolted. That is, at least, to be deduced from the completely isolating veil he hung between Dorothy and the factory. His house was the old home of the Hepplestalls, near the factory but not, like many manufacturers’ houses, adjacent to it. It was sufficiently far away for him, practically, to live two lives which did not meet. He was a manufacturer and he was the husband of Dorothy’ Hepplestall; in the factory one man and at home another, not lying at home about steam because there he never spoke of it, preserving her romantic illusions about his work by keeping her remote from it. She might have had her curiosities, but she loved Reuben, she consented at his will to be incurious and the habit remained. It might have remained even if love had faded, but their love was not to fade. And the county took it that if Dorothy Verners had married a manufacturer, the factory was not to be mentioned before her. In the presence of ladies they did not mention it to Reuben, though, in the bad times, when the poor-rate rose and half the weavers came upon the parish, Reuben was roasted to his face with indignant heat after the ladies had left the table.

He was neither of the best nor of the worst. He was not patriarchal like the Strutts and the Gregs who, while conforming to the System, qualified it with school-houses and swimming baths, nor did he go to the extreme of ordering his people into the cottages he built and compelling them to pay rent for a cottage whether they occupied it or not. He didn’t run shops, charging high prices, at which his people had to buy or where they had to take goods in part payment of wages. Such devices, though general, seemed to him petty and extraneous to the factory; but in the factory he was a keen economist and one of the results of the System was that the masters looked on wages not as paid to individuals but to families. That was so much the normal view that a weaver was not allowed to go on the parish unless he proved that his wife and children worked in the mills and that the whole family wage was inadequate for their support.

Phoebe had to go and, when he was old enough, that is to say at five, John also went. The legal age for apprentices was seven—they were workhouse children bound to the master till they were twenty-one—but John was a “free” laborer, so, until the Act of 1819, which made nine years and twelve working hours the minimum, John was “free” to work at five, to be a breadwinner, to add his magnificent contribution to the family wage which kept the Bradshaws from the workhouse.

The factory bell was the leit motif of his life, but the Bradshaws had a relic of their past which made them envied. They had a clock, and the clock told them when it was time to get up to go to the factory. Others, clockless, got up long before they needed and waited in the chill of early morning, at five o’clock, for the door to open. The idea of ringing the bell as a warning half an hour before working hours began had not occurred to any one then, and people rose in panic and went out, cutting short sleep shorter, stamping in snow (or, if snow is sentimental, is it ever particularly joyous to rise, with a long day’s work ahead, at five and earlier?), waiting for the doors to let them in to warmth. No one was ever late. The fines made it expensive to be late, and the knocker-up, the man who went round and for a penny or tuppence a week rattled wires at the end of a clothes-prop against your bedroom window till you opened the window and sang out to him—the knocker-up was a late Victorian luxury. In John’s day, there was only the factory bell, and one was inside the factory when it rang. The bell was the symbol of the system, irritating the weavers especially, as the power-loom increased in efficiency, and drove more and more of them to the factories. The spinners, indeed, had had the interregnum of the water-factory: it was not, for them, a straight plunge into the tyranny of the system. The old hand-weaver, whose engine was his arms, began and stopped work at will, which is not to say that he was a lazy fellow, but is to say that he had time to grow potatoes in a garden, to take a share in country sports and, on the whole, to lead a reasonable life: and his wife had the art and the time to cook food for him. When she worked in the factory, she had no time to cook, and there was nothing to cook, either, and if she had worked from childhood, she had never learned how to cook, and there was no need. They lived on bread and cheese, with precious little cheese. They rarely lived to see forty.

John, son of Reuben (though he did not know that), came to the factory at five in the morning and left it, at earliest, at seven or eight at night, being the while in a temperature of 75 to 85. As to meal-times, why, adults got their half hour or so for breakfast and their hour for dinner and the machinery was stopped so that was just the time for the children to nip under and over it, snatching their food while they cleaned a machine from dust and flue. Bad for the lungs, perhaps, but the work was so light and easy. John, who was small when he was five, crawled under the machines picking up cotton waste.

There was a school of manufacturers who held, apparently without hypocrisy, that this was a charming way to educate an infant into habits of industry: a sort of work in play, with the cotton waste substituted for a ball and the factory for the nursery. And they called the work light and easy.

John was promoted to be a piecer—he pieced together threads broken in the spinning machines, and, of course, the machine as a whole didn’t stop while he did it, and it was really rather skilled work, done very rapidly with a few exquisitely skilled movements: and that was hardly work at all, it was more amusement than toil. Only one Fielden, an employer who, many years later, tried the experiment for himself, found that in following the to-and-fro movements of a spinning machine for twelve hours, he walked no less than twenty miles! Fielden was a reformer; he didn’t call this light and easy work for a child, but others did.

It would happen that—one knows how play tires a child—John would feel sleepy towards evening. He didn’t go to sleep on a working machine, or he would have died, and John did not die that way: he didn’t go to sleep at all. He was beaten into wakefulness. Peter often beat him into wakefulness, and Peter did it not because he was cruel to John but because he was kind. If Peter had not beaten him lightly, other overseers would have beaten him heavily, not with a ferule, but with a billy-roller, which is a heavy iron stick. John also beat himself and pinched himself and bit his tongue to keep awake. As the evening wore on it became almost impossible to keep awake on any terms: sometimes, they sang. Song is the expression of gladness, but that was not why they sang. And they sang—hymns. It would have been most improper to sing profane songs in a factory.

As to John’s home life, he went to bed: and if it hadn’t been for Phoebe or Peter who carried him, he would often not have reached bed. He would have gone to sleep in the road, and because he had never known any other life than this, it was reasonable in him to suppose that the life he led, if not right, was inevitable.

He did not suppose it for long. You can spring surprises on human nature, you can de-humanize it for a time, but if you put faith in the permanent enslavement of men and women, you shall find yourself mistaken. Even while John was passing from a wretched childhood to a wretched adolescence, the reaction was preparing, and mutely, hardly consciously at all, he was questioning if the things that were, were necessarily the things that had to be. There was the death of Peter, in the factory, stopping to live as a machine stops functioning because it is worn out, and there was the drop in their family wages, though John was earning man’s pay then. And there was the human stir in the world, the efforts of workers to combine for better conditions, for Trade Unions, for Reformed Parliaments, and the efforts of the ruling classes, qualified by the liberalism of a Peel or the insurgency of a Cobbett, to repress. There were riots, machine-breaking, factory-burning, Peterloo, the end of a great war, peace and disbanded soldiery, people who starved and a panic-stricken Home Secretary who thought there was a revolution.

Most of it mattered very little to John, growing up in Hepplestall’s factory, which escaped riot. It escaped not because its conditions were not terrible but because conditions were often more terrible. As employer, Reuben trod the middle way, and it was the extreme men, the brutes who seemed to glory in brutality, at whom riots were aimed. John knew that there were blacker hells than his, which was a sort of mitigation, while mere habit was another. If life has never been anything but miserable, than misery is life, and you make the best of it. One of the ways by which John expected to make the best of it was to marry. He married at seventeen, but when it is in the scheme of things to be senile at forty, seventeen is a mature age. The family wage was also in the scheme of things: the exploitation of children was the basis of the cotton trade: and though love laughs at economics as heartily as at locksmiths, marriage and child-bearing were not discouraged by misery, but encouraged by it. John did not think of these things, nor of himself and Annie as potential providers of child-slaves. He thought, illogically, of being happy.

And, considering Annie, not without excuse. She was of the few’ who stood up straight, untwisted by the factory, though it had caught her young and tamed her cruelly. There was gypsy blood in her. She, of a wandering tribe, had been taught “habits of industry,” and the lesson had been a rack which, still, had not broken her. It hadn’t quenched her light, though, within him, John had the fiercer fire. With him, the signs of the factory hand were hung out for all to see. Pale-faced and stunted, with a great shock of hair and weak, peering eyes, he was more like some underground creature than a man living by the grace of God and the light of the sun—he had lived so much of life by the artificial light of the factory in the long evenings and the winter mornings; but he had a kind of eagerness, a sort of Peeping Tom of a spirit refusing to be ordered off, and a suggestion of wiriness both of mind and body, which announced that here was one whose quality declined obliteration by the System.

Lovers had a consolation in those days. Bone-tired as the long work-hours left them, it was yet possible by a short walk to get out of the town that Hepplestall had made. These two were married, and a married woman had no manner of business to steal away from her house when the factory had finished with her for the day, but that was what Phoebe made Annie do. That was Phoebe’s tribute to youth, and a heavy tribute, too. She, like them, had labored all day in the factory and at night she labored in the home, sending them out to the moors as if they were careless lovers still—at their age! Phoebe kept her secret, and she had the sentiment of owing John reparation. It was not much that she could do, but she did this—growing old, toil-worn, she took the lion’s share of housework, she set them free, for an hour or so, to go upon the moors. And Annie was grateful more than John. Already, he was town-bred, already he craved for shelter, already the overheated factory seemed nature’s atmosphere to John.

She threw herself on the yielding heather, smelling it, and earth and air in ecstasy, then rolled on her back and looked at the stars. “Lad, lad,” she cried, “there’s good in life for all that.”

“Aye, wench,” he said, “there’s you.”

“Me? There’s bigger things than me. There’s air and sky and a world that is no beastly reek and walls and roofs.”

“It’s cold on the moor to-night,” he said, shivering.

She threw her shawl about him. “You’re clemmed,” she said, drawing him close to the generous warmth of her. “Seems to me I come to life under the stars. Food don’t matter greatly to me if there’s air as I can breathe.”

“We’re prisoned in yon factory, Annie. Reckon I’m used to the prison. There’s boggarts on the moor.”

She laughed at his fears. “Aye, you may laugh,” he said, “but there was a gallows up here, and boggarts of the hanged still roam.”

The belief in witches, ghosts and supernatural visitants of all kinds was a common one and it was not discouraged by educated people who hoped, probably, to reconcile the ignorant to the towns by allowing terrifying superstitions of the country to remain in circulation. But Annie’s gypsy strain kept her immune from any such fears: her ancestors had traded in superstition. “And,” he went on seriously, “when the Reformers tried to meet on Cronkey-shaw Moor, it’s a known fact that there were warlocks seen.” What was seen was a body of men grotesquely decked in the semblance of the popular notion of a wizard, with phosphorescent faces and so on. Somebody was using a better way to scotch Reform than soldiers, but the trick was soon exposed and meetings and drillings on the moors were phenomena of the time.

“You make too much o’ trouble o’ all sorts, John,” she said.

“I canna keep fro’ thinking, Annie,” he apologized. “I’m thinking now.”

“Aye, of old wives’ tales,” she mocked.

“No. I’m thinking of my grandfer and of Hepplestall’s factory.”

“I’m in the air,” she said. “That’s good enough for me.” She was slightly jealous of John, who had known his grandfather. Very soundly established people had known two grandfathers: John had known one, but Annie none. However, he was not to be prevented from speaking his thought.

“I’ve heard my grandfer tell o’ times that were easier than these. He had a factory o’ his own—what they called a factory them days. Baby to Hepplestall’s it were. I’ll show you its ruin down yonder by the stream some day. He’s dead now, is grandfer. Sounds wonder-ful to hear me talk of a grandfer wi’ a factory o’ his own.”

“Fine lot of good to thee now, my lad. I never had no grandfer that I heard on, but I don’t see that it makes any difference atween thee and me to-day.”

“I’m none boasting, Annie,” he said. “I’m nobbut looking back to the times that used to be. Summat’s come o’er life sin’ then, summat that’s like a great big cloud, on a summer’s day.”

“Well,” said Annie, “we’ve the factory. But there’s times like this when I’ve my arms full of you and my head full of the smell of heather. And there’s times like mischief-neet”—that is, the night of the first of May—“and th’ Bush-Bearing in August. I like th’ Wakes, lad... oh, and lots of times that aren’t all factory. There’s Easter and Whitsun and Christmas.” There were: there were these survivals of a more jocund age, honored still, if by curtailed celebrations. The trouble was that the curtailments were too severe, that neither of cakes nor ale, neither of bread nor circuses was there sufficient offset against the grinding hardships of the factories. Both John and Annie had so recently emerged from the status of child-slavery that the larger life of adults might well have seemed freedom enough; to Annie, aided by Phoebe’s sacrifice, to Annie, living more physically than John, to Annie, who rarely looked beyond one short respite unless it was to the next, the present seemed not amiss. Except the life of the roads and the heaths, to which she saw no possibility of return, from which the factory had weaned her, she had no traditions, while he had Peter Bradshaw for tradition. He had slipped down the ladder, and there was resentment, usually dormant, of the fact that he saw no chance to climb again.

“Things are,” was her philosophy. “I’m none in factory now, and I’m none fretting about factory and you’d do best to hold your hush about your grandfer, John. His’n weren’t a gradely factory.”

That was it. She accepted Hepplestall’s, while John accepted the habit of Hepplestall’s, dully, subterraneously resenting it. She almost took a pride in the size of Hepplestall’s. “And,” she said, good Methodist as she was, “there’s a better life to come.”

He had no reply to make to that. The Methodist was the working class religion, as opposed to the Church of the upper classes and, at first, the rulers had seen danger in it, and in an unholy alliance of Methodism with Reform. There was something, but not a great deal in their fear. There was the fact, for instance, that in the Methodist Sunday Schools reading and writing were taught. “The modern Methodists,” says Bamford in his ‘Early Days,’ “may boast of this feat as their especial work. The church party never undertook to instruct in writing on Sundays.” That far, but not much farther, the Methodists stood for enlightenment. Cobbett gave them no credit at all. He said, in 1824, “the bitterest foes of freedom in England have been, and are, the Methodists.” Annie had “got religion”: the sufferings and the hardships of this life were mere preparations for radiant happiness to come, and a religion of this sort was not for citizens but for saints; it gave no battle to the Devil, Steam.

John stirred uncomfortably in her arms. He had an aching sense of wrong, beyond expression and beyond relief. If he tried to express it, his fumbling words were countered by her opportunism and, in the last resort, by her religion. Things were, and there was nothing to be done about them.