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—Buttons—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 shillings 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 shillings, or more, as commonly it is; for how can they be less, when as the very knitting of them is worth a noble 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 shillings a year wages could expend twenty shillings 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?

as Shakspere describes the country lasses 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 substitutes 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 fashioned stocking. The new hosiery-machines have doubled the employment of the stocking-makers, by enabling us to meet the competition 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:—

The hosiery of Saxony was superseding, a few years ago, from its extreme cheapness, the shipment to the United States of goods made at Nottingham. The cheapness in Saxony was produced, not by the employment of large capital and the application of the most expensive machinery, but by the miserably low wages of labour. It is stated by Mr. Porter that, in 1837, a man of Saxony, with his wife and three children, working incessantly at the stocking-loom, could only earn 5s. 4d. weekly. In the principal manufacturing districts of that country, the food of the artisans is of the coarsest kind, and of the most limited supply. The comparative ease and comfort of the workers in our hosiery districts is one of the most satisfactory proofs that invention is as great a benefit to the labourer as to the capitalist.

As the nether-stocks of our ancestors were for the great and wealthy, so were their Hats. Old Stubbes writes, "Sometimes they use them sharp on the crown, pearking up like the spear or shaft of a steeple, standing a quarter of a yard above the crown of their heads, some more, some less, as please the phantasies of their inconstant minds. Other some be flat and broad on the crown, like the battlements of a house. Another sort have round crowns, sometimes with one kind of band, sometimes with another, now black, now white, now russet, now red, now green, now yellow, now this, now that, never content with one colour or fashion two days to an end. And thus in vanity they spend the Lord his treasure, consuming their golden years and silver days in wickedness and sin. And as the fashions be rare and strange, so is the stuff whereof their hats be made divers also; for some are of silk, some of velvet, some of taffeta, some of sarsenet, some of wool, and, which is more curious, some of a certain kind of fine hair; these they call beaver hats, of 20, 30, or 40 shillings price, fetched from beyond the seas, from whence a great sort of other vanities do come besides." Here, then, we see that the beaver hat was in those days an article of great price. The commonalty had their "plain statute caps" of wool. In our time the beaver hat was the common wear of the middle classes until the last few years, when the cheaper silk hat became almost universal. We import from France some plush for making hats; but much of this silk material is also prepared in our own factories. Hats have therefore become intimately associated with the material produced by the loom.

The manufacture of Gloves is connected, in a very large department, with the hosiery manufactory. The use of thread gloves and cotton gloves has had the effect, in some degree, of lessening the consumption of leather gloves. The importation of leather gloves and mitts was prohibited until 1825. We now import three million pairs annually; and the home manufacture, instead of being ruined as was predicted, was never more prosperous. The French gloves, once so superior to our own, have improved the English, by the natural force of competition; and the manufacturers not only purchase better leather than formerly, but the cottage-workwomen that labour in the glove districts have become neater and more careful sewers. The consumption of gloves has ceased to be exclusively for the rich. The perfumed and embroidered glove of the 16th century is no longer required. The use of gloves has become universal amongst both sexes of the middle classes. The female domestic would think it unbecoming to go to church without her gloves; and the well-dressed artisan holds it nothing effeminate to use a covering for his hands, which his forefathers thought a distinguishing appurtenance of the high-born and luxurious.

Our home-manufacture of Boots and Shoes has received an immense impulse from foreign competition. The number of men's and women's boots and shoes which we import is not much above two hundred thousand. But we also import six hundred thousand boot-fronts from France, which our own people work up. Although the boot and shoe manufacture can scarcely be considered a factory process, it has now adapted itself to certain localities, such as Northampton. The articles made in the provinces were originally distinguished for their cheapness merely. They now unite the characters of goodness and cheapness. This chiefly arises from the trade being carried on, at Northampton especially, upon a large scale—upon a principle the very reverse of the old familiar spectacle of the cobbler in his stall.

The Straw-plat is a domestic manufacture, chiefly carried on in the midland and eastern counties. It employs thirty-two thousand persons, of whom twenty-eight thousand are females. The straw hat and bonnet makers amount to twenty-two thousand, of whom more than twenty thousand are females. The art of straw-platting has been greatly improved amongst us of late years; but the Italian straw, being of a finer nature, is in greater demand for the higher priced bonnets.

The beautiful production of Artificial Flowers has, in very recent years, been much increased in England. France, with its superior taste, long supplied us with these ornaments, which had the brilliancy of natural flowers without their perishableness. But three thousand females, and five hundred males, are now engaged with us in this branch.

The Fan-makers of England are only thirty in number. In France this is a large branch of manufacture. In the Jury Report on the Exhibition of Industry in 1851 there is a notice of the fan-trade of Paris, which is curious as showing the joint influences upon cheapness, of machinery, and of the multiplication of works of art by engraving. The fan-makers of Paris in 1847 employed five hundred and seventy-five work-people—the number of the sexes being pretty equally divided. "The men were for the most part copper-plate engravers and printers, lithographic draughtsmen and printers, painters, and colourers; the women were mounters, illuminators, painters, colourers, and overlookers. In twenty years it appears that the produce in fans had increased in value nearly threefold, whilst the number of work-people had diminished one-half. This change is attributed to the employment of machinery, especially of the fly press, in stamping out and embossing the ribs, and the extensive employment of chromo-lithography, an art not practised at the former period. By these means the French have been enabled greatly to increase their exports by the production of cheap fans, to compete with those made by the Chinese."

Dekker, in his 'Gull's Hornbook,' printed in 1609, advises the gallant of his day to exhibit a "wrought handkerchief." A "handkerchief, spotted with strawberries," was Othello's first gift to Desdemona. It was an embroidered handkerchief, such as is produced in the present day at Cairo by the Egyptian ladies in their private apartments. The embroidered shirts of the time of Elizabeth are thus noticed by Stubbes:—

"These shirts (sometimes it happeneth) are wrought throughout with needle-work of silk, and such like, and curiously stitched with open seam, and many other knacks besides, more than I can describe; in so much as I have heard of shirts that have cost some ten shillings, some twenty, some forty, some five pound, some twenty nobles, and (which is horrible to hear) some ten pound apiece."

The embroidery-frame was in time superseded by the lace-pillow, which is stated to have been first used in Saxony in the sixteenth century. The production of Lace extended to Belgium and France; and we are still familiar with the names of Brussels, Mechlin, Lisle, Valenciennes, and AlenÇon lace. Until the present century no lace was heard of but pillow-lace,—a domestic manufacture, of which Honiton was the most famous seat. A stocking-weaver of Nottingham adapted his stocking-frame to the making of lace about 1770; and the bobbin-frame was invented in 1809. It was never extensively used till the expiration of the patent; and the produce of this machine was kept at so high a price by the patentees that it interfered little with the labour of the lace-makers in the cottages of the midland counties.

But a time was coming when as much bobbin-net as the patentees of the first frame charged five pounds for would be sold for half-a-crown; and when, as a necessary consequence of this cheapness, lace-making as a domestic employment would wholly cease, or be confined to the production of an expensive article, supposed to be superior to machine-made lace. That the old hand-labour could compete with the machine was an impossibility. Lace of an ordinary figured pattern used to be made on the pillow at the rate of about three meshes per minute. A bobbin-net machine will produce similar lace at the rate of twenty-four thousand meshes per minute, one person only being[Pg 265]
[Pg 266]required to wait upon the machine. Those who have watched the cottage lace-maker, working with her bobbins and pins, were unable, without long observation, to understand the principle upon which she intertwined the threads. But to explain the more rapid working of the bobbin-net machine would require such a minute acquaintance with all its parts as belongs to the business of the practical machinist, and which words are inadequate to exhibit. The accompanying engraving offers the best notion we can furnish.

Instead of England being now supplied with lace from France and Belgium, we are now an exporting lace-country. In 1848 we exported cotton lace and net to the amount of 363,255l.; in 1853 to the amount of 596,578l.

According to the census of 1851, the number of persons employed in the lace manufacture was 63,660; of whom 54,080 were females. The same returns give the number of 4658 embroiderers.

There is an article employed in dress which is at once so necessary and so beautiful that the highest lady in the land uses it, and yet so cheap that the poorest peasant's wife is enabled to procure it. The quality of the article is as perfect as art can make it; and yet, from the enormous quantities consumed by the great mass of the people, it is made so cheap that the poor can purchase the best kind, as well as the rich. It is an article of universal use. United with machinery, many hundreds, and even thousands, are employed in making it. But if the machinery were to stop, and the article were made by human hands alone, it would become so dear that the richest only could afford to use it; and it would become at the same time so rough in its appearance, that those very rich would be ashamed of using it. The article we mean is a Pin.

It is not necessary for us to describe the machinery used in pin-making, to make the reader comprehend its effects. A pin is made of brass. We have seen how metal is obtained from ore by machinery; and therefore we will not go over that ground. But suppose the most skilful workman has a lump of brass ready by his side, to make it into pins with common tools,—with a hammer and with a file. He heats it upon an anvil, till it becomes nearly thin enough for his purpose. A very fine hammer, and a very fine touch, must he have to produce a pin of any sort,—even a large corking-pin! But the pin made by machinery is a perfect cylinder. To make a metal, or even a wooden cylinder, of a considerable size, with files and polishing, is an operation so difficult that it is never attempted; but with a lathe and a sliding rest it is done every hour by a great many workmen. How much more difficult would it be to make a perfect cylinder the size of a pin? A pin hammered out by hand would present a number of rough edges that would tear the clothes, as well as hold them together. It would not be much more useful or ornamental than the skewer of bone with which the woman of the Sandwich Islands fastens her mats. But the wire of which pins are made acquires a perfectly cylindrical form by the simplest machinery. It is forcibly drawn through the circular holes of a steel plate; and the hole being smaller and smaller each time it is drawn through, it is at length reduced to the size required.

The head of a pin is a more difficult thing to make even than the body. It is formed of a small piece of wire twisted round so as to fit upon the other wire. It is said that by a machine fifty thousand heads can be made in an hour. We should think that a man would be very skilful to make fifty in an hour by hand, in the roughest manner; if so, the machine does the work of a thousand men. The machine, however, does not do all the work. The head is attached to the body of a pin by the fingers of a child, while another machine rivets it on. The operations of cutting and pointing the pins are also done by machinery; and they are polished by a chemical process.

It is by these processes,—by these combinations of human labour with mechanical power,—that it occurs that fifty pins can be bought for one halfpenny, and that therefore four or five thousand pins may be consumed in a year by the most economical housewife, at a much less price than fifty pins of a rude make cost two or three centuries ago. A woman's allowance was formerly called her pin-money,—a proof that the pins were a sufficiently dear article to make a large item in her expenses. If pins now were to cost a halfpenny apiece instead of being fifty for a halfpenny, the greater number of females would adopt other modes of fastening their dress, which would probably be less neat and convenient than pins. No such circumstance could happen while the machinery of pin-making was in use.

Needles are not so cheap as pins, because the material of which they are made is more expensive, and the processes cannot be executed so fully by machinery. But without machinery how could that most beautiful article, a fine needle, be sold at the rate of six for a penny?

As in the case of pins, machinery is at work at the first formation of the material. Without the tilt-hammer, which beats out the bar of steel, first at the rate of ten strokes a minute, and lastly at that of five hundred, how could that bar be prepared for needle-making at anything like a reasonable price? In all the processes of needle-making, labour is saved by contrivance and machinery. What human touch, without a machine, would be accurate enough to make the eye of the finest needle, through which the most delicate silk is with difficulty passed? There are two needles to be formed out of one piece of wire; in the previous preparation of which the eyes are marked. The workman, holding in his hand several wires, drops one at a time on the bed-iron of the machine, adjusts it to the die, brings down the upper die upon it by the action of the foot, and allows it to fall into a little dish when done. This he does with such rapidity that one stamper can stamp four thousand wires, equivalent to eight thousand needles, in an hour.

Needles are made in such large quantities, that it is even important to save the time of the child who lays them all one way when they are completed. Mr. Babbage, who is equally distinguished for his profound science and his mechanical ingenuity, has described this process as an example of one of the simplest contrivances which can come under the denomination of a tool. "It is necessary to separate the needles into two parcels, in order that their points may be all in one direction. This is usually done by women and children. The needles are placed sideways in a heap, on a table, in front of each operator. From five to ten are rolled towards this person by the forefinger of the left hand; this separates them a very small space from each other, and each in its turn is pushed lengthways to the right or to the left, according as its eye is on the right or the left hand. This is the usual process, and in it every needle passes individually under the finger of the operator. A small alteration expedites the process considerably; the child puts on the forefinger of its right hand a small cloth cap or finger-stall, and, rolling from the heap from six to twelve needles, it keeps them down by the forefinger of the left hand; whilst it presses the forefinger of the right hand gently against the ends of the needles, those which have their points towards the right hand stick into the finger-stall; and the child, removing the finger of the left hand, allows the needles sticking into the cloth to be slightly raised, and then pushes them towards the left side. Those needles which had their eyes on the right hand do not stick into the finger-cover, and are pushed to the heap on the right side previous to the repetition of the process. By means of this simple contrivance, each movement of the finger, from one side to the other, carries five or six needles to their proper heap; whereas, in the former method, frequently only one was moved, and rarely more than two or three were transported at one movement to their place."

A large number of people are employed, at Birmingham chiefly, in the manufacture of buttons. The census return gives about seven thousand. In the manufacture of a single button there is great division of labour amongst piercers, cutters, stampers, gilders, and burnishers. The engraving exhibits the operations of stamping, pressing, and punching, as carried on in a great factory. The shank of a button is made by very complicated machinery as a distinct class of manufacture, and the button-makers buy the shanks. It has been stated that three firms in Birmingham annually make six hundred million of button-shanks.

The application of machinery, or of peculiar scientific modes of working, to such apparently trifling articles as pins, needles, buttons, and trinkets, may appear of little importance. But let it be remembered, that the manufacture of such articles furnishes employment to many thousands of our fellow-countrymen; and, enabling us to supply other nations with these products, affords us the means of receiving articles of more intrinsic value in exchange. In 1853 our exports of hardware and cutlery amounted to more than three millions and a half sterling. No article of[Pg 271]
[Pg 272]ready attainment, and therefore of general consumption, whether it be a labourer's spade or a child's marble, is unimportant in a commercial point of view. The wooden figures of horses and sheep that may be bought for twopence in the toy-shops furnish employment to cut them, during the long winter nights, to a large portion of the peasantry of the Tyrol. The Swiss peasant cuts a piece of white wood into a boy or a cottage, as he is tending his herd on the side of a mountain. These become considerable articles of export. In the town of Sonneberg, near the forest of Thuringia, four thousand inhabitants are principally employed in the toy-trade, and also find employment for the neighbouring villagers. Mr. Osler, of Birmingham, some years ago, addressing a Committee of the House of Commons upon the subject of his beads and trinkets, said,—"On my first journey to London, a respectable-looking man in the City asked me if I could supply him with dolls' eyes; and I was foolish enough to feel half offended. I thought it derogatory to my new dignity as a manufacturer to make dolls' eyes. He took me into a room quite as wide and perhaps twice the length of this (one of the large rooms for Committees in the House of Commons), and we had just room to walk between stacks, from the floor to the ceiling, of parts of dolls. He said, 'These are only the legs and arms—the trunks are below.' But I saw enough to convince me that he wanted a great many eyes; and as the article appeared quite in my own line of business, I said I would take an order by way of experiment; and he showed me several specimens. I copied the order. He ordered various quantities and of various sizes and qualities. On returning to the Tavistock Hotel, I found that the order amounted to upwards of five hundred pounds."

Mr. Osler tells this story to show the importance of trifles. The making of dolls' eyes afforded subsistence to many ingenious workmen in glass toys; and in the same way the most minute and apparently insignificant article of general use, when rendered cheap by chemical science or machinery, produces a return of many thousand pounds, and sets in motion labour and labourers. Without the science and the machinery, which render the article cheap, the labourers would have had no employ, for the article would not have been consumed. What a pretty article is a common tobacco-pipe, of which millions are used! It is made cheap and beautiful in a mould—a machine for copying pipes. If the pipe were made without the mould, and other contrivances, it would cost at least a shilling instead of a halfpenny:—the tobacco-smoker would go without his pipe, and the pipe-maker without his employment.

Amongst articles of great demand that have become of importance, though apparently insignificant, in our own day, there is nothing more worthy of notice than the Lucifer-Match. About twenty years ago chemistry abolished the tinder-box; and the burnt rag that made the tinder went to make paper. Slowly did the invention spread. The use of the lucifer-match is now so established that machines are invented to prepare the splints. In London one saw-mill annually cuts up four hundred large timber-trees for matches. The English matches are generally square, and thus thirty thousand splints are cut in a minute. The American matches are round; and the process of shaping being more elaborate, four thousand five hundred splints are cut in a minute. We will follow a bundle of eighteen hundred of the square splints, each four inches long, through its conversion into three thousand six hundred lucifer-matches.

Without being separated, each end of the bundle is first dipped into sulphur. When dry, the splints, adhering to each other by means of the sulphur, must be parted by what is called dusting. A boy, sitting on the floor with a bundle before him, strikes the matches with a sort of mallet on the dipped ends till they become thoroughly loosened. They have now to be plunged into a preparation of phosphorus or chlorate of potash, according to the quality of the match. The phosphorus produces the pale, noiseless fire; the chlorate of potash, the sharp cracking illumination. After this application of the more inflammable substance, the matches are separated, and dried in racks. Thoroughly dried, they are gathered up again into bundles of the same quantity, and are taken to the boys who cut them; for the reader will have observed that the bundles have been dipped at each end. There are few things more remarkable in manufactures than the extraordinary rapidity of this cutting-process and that which is connected with it. The boy stands before a bench, the bundle on his right hand, a pile of half-opened empty boxes on his left. The matches are to be cut, and the empty boxes filled, by this boy. A bundle is opened; he seizes a portion, knowing by long habit the required number with sufficient exactness; puts them rapidly into a sort of frame, knocks the ends evenly together, confines them with a strap which he tightens with his foot, and cuts them in two parts with a knife on a hinge, which he brings down with a strong leverage. The halves lie projecting over each end of the frame; he grasps the left portion and thrusts it into a half-open box, which slides into an outer case; and he repeats the process with the matches on his right hand. This series of movements is performed with a rapidity almost unexampled; for in this way, two hundred thousand matches are cut, and two thousand boxes filled, in a day, by one boy.

It is a law of this manufacture that the demand is greater in the summer than in the winter. The increased summer demand for the lucifer-matches shows that the great consumption is among the masses—the labouring population—those who make up the vast majority of the contributors to duties of customs and excise. In the houses of the wealthy there is always fire; in the houses of the poor, fire in summer is a needless hourly expense. Then comes the lucifer-match to supply the want—to light the candle to look in the dark cupboard—to light the afternoon fire to boil the kettle. It is now unnecessary to run to the neighbour for a light, or, as a desperate resource, to work at the tinder-box. The lucifer-matches sometimes fail, but they cost little, and so they are freely used, even by the poorest. Their value was sufficiently shown when an officer in camp at Balaclava wrote home that no want was greater than that of the ready means of procuring fire and light, and that he should hold a box of lucifer-matches cheap at half-a-crown.

We may notice one other article of almost universal use, which is of very recent introduction—the Envelope. It is a labour-saving contrivance for the writer of letters. The use of the envelope has been mainly created by the penny postage. We find, in the census, that seven hundred persons, chiefly females, are employed in making envelopes. But there is a beautiful machine also for making them, at the rate of twenty-five thousand a day. The envelope-making machine was one of the most attractive objects in the Great Exhibition.

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