XIII.

RICHARD ARKWRIGHT.*

THIS memorable man was born at Preston on the 23d of December 1732,' and in the following year John Kay patented the fly-shuttle, an invention destined to stimulate the demand for cotton-yarn, by supplying which Richard Arkwright reaped fame and fortune. Arkwright is

* Richard Arkwright, Esquire, versus Peter Nightingale, Esquire. Copy (from Mr Gurney's shorthand notes) of the Proceedings on the Trial of this Cause in the Court of Common Pleas, before the Right Honourable Lord Loughborough, by a Special Jury, February 17, 1785. [without place or date]. The Trial of a Cause instituted by Richard Pepper Arden, Esquire, his Majesty's Attorney-General, by writ of Scire Facias, to repeal a patent, granted on the 16th of December 1775 to Mr Richard Arkwright, for an invention of certain instruments and machines for preparing silk, cotton, flax, and wool for spinning; before the Honourable Francis Buller, one of the judges of his Majesty's Court of King's Bench, at Westminster Hall, on Saturday, the 25th of June 1785 (London, 1783). Aikin's General Biography (London, 1790, &c.), vol. i. § Arkwright; and Country round Manchester. Quarterly Review for January 1860, § Cotton-Spinning Machines and their Inventors. Smiles's Self-Help (London, 1866). Felkin's History of the Machine-wrought Hosiery and Lace Manufactures (London, 1867). Hardwick's History of the Borough of Preston (Preston, 1857). Dobson's History of the Parliamentary Representation of Preston (Preston, 1868). Walker's Original (London, 1838.) Handbook of Lancashire, &c. (London, 1870.) Brayley and Britton's Beauties of England and Wales (London, 1801, &c.), vol. iii. § Derbyshire. Handbook of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, &c. (London, 1868.) Guest's Compendious History, &c., and British Cotton-Manufacture, &c. Baines and Ure on the Cotton-Manufacture. French's Life of Crompton. Defoe's

Tour, &c. &c.

1"Parish Register of Preston Church. Christenings in December 1732. Richard, son of Thomas Arkwright, born 23d, baptized 31st." Guest's Compendious History, p. 21.

said to have been the youngest of thirteen children, and if, as is supposed, his parents were very poor, his arrival in the world could scarcely have contributed to make the Christmas of 1732 merrier in that humble Preston household. "The house or shop in which Arkwright resided," says a local historian, writing or publishing in 1857, "was pulled down a short time ago. It stood on the north side of Lord Street, a little to the west of Wood Street, and faced Molyneux Square. It was afterwards tenanted by Mr Clare, hosier. Its site is now occupied by one of the handsome shops lately erected by the Earl of Derby. It forms the .southern extremity of Stanley Buildings, Lancaster Road." According to the same authority, Arkwright's "uncle Richard taught him to read, and he gathered some little further instruction at a school during winter evenings." " But his education was of the scantiest, and though in later life he is said to have endeavoured to repair its deficiencies, it is doubtful whether he ever learned to write with ease.

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In the course of a hundred and forty years, Arkwright's birthplace has been transformed by the growth of the industry which he did so much to develop-nay, which in one sense he may be said to have created. Preston now counts some 80,000 inhabitants, and is one of the principal seats of the cotton-manufacture, to the history of which "Preston strikes" have contributed prominent and painful episodes. But when Arkwright was born, Preston was a town with only some five or six thousand inhabitants, and was noted for its "gentility" rather than for its trade or industry. "Proud Preston," as it was called, boasted of its antiquity, and of being the capital of the Duchy of Lancaster, if Lancaster itself was the capital of the county; " and all the business of the duchy, at one time more considerable than that of the county, was transacted in the palatine county of Preston." 1 Hardwick, p. 361. 2 Ib. p. 650.

Even when Dr Whitaker wrote, he spoke of Preston as "an elegant and commercial town, the resort of well-born but ill-portioned and ill-endowed maids and widows." In the middle of the eighteenth century, according to that Lancashire worthy, Thomas Walker of "The Original," the wine merchant who used to supply Manchester lived in Proud Preston, as being the resort of all the gentry; and his Manchester orders, which rarely exceeded a gallon of wine at a time, were always executed on horseback. "Preston is a fine town," says Defoe, who visited it not many years before Arkwright's birth, "and tolerably full of people; but not like Liverpool or Manchester, for we now come beyond the trading part of the county. But though there is no manufacture, the town is full of attorneys, proctors, and notaries, the process of law being here of a different nature from that in other places, by reason that it is a duchy and county palatine, and has particular privileges of its own. The people are gay here, though not, perhaps, the richer for that; but it has, on this account, obtained the name of Proud Preston. Here is a great deal of good company, but not so much, they say, as was before the late bloody action with the northern rebels; not that the battle hurt many of the immediate inhabitants, but the consequences of it so severely affected many families thereabout that they still retain the remembrance of it." 1 "The late bloody action " was the storm of Preston in the Jacobite rising of 1715, the ancient town having become the headquarters of the rebels. Preston was then so gay that one of the Jacobites wrote from it, and of it, during the rebel occupation, "The ladies of this town, Preston, are so very beautiful and so richly attired, that the gentlemen-soldiers from Wednesday to Saturday minded nothing but courting and feasting." " Yet Proud Preston was not so entirely destitute of manu1 Tour, iii. 183. 2 Handbook of Lancashire, p. 274.

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facturing industry as from a cursory glance Defoe supposed it to be. It had a manufacture of linen "from yarn spun with the distaff and spindle, and a few worsted fabrics." It is possible that from infancy Arkwright was familiar with the rude and simple process of manufacture, which he was destined to revolutionise; but nothing of his early life is known with certainty, except that he was apprenticed to a barber. With this single exception, his biography is a blank from his birth to his twenty-third year. He had married, and married young, though there seems to be no trace of the when or where of the wedding. This, the first Mrs Arkwright, was Patience, daughter of Robert Holt of Bolton, schoolmaster, and bore him, in the December of 1755, his only son, Richard, who survived him and inherited his wealth. It is probable, from his marriage to a Bolton woman, that on the expiry of his term of apprenticeship, Arkwright had migrated to that town and established himself in business there. It is pretty certain that this had happened within five years of the birth of his only son. Patience Arkwright died before 1761, and in that year Arkwright married a second time. Of this marriage the register was copied by Mr Guest. According to the parish-register of the church of Leigh, some six or seven miles from Bolton, "Richard Arkwright, of the parish of Bolton, barber, and Margaret Biggins, of this parish of Pennington, spinster, were married in this church by licence, with consent, this twenty-fourth day of March 1761, by me, Jo. Hartley, curate."1 Mr Biggins, the father of the bride, is described as "a respectable inhabitant of Leigh, who had lived many years in the town; and his daughter, up to the time of her marriage, resided with him in the market-place of Leigh, at a house now”—that is, in 1827-"known as the sign of the Millstone." The 1 Guest, ubi supra. 2 Guest's British Cotton-Manufacture, p. 14.

second Mrs Arkwright seems to have had a little money, or a little property of her own, "perhaps of the value of £400," which also seems to have been settled on herself. That the pair were married by licence, would of itself, one supposes, betoken that Arkwright or his wife was in tolerable circumstances.

Bolton, when Arkwright settled in it, was a town very different from the Preston of his birth and early years. Standing in the dreary country from which it took its old designation of Bolton-in-the-Moors, it contained a population of some four or five thousand souls, almost wholly dependent on the manufacture of heavy fabrics of cotton mixed with wool and flax. When Arkwright married his second wife, Samuel Crompton, the inventor of the spinning-mule, was a boy of eight, and the following description of Crompton's native town at the time of his birth no doubt pretty accurately represents its aspects during Arkwright's sojourn in it :

"It is difficult to describe exactly Bolton-in-the-Moors as it was in 1753; but some idea of it may be gathered by supposing a long, irregularly-built street, commencing at the east end in the churchyard, and continuing as a double row of closely-packed houses about half the length of the present Deansgate; after which, fields and gardens intervened among the dwellings. From this street Bank Street branched to the north, and Bradshawgate to the south; they were both short and unimportant. At their intersection with Churchgate and Deansgate the market-cross was placed"-a few yards from the spot where the seventh Earl of Derby was beheaded in 1651-" and about it the wealthier inhabitants had their dwellings. Gardens, meadows, and bleaching-crofts, dotted here and there with cottages, stretched on the north side down to the Croal, then a pleasant stream of pure water; and besides the comparatively considerable suburbs of Little Bolton, the neighbourhood of the town was thickly studded with groups of cottages in hamlets—or folds, as they are there called-many of which have since been surrounded by new houses, and now form part of the town itself. There were no tall chimneys in Bolton in those days, but many considerable warehouses, to contain the heavy fustians and other piece-goods made in the neighbourhood.”

1Guest's British Cotton-Manufacture, p. 110.