The Admiring
1825 The waterly lowlands, or bottoms, present one continuous display of well-organised industry; the rising lands, even to the summit of the boldest elevations, are enriched with the mansions of capitalists engaged in manufacture, or dotted with the white cottages of subordinate actors in the busy scene
Delineations of Gloucestershire
The Romantic
Victoriana You cannot think what primitive people they are hereabouts, descendants from an old colony of Flemish weavers; they keep to the trade. Down in the valley, if one could see through the beechwood, is the grand support of the neighbourhood, a large cloth mill
I shall be master of nearly a hundred men and women
listen to the drowsy fall or the miniature Niagara or watch the incessant turning, turning of the great water wheel
.
the stream on which the machinery depended was led by various contrivances, checked or increased in its flow, making small ponds, or locks, or waterfalls
it was sweet to climb the steep meadows & narrow mule paths
There was a slight motion of the piston rod.
"All’s right! it will work?"
No, it stopped.
John drew a deep breath.
It went on again, beginning to move slowly up and down, like the strong right arm of some automaton giant. Greater and lesser cog-wheels caught up the motive power, revolving slowly and majestically, and with steady, regular rotation, or whirling round so fast you could hardly see that they stirred at all. Of a sudden a soul had been put into that wonderful creature of man’s making, that inert mass of wood and metal, mysteriously combined. The monster was alive!
Mrs Craik, John Halifax, Gentleman
Dislike of the Mills
The Practical
Ladies of a delicate disposition were advised not to live near a fulling mill.
Stroud Journal
The Antagonistic
1865 As we approach Nailsworth the mills become more frequent. Tall chimneys rise up from the low lands and their black tops send forth forbidding streams of thick smoke. About ½ a mile from the village, a huge cloth mill (Dunkirk), factory-like, gloomy, many-windowed, and populous with young persons and adults, all with their arms and hands more or less dyed the colour of black cloth, and all more or less busy in their respective departments of labour. Suddenly the mill bell rings, it may be the dinner hour, and immediately out come dozens of boys and girls, and one or two dozen of elder folk
Every class of manufacture gives forth its particular sounds and signs of activity to its neighbourhood. The only sound by which you may at once recognise the vicinity of cloth mills is a heavy, dull beating, a ponderous thump-bump-thump-bump, which awakens you in the morning and keeps you awake at night. To hear this perpetual thumping and bumping is extremely unpleasant for some time, but at length you become so accustomed to it that its disagreeableness ceases. When you stand by the side of these beaters within the mill, and behold the heavy wooden hammers alternately rising from and falling on the cloth, and keep silence yourself because attempting to speak in their presence would be absurd you then come to understand how it is that the elder work-people here become taciturn
On Sunday mornings every beater in every mill is quiet; and the effect of the stillness is to make you aware as soon as you wake up that Sunday has arrived. The great water-wheels, both overshot and undershot, as they are termed, are now motionless, the whole valley is free from the clouds of rolling smoke. The sluggish river, too, has its day of rest, and runs lazily, securely by, no longer entrapped in mill dams and seduced into side channels. The large bleaching and drying grounds show their empty framework of wood unclothed and bare; nor does scarlet cloth today flaunt its glaring brightness in the sun. Nature resumes her sway on this day of rest, and for once in the week you may listen to birds singing in the thickets, and behold streams running unpolluted with madder or any other kind of dye
The Minister of Lower Shortwood Chapel
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