Page images
PDF
EPUB

goods must also be noticed, and this is an advantage by which the poor chiefly benefit. A printed dress of good material, a neat pattern, and a fast colour, may now be bought for a few shillings; and English cloths are now sent to India, and sold there cheaper than the produce of the native looms.

An important branch of the cotton manufacture is the art of calico printing: this also has been brought to great perfection of late years. Many of the large print-works in Lancashire employ more than a thousand people. They design their own patterns; and bleaching, dyeing, and printing go on in these establishments; in short, every operation through which the cloth has to pass, after it has left the hand of the weaver, till it is converted into a finished print, ready for the foreign or home market.

Some idea of the growth of this manufacture may be obtained from the fact, that the amount of cotton imported into Great Britain, which, in 1781, was only 5,198,778 lbs., in 1859 was 1,225,989,072 lbs., while the declared real value of cotton manufactures exported has increased during the last thirty years from 16,516,7487. to 48,208,4447.

The principal counties where this manufacture is carried on are, Lancashire, Cheshire, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Cumberland, Lanarkshire, and Renfrewshire. In these counties coal and iron are both found in great abundance, and the

manufacture naturally establishes itself where the two substances most necessary to its existence are easily obtained. Manchester, Lancaster, and Glasgow, besides numerous other large towns, owe their present importance and prosperity to the cotton, manufacture.

GEORGE STEPHENSON.

OF all the remarkable inventions of the last hundred years, the steam-engine and the railway are the most important. The former is associated

[graphic]

STEPHENSON'S BIRTHPLACE.

with the name of James Watt, the latter we owe to George Stephenson. "Watt's invention exercised a wonderfully quickening influence on every branch of industry, and multiplied a thousand-fold the amount of manufactured productions; and Stephenson's enabled these to be distributed with an economy and despatch such as

had never before been thought possible. They have both tended to increase indefinitely the mass of human comforts and enjoyments, and to render them cheap and accessible to all."

[ocr errors]

George Stephenson was born at the small village of Wylam, in Northumberland, in 1781. His father was a poor man, and earned his living by working as engineman at the Wylam coal-pit: his duty was to look after the steam-engine, which is always employed in coal-mines for pumping up the water that collects in them. George was one of a large family, and his father being too poor to send him to school, he was early set to work cowherding, and, as he grew older, he and his brother were employed in the colliery to help their father. In his spare time he amused himself with birdnesting; and he would often bring in the young birds and feed them himself, till they became so tame that they would fly fearlessly in and out of the cottage. One of his favourite blackbirds used to roost at night at the foot of his bed. He was a remarkably strong, active lad, very industrious at his work, and he acquired such a character for steadiness and industry, that, by the time he was seventeen, he was promoted to the responsible post of engineman at a neighbouring colliery. When quite a child, one of his amusements was modelling little engines in clay; and now that he had an engine of his own to look after, he

# Life of Stephenson."-SMILES.

employed all his spare hours in taking it to pieces, and studying its different parts. He also tried to model engines which he had seen, or which had been described to him; and he was told he would

[graphic][subsumed]

PORTRAIT OF GEORGE STEPHENSON.

find accounts in books of the wonderful engines. made by Boulton and Watt, about which he was so anxious to know. But here poor George was at.

« PreviousContinue »