R.S. Fitton and A.P. Wadsworth's pioneering case study of the birth of the factory system in Derbyshire's Derwent Valley, has long been recognised as a classic in the literature of the industrial revolution.
First published in 1958, it charts the development of Richard Arkwright's and Jedediah Strutt's textile empires with particular focus on their cotton mills in Cromford, Belper and Milford with the communities they built to sustain them.
Among the book's strengths is Wadsworth's depiction of life in Belper in the 1790s, lives that were lived at the mill and at home, always under the watching eye of the factory master. The reader glimpses real lives in these pages, an attribute all too rare, made possible here by the quality of the Strutt archive.
Out of print for many years, this paperback edition was commissioned by the Trust in 2012.
JOHN TAMS returns to St Peter’s following a sellout Christmas show with a fundraiser for the publication of Belper Voices Volume Two.
Saturday 13th July 2024 at St Peter's Belper. Doors open 7pm. Performance 7:45pm.
Tickets £15 from livetickets.org, belperfringe.org, eventbrite.co.uk.
This is the first of two books describing life in Belper in the nineteenth century. These were the years that saw the town establish itself within the county as an administrative centre and, with its early railway connection, a flourishing horse-nail industry, and the seemingly inexorable growth of the Strutts' empire, what could go wrong? But the railway didn't bring investment; handcrafted nails were overtaken by those made by machine and then by imported products; and the mills contracted and were sold. The growth of the town stalled.
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Here is the story of Matlock Bath from its origin in the late seventeenth century to the recent past. At first, a remote rural spa, a century later, though still no more than a small village, its awesome scenery and mineral springs had become so highly regarded by fashionable visitors that it was spoken of alongside Bath, Buxton and Tunbridge Wells.
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