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.
This is the Trust’s second book devoted to life in Belper in the nineteenth century. Thanks to the Trust securing generous financial support it is substantially larger than its predecessor. It retains the format that has become a hallmark of the Trust’s publications with copious illustrations and extensive quotations from contemporary sources. There is much in the book that breaks new ground. It features the extraordinary contribution to the development of the town, its administration and the shaping of its essential services by three generations of the Pym family. Other chapters describe the strategy the young town adopted to look after its poor creating a patchwork of individual philanthropy and self help while for those who sank into absolute poverty there was the workhouse. The building of the Belper Workhouse ( known now as the Babbington Hospital ) is described in detail. This account is accompanied by episodes from its later life as the Guardians who administered the Poor Law struggled with the challenges of unwelcome commands from London and disagreements within their own ranks as to where help was to be given. Should they, as the honourable Frederick Strutt demanded, deny money to the wives and families of men who were in prison? How the Guardians responded to this and many of Strutt’s other propositions is all in the book.
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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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