’We regularly pay away from L40 to L50 (to some 300 persons) every Monday morning or on the Tuesday.  They will, perhaps, wash on the Monday and get their linen clean preparatory to the next Sunday, and in the course of the week they bring all the linen things they can spare.  Friday is the worst; they will then bring their small trifling articles, such as are scarcely worth a penny, and we lend on them, to enable them to buy a bit of meat or a few trifles for dinner.’[41]

They are too poor to indulge in church-going or alcohol.  They have no clothes to go to church in.  Their publican is the druggist, where they buy opium for themselves and Godfrey’s cordial, a preparation from laudanum, for their children.  In the whole of Leicester, with its population of 50,000, there are but nine gin-houses.  And only on Sundays do they get a bit of schooling.  ’We have only one bit of a cover lid to cover the five of us in winter ... we are all obliged to sleep in one bed.’[42]

A frame smith, making his usual inspection of hosiers’ frames at workmen’s dwellings in Nottingham, after thus spending a fortnight, found his health had begun to suffer from the squalid wretchedness of their abodes.  Thinking to improve it, he went on the same errand into the country, but found the frame-work knitters there in a still more deplorable state.  From the bad air and other distressing influences in their condition and that of their dwellings, in another fortnight he returned, too ill to attend to his business for some weeks afterwards.  This occurred in 1843.[43]

Nottingham, however, with its up-to-date lace trade was usually better off than this.  The lace factories, like the cotton mills in Lancashire, eased the position of the hand-workers.  In Leicestershire the knitters had no such alternative.  The more their earnings were reduced, the more helplessly they were bound to their only trade.

6. 1842 is a long while ago!  Let us go to sleep for thirty years and wake up in 1871, when the Truck Commissioners are publishing their report.

West of Birmingham lies the black country, an area of some twenty square miles.  Here, if we have read the evidence of the Truck Commissioners, we can interpret a dumb-show in Dudley, where the nail-makers dwell.

On Monday mornings the nail-maker emerges from a small hovel containing a smithy and walks into Dudley to call on a gentleman known as a fogger, a petty-fogger if he is a middleman, a market-fogger if he is a master.  The nailer comes out with a bundle of metal which he takes to a second house and changes for a second bundle of metal, and with this he walks away. (The next nailer, not so lucky, hangs about till Wednesday morning, waiting for his metal.) On Saturday the nailer comes back with his nails, enters the fogger’s shop, and emerges with 12_s._ in his hand.  But he does not go home.  He slips into a shop close by and parts company with the shillings.  In return he gets a parcel, the contents of which are obviously displeasing to him.  What has happened?