Shelf Life: Run of the Mill

The July edition of my 'Shelf Life' column on clothes viewed through the prism of literature, for the website 'The Voice of Fashion':

A reading of literary works set in and around the Industrial Revolution which remain relevant today, showing that no technological innovation is by itself any guarantee of social betterment

 Power loom weaving in a cotton mill in Lancashire England, ca. 1835. Engraving with modern watercolour. (Shutterstock)

As any school textbook will tell you, the Industrial Revolution began in Britain in the mid-1700s. Production became increasingly mechanised, accelerating a process of economic change that altered the very character of society. What the textbooks don't stress enough is how much of the technological innovation that drove the Industrial Revolution was in textiles. John Kay's flying shuttle, patented 1733, allowed wider cloth to be woven faster. The greater demand for yarn was met by James Hargreaves's 1764 spinning jenny, where one person could work many spindles, and Richard Arkwright’s 1769 water frame, with spindles operated by water rather than manually. Both were supplanted by Samuel Crompton's 1779 spinning mule, which spun thread strong enough for Britain to finally start producing cheap calico cloth. Then came Edmund Cartwright's vertical power loom in 1785.

Combined with Britain's colonial status, these innovations meant that by the 1830s, 85 per cent of the world's raw cotton was being processed in the mills of Lancashire. Manchester and the surrounding mill towns began to draw researchers and writers concerned about the new working class. Benjamin Disraeli, later Britain's Prime Minister, wrote a novel called Sybil, or the Two Nations (1845), in which an upper class character travels to the industrial north to see working class conditions. The popular Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell set her first book Mary Barton (1848) in Manchester: a romance between her working class heroine and a mill-owner's son. In Gaskell's North and South (1854), we see workers’ troubles and early strikes through the eyes of a heroine who clashes with a cotton mill owner, only to eventually marry him.

Real-life romance in the mill town could sometimes expand on the novelist's imagination.

Friedrich Engels, born into a German textile dynasty that had made its fortune from linen yard bleaching, mechanised lace-making and silk ribbon manufacture, came to Manchester because his father had a thread factory there. Expected to learn the textile business, Engels instead produced The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), establishing in horrific detail how early industrialisation had actually worsened workers' lives. Low wages and terrible living conditions led to much higher mortality from disease in Manchester than in the surrounding countryside. Karl Marx's reading of the book helped forge the intellectual partnership of a lifetime – and Marx and Engels' critique of capitalism.

But Manchester is also where Engels forged a long-term partnership with Mary Burns, then a worker in his father's factory. Rachel Holmes' delightful 2014 biography of Marx's daughter, the feminist and trade unionist Eleanor Marx, describes Mary Burns' role in Engels' life as “directive and Socratic”: “Engels took Mary to bed; Mary took Engels to the tenements and to the heart of the Irish immigrant community of Manchester... [explaining] the conditions of factory and domestic workers.”

Among the sharpest fictional takes on the textile industry came almost a century later, in 1951, when Roger MacDougall's superb play, The Man in the White Suit, was turned into a Ealing Studio comedy by his cousin Alexander McKendrick. Starring the great British actor Alec Guinness, The Man in the White Suit is a cynical comedy, with its cynicism extending all the way across capitalist society.

The film opens with a younger textile mill owner called Michael Corland romancing Daphne, the daughter of an older and richer mill owner called Birnley, with purely monetary desires. Guinness plays Sidney Stratton, a misunderstood scientific genius who takes yard jobs in one textile mill after another so that he can stealthily use the labs. When Sidney devises an artificial fabric that will last forever and repels dirt, Daphne convinces her father to test it. But when word gets out, the mill-owners gang up to prevent what they see as a calamity for business. “The spinning jenny and the mechanical loom increased output,” says one captain of industry. “This'll finish it!”

Sidney somehow escapes their clutches and is trying to reach the newspapers, but is stopped by his old worker friends: the unions, too, are dead against a fabric whose production has an inbuilt time limit. Even these socialist workers, aware enough to describe themselves as “flotsam floating on the high tide of profit”, cannot actually imagine a world beyond the short-term goals of capitalist production. If obsolescence is not built into the things workers produce, then things will last forever; demand will dry up – and so will jobs.

A still from The Man in the White Suit, an Ealing Studio adaptation of Roger MacDougall's play

The Man in the White Suit is even more relevant today, when late capitalism's need to artificially inflate demand ensures greater inbuilt obsolescence. It is more so because technological innovation is constantly being thrown at us as a panacea, without enough attention paid to the politics that surrounds that technology: think, in post-2014 India, of the discourse around the digital, in relation to demonetisation, lockdown relief or Covid-tracking apps.

Just as with the textile industry at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, technological innovation is not by itself any guarantee of social betterment. Who has access to that technology, who controls it, and to whose benefit – that is what determines whether it is good for the human race: whether, in fact, technology will mean progress.

Published on The Voice of Fashion, 16 July 2020.