Note 59 — Chapter I
Reading edition
Defoe’s Tour, vol. iii. pp. 97-101, 116 (1724). John Bright mentions his father’s apprenticeship, about 1789, to “a most worthy man who had a few acres of ground, a very small farm, and three or four looms in his house” (speech reported in Beehive, February 2, 1867). For a less optimistic account of the Yorkshire clothiers, who were, even in the seventeenth century, often mere wage-earners, see Cartwright’s Chapters of Yorkshire History.