NORTH & WORLD

1.

from the Making of the English Working Class, 322

2.

Holt worked as a weaver in cotton mills (while Yorkshire is generally associated with wool and worsted, Todmorden’s textile industry was decidedly Lancastrian. Like Saddleworth, today it has an Oldham postcode). Despite his class consciousness and interest in history, I am not aware of Holt ever referencing the source of most of the crop spun by his ancestors, or even the important role of many Lancashire mill workers in upholding the embargo on Confederacy cotton during the American Civil War. Although he was primarily a memoirist and not a historian, the lack of any mention of the slave trade in his breathless celebrations of the wondrous tradition of weaving begins to feel like a very glaring omission.