The Cotton Spinner by Libby Ashworth: Brimming with drama, heartbreak, love, friendship and the powerful bonds of family - book review -

When the production of Lancashire’s lucrative cotton moved from home-spun cottage industries to the factory floors of mighty, mechanised mills, it brought change and hardship to many families across the county.
The Cotton SpinnerThe Cotton Spinner
The Cotton Spinner

When the production of Lancashire’s lucrative cotton moved from home-spun cottage industries to the factory floors of mighty, mechanised mills, it brought change and hardship to many families across the county.

Libby Ashworth – who has written several historical novels and non-fiction books featuring fascinating corners of the county’s rich heritage under the name Elizabeth Ashworth – was born and raised in the Blackburn area and can trace her family back to the village of Whalley in the Middle Ages.

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But in this first hard-hitting and captivating book of her new Mill Town Lasses saga series, Ashworth draws inspiration from the lives of her great, great, great, great grandparents, Jennet and Titus Eastwood, who were forced to move from their cottage in the countryside in the early decades of the 19th century to find work in the burgeoning mill town of Blackburn.

Several women in Ashworth’s family were weavers and suffered the grind and privations of work in Lancashire mills and, ironically, her research threw up a possible blood link to Sir Richard Arkwright, the Preston man who was one of the leading players of the Industrial Revolution and is credited with founding the whole factory system.

And the series, she reveals, is her tribute to the hardworking, resilient women mill workers who brought up their families and supported one another through some shocking and appalling times.

Until 1826, Jennet and Titus Eastwood have forged a living by spinning cotton at their idyllic cottage at Pleck Gate in the countryside near Blackburn where the air is clean and they have a garden to grow their own vegetables.

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But it has become impossible to make ends meet as the price of home-spun cloth has fallen because the new mills and their machinery can weave the cotton so much faster. With reluctant hearts, the couple and their baby daughter Peggy leave their cottage and move into the centre of Blackburn to find work in the cotton mills.

But their new home in Paradise Lane bears no resemblance to anything heavenly… damp and neglected, it sits in the middle of a grubby terrace and across the road from the towering walls of Dandy Mill which steals all the light from their small house.

Soon their lives are changed in so many ways. Titus finds the long hours of mill work, hard, hot and noisy, little Peggy falls seriously ill, and Jennet cannot imagine ever feeling happy in her new home.

And when Titus is arrested and sent to prison in Preston for attending a Reform meeting which gets dangerously out of hand, Jennet is left to fend for herself and their child. But things become even worse when she finds herself pregnant and alone… with another man’s child.

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Ashworth uses her vast local knowledge and research, her eye for rich period detail, and passion for her home county to bring readers an enthralling story which offers a vivid portrait of the tumultuous early years of the Industrial Revolution in Lancashire.

Jennet’s struggles to protect her family and battle through the unimaginable hardships of work, illness, caring for her little daughter, putting food on the table and suffering the fall-out of the Reform riots make for gripping reading.

The rise of the mills changed everything for the workers of Lancashire and The Cotton Spinner helps to put their experiences and their plight into a memorable focus. Brimming with drama, heartbreak, love, friendship and the powerful bonds of family, this is an exciting opener to a wonderful new series.

(Arrow, paperback, £6.99)