A first-person magazine essay from All The Year Round describing a visit to the Lancashire cotton-mill districts around Burnley, Accrington, Padiham and Blackburn. The narrator observes the often cool, wary relations between mill owners and operatives, discusses reading-rooms and lectures for mill hands, and tours a model mill, including its engine, weaving shed and frugal use of power and waste. It closes with an imagined weaver's view of his employer's wealth, and promises later papers on the subject.

A magazine article from All The Year Round presenting a biography of Samuel Crompton, inventor of the spinning mule, set in Bolton, Lancashire. It describes his stern upbringing, the mechanical inventions that unbalanced spinning and weaving (Kay's fly-shuttle and drop-box, Hargreaves's jenny, Arkwright's frame), and Crompton's years of experiments on a muslin wheel. It follows his loss of control over the invention, the meagre parliamentary grant, the rise and fall of muslin weavers' wages, and his death in obscurity.