A Household Words article (1853) on the British cotton industry and the "Flax Movement". It gives statistics on raw cotton imports, Lancashire manufacturing, and dependence on American slave-grown cotton, and compares them with the linen and flax trade. It then describes Chevalier Clausson's patented chemical process for "cottonising" flax at a model factory in Stepney, using soda and dilute sulphuric acid baths followed by bleaching. The article closes with uses of the product blended with wool or silk, and with the agricultural benefits of flax growing.

A biographical essay in Household Words on Edmund Cartwright (1743-1823), the clergyman and poet who invented the power loom. It covers his early life and friendship with the poet George Crabbe, the 1784 conversation at Matlock that set him on the idea, his patents of 1785 onward, his Doncaster mills, and the opposition and losses he suffered. It also follows his later inventions, his agricultural work at Woburn and the Parliamentary grant of £10,000. It includes figures on the growth in the number of power looms in England and Manchester.

An 1853 Household Words article describing a visit to a silk dye-house and a ribbon factory in Coventry. It covers the boiling, bleaching and dyeing of silk (mordants and dyestuffs for particular colours), the weighting of silk with sugar, and the 'clouding box' for dyeing plaid ribbon yarns. It then follows the silk to the steam-powered factory, covering Jacquard loom preparation, pattern 'reading in', multi-ribbon looms, ribbon types, and the economic state of Coventry's ribbon trade and its workers.

A mid-19th-century magazine article describing the assaying, or "conditioning," of silk to detect moisture and adulteration. It explains how silk absorbs moisture and is weighted with gum, sugar and fats, and how French and Italian conditioning houses test humidity, foreign matter, length, elasticity, twist and lustre. It reports on a newly opened conditioning establishment in London's Broad Street Buildings and argues that British silk manufacturers have lagged because they neglect chemistry.

A Household Words article that opens with an Irish folk tale of Wallotty Trot, a Rumpelstiltskin-like story in which a mysterious old man teaches a princess the spinning wheel. It then surveys the history of spinning, the old domestic system of wool and cotton manufacture in Norfolk, Yorkshire and Lancashire, and the arrival of factories. The article describes a Lancashire cotton mill, Marshall's flax mill at Leeds, and the Bradford alpaca and mohair mill being built by Titus Salt at Saltaire, with its planned workers' town.