The Paper Cap

A West Riding weaving village in the years of the Reform Bill, when the power loom is coming and the hand-weavers' living is going with it, and a squire who owns most of the village and has to decide which side he is on. Barr, a Lancashire-born minister's daughter, knew these Methodist communities of the north from childhood and wrote about industrial England without taking the mill-owner's side by default. Fifty-eight plates after Lejeune and Landseer carry the wars, courts and crowned heads of 1775 to 1872, the public drama behind a village tale of love and labor.