The Arkwright Society

By Richard Cavendish | Published in History Today Volume: 41 Issue: 1 1990

Richard Cavendish visits an historic mill in Derbyshire central to the Industrial Revolution.

When George III recovered his health in 1789, Sir Richard Arkwright put on put on a tremendous celebration at his Derbyshire factory at Cromford. An enormous sign was fastened up, saying in menacing capitals: REJOICE ALL MEN FOR THE KING LIVERTH. That night hundreds of mill hands went in a procession with torchbearers and a band to Sir Richard’s house, where loyal toasts were drunk in profusion.

When Sir Richard Arkwright told you to rejoice, rejoice you did. He was not a good man to cross. A self-made business genius, he was a pioneer of the factory system and one of the prime movers of the Industrial Revolution. A formidable portrait of him in his fifties by Wright of Derby shows a plump, paunchy figure, straddling a chair, with a big nose, shrewd little eyes and an expression of vigorous pugnacity. A touch of tough humour, too.

This article is available to History Today online subscribers only. If you are a subscriber, please log in.

Please choose one of these options to access this article:

Purchase a online subscription and receive unlimited access to our archive for one week, one month or a year

Purchase a print and website subscription, giving you one year's access to all our content and 12 editions of History Today magazine.

If you are already a print subscriber, purchase the online archive upgrade for a year's worth of access at a reduced price

Call our Subscriptions department on +44 (0)20 3219 7813 for more information.

If you are logged in but still cannot access the article, please contact us

Tags: Europe,

If you enjoyed this article, you might like these:

This Month's Magazine

Subscribe to our weekly e-newsletter:

From The Current Issue

History Today App

From The Archive

Lords of the Northern Forest

The Hudson's Bay Company was one of the central forces moulding the development of the vast tracts of land that today are Canada - but as Barry Gough explains here, the circumstances of its launch in 1670 also reveal much about the commercial forces, personalities and rivalries of Restoration England.