Home Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton
Famine. By Edwin Waugh. (Simpkins, Marshall, and Co.)—We might reasonably expect that this book would be painful, and though time enough has gone by since the cotton famine to blunt the keen edge of present sympathy, we must say that the picture of general, hopeless, irremediable suffering is harrowing in the extreme. The patience of many families is a redeeming point, the good-will and liberality of dis- tress committees and subscribers to them, another. We notice, too, with pleasure an account of a poor man giving a thick piece of his- bread to a poor woman, and the remark of the narrator who witnessed this and similar acts of kindness :—" After what I have seen of them here, I say, 'Let me fall into the hands of the poor.' " At another page there is a touching description of a father who had found some work four miles from home, and who at first walked there and back daily. Bat his wife saw that he was killing himself just for the sake " o' comin' to his own whoam ov a neet," and made him take lodgings, though she said she knew he must be homesick, as he was "a very belie mon."
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