The Piecer

“Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in Sheol, whither thou goest.”

— Ecclesiastes 9:10, ASV

Six in the Morning Till Eight at Night

In 1823, at the age of ten, David Livingstone went to work in the Blantyre mill. He wrote that he was put into the factory at ten as a piecer, so that his earnings might lessen his mother’s anxiety.

A piecer’s job was to watch the threads on the spinning machines and to join them when they broke. The machines did not stop for a broken thread, so the boy had to reach in among the moving parts, catch the two ends and twist them together, then move on to the next. He spent the day walking up and down beside the machine, bending, reaching and watching. The work was not heavy, but it was relentless, and it was done in the heat and lint-filled air of a cotton mill, where the machinery roared so loudly that talk was almost impossible. The working day, Livingstone recorded, ran from six in the morning to eight at night, with short breaks for meals. He was a child. He did it for ten years.

Child labour in the mills is one of the great scandals of the British industrial revolution, and the reforming laws that began to limit it came only during Livingstone’s years in the factory. It is worth saying plainly that his childhood was hard and that it was hard because of a system that used up children for profit. Livingstone himself, characteristically, did not complain. He looked back on it as a school.

Ruddiman’s Rudiments

The mill owners provided an evening school for their young workers, and Livingstone went to it. With part of his first week’s wages, he recalled, he bought Ruddiman’s Rudiments of Latin, and he went on studying Latin for years afterwards, with undiminished enthusiasm, at an evening school that met from eight until ten.

A boy who had been on his feet since six in the morning went from the factory floor to the schoolroom, and from the schoolroom to his books at home. The dictionary work, he wrote, went on till midnight or later, unless his mother intervened by jumping up and snatching the books out of his hands. Then he slept a few hours and was back at the mill by six. In this way, he said, he read many of the classical authors, and knew Virgil and Horace better at sixteen than he did in middle age.

He read at work too. The famous picture of the boy with his book on the spinning frame comes from his own pen. He wrote that he read at work by placing his book on part of the spinning-jenny, so that he could catch a sentence at a time as he passed at his work, and in this way kept up a fairly constant study, undisturbed by the roar of the machinery. Strictly, the machines at Blantyre were spinning mules, not jennies, but Livingstone used the common word. He added that the habit of concentrating in the noise of the factory gave him a power of shutting his mind to everything around him, so that later he could read and write in the middle of a crowd of shouting people, or amid the dancing and singing of an African village, without being disturbed.

Many poor children in Scotland worked and studied in this way, and the country was proud of its self-educated working men. What marked Livingstone was not the habit but the intensity of it, and its persistence. He did not read in order to escape the mill. He read in order to master things: languages, then science, then medicine. He was already, at twelve and thirteen, a boy who would not let go of a task until it was done.

Rocks, Shells and Herbs

His great love, from boyhood, was the natural world. On the few free days of the year he went out into the country around Blantyre with his brothers, collecting plants, rocks and shells. He identified the plants he found with the help of old botany books. He was fascinated by the limestone quarries near the village, where the rock was full of fossil shells. He once asked a quarryman how the shells had got into the rocks. The man, he recalled, looked at him with the pitying expression people reserve for a harmless lunatic. The boy did not get an answer, but he never stopped asking that kind of question.

This curiosity about the created world was part of his religion, though for some years it seemed to him to be in conflict with it. His father distrusted science books. The theology of his father’s church seemed to have no room for geology. David read whatever science he could find, including books on chemistry and astronomy, and for a time he was troubled by the thought that he could not be a Christian and love these things too. How he came through that trouble is the story of the next chapter.

Promotion to the Wheel

In his nineteenth year, about 1832, he was promoted from piecer to spinner. The work was harder and the pay better. Spinning, he wrote, was exceedingly hard on a slim, loose-jointed lad, but it was well paid. The better pay was important, because by then he had decided what he wanted to do with his life, and it would cost money. For the next few years he worked in the mill in the summer and studied in Glasgow in the winter, paying his own fees and living on almost nothing.

He was proud of having done it without help. He wrote later that he had never received a farthing of aid from anyone, and that he would have reached his goal by his own efforts in the end, if friends had not advised him to apply to the London Missionary Society. There is a characteristic note in that pride. It is the pride of a man who has earned everything he has and who finds it hard to understand people who have not had to.

The Same Hardy Training

Many years later, in the opening pages of Missionary Travels, written when he was the most famous traveller in Britain, Livingstone looked back on the mill with gratitude. Looking back on that life of toil, he wrote, he could only feel thankful that it had formed so large a part of his early education, and if it were possible he would like to begin life over again in the same lowly way and pass through the same hardy training.

That passage has been quoted ever since as an example of Victorian self-help, and it is easy to be cynical about it. It was written by a man who had escaped the mill, for readers who had never been in one. It can be read as a comfortable endorsement of child labour by someone who no longer had to do it.

But Livingstone meant something more particular. He believed that the factory had given him two things that he needed in Africa. The first was endurance. He had learned, as a child, to work through tiredness for fourteen hours a day, and it was that endurance that carried him across the continent. The second was a working man’s sympathy for the poor. He said more than once that his time in the mill had taught him to respect working people and to understand their lives, and that he never forgot it. In Africa, he dealt with chiefs and porters, traders and slaves, and he was often more at ease with the porters than with the officials. He knew what it was to work for someone else.

There is a third thing the factory gave him, which he did not mention. It taught him to measure himself, and others, by work done. In the mill a man was what he produced. In Africa, Livingstone would judge his companions by the same standard, and those who could not keep up with him, or who seemed to him idle, he despised. A missionary needs endurance. He also needs patience with the weak, and that is harder to learn at a spinning frame.

With Thy Might

The verse at the head of this chapter comes from Ecclesiastes, the book of the Bible most aware of the shortness and frustration of human life. “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.” The Preacher does not say this because work always succeeds. He says it because life is short and death is coming, and there will be no work in the grave. It is a sober verse, not a cheerful one.

Livingstone lived it all his life. He worked with his might in the mill, in the classroom, in the dispensary, on the road and in the swamp. The Preacher would have recognised him. He might also have reminded him of something else he says, that there is “a time to keep silence, and a time to speak,” and “a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing” (Ecclesiastes 3:5, 7, ASV). Livingstone was much better at doing things with his might than at knowing when to stop. Paul gives the same command a gentler setting: “whatsoever ye do, work heartily, as unto the Lord, and not unto men” (Colossians 3:23, ASV). The mill taught him to work heartily. It would take the rest of his life to learn what it meant to work as unto the Lord, and to leave the results with him.