At the
prospect of success opened before him, he abandoned his curacy, and
devoted himself to the art of stocking making by machinery. This
is the version of the story given by Henson {7} on the authority of
an old stocking-maker, who died in Collins's Hospital, Nottingham,
aged ninety-two, and was apprenticed in the town during the reign
of Queen Anne. It is also given by Deering and Blackner as the
traditional account in the neighbourhood, and it is in some measure
borne out by the arms of the London Company of Frame-Work Knitters,
which consists of a stocking frame without the wood-work, with a
clergyman on one side and a woman on the other as supporters. {8}
Whatever may have been the actual facts as to the origin of the
invention of the Stocking Loom, there can be no doubt as to the
extraordinary mechanical genius displayed by its inventor. That a
clergyman living in a remote village, whose life had for the most
part been spent with books, should contrive a machine of such
delicate and complicated movements, and at once advance the art of
knitting from the tedious process of linking threads in a chain of
loops by three skewers in the fingers of a woman, to the beautiful
and rapid process of weaving by the stocking frame, was indeed an
astonishing achievement, which may be pronounced almost unequalled
in the history of mechanical invention.
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