The demographic pattern of Heptonstall-Slack was extraordinary: in a population of 348, over one-half were under twenty (147 under fifteen), while only 30 were over fifty-five; this did not represent a growing community, but a low expectation of life. In the catastrophic years of the 1830s and 1840s, when the power-loom, the Irish influx, and the new Poor Law, finished off what wage-cutting had begun, there were—alongside the insurrectionary hopes of Chartist weavers—the more gruesome stories: the children’s burial clubs (where each Sunday-school pupil contributed 1d. per week towards his own
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