Dr Andrew Hobbs writes… I’m writing something on weekly publications produced during the 1853-54 Preston Lock-Out in North-West England, when thousands of cotton workers were locked out of the mills over their demand for a 10% restoration of wages (the event which inspired Charles Dickens’s Hard Times and Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South). These publications called themselves balance sheets — they list donations to the … Continue reading Researching the Preston lock-out