invention, sacrificing everything to his new idea. As 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[1] on the authority of an old stocking-maker, 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.[2]
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 extra-
- ↑ 'History of the Framework Knitters.'
- ↑ There are, however, other and different accounts. One is to the effect that Lee set about studying the contrivance of the stocking-loom for the purpose of lessening the labour of a young country-girl to whom he was attached, whose occupation was knitting; another, that being married and poor, his wife was under the necessity of contributing to their joint support by knitting; and that Lee, while watching the motion of his wife's fingers, conceived the idea of imitating their movements by a machine. The latter story seems to have been invented by Aaron Hill, Esq., in his 'Account of the Rise and Progress of the Beech Oil Manufacture, London, 1715; but his statement is altogether unreliable. Thus he makes Lee to have been a Fellow of a college at Oxford, from which he was expelled for marrying an innkeeper's daughter; whilst Lee neither studied at Oxford, nor married there, nor was a Fellow of any college; and he concludes by alleging that the result of his invention was to "make Lee and his family happy"; whereas the invention brought him only a heritage of misery, and he died abroad destitute.
