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 Expertise in Transition

This book challenges standard notions of expertise. In today’s world,

truly effective expertise is built on fluid collaboration between
practitioners from multiple backgrounds. Such collaborative exper-
tise must also be transformative, must be able to tackle emerging new
problems and changes in its organizational framework. Engeström
argues that the transition toward collaborative and transformative
expertise is based on three pillars: expertise needs to be understood and
cultivated as a collective activity; expertise needs to be built on flexible
knot-working among diverse practitioners; and expertise needs to be
fostered as the expansive learning of models and patterns of activity
that are in progress. In this book, Engeström recasts expertise as fluid
collaboration on complex tasks that requires envisioning the future
and mastering change.

Yrjö Engeström is Professor Emeritus of Communication at the

University of California, San Diego, and Professor Emeritus of Adult
Education at the University of Helsinki, Finland, where he is also director
of the Center for Research on Activity, Development and Learning
(CRADLE). Engeström is also a visiting professor at Rhodes University
in South Africa and at University West in Sweden. In his work, Engeström
applies and develops cultural–historical activity theory as a framework
for the study of transformations in educational settings, work activities,
and communities. He has done interventionist research in health care
settings for over thirty years. He is known for his theory of expansive
learning and for the methodology of formative interventions, including
the Change Laboratory method. Engeström’s most recent books are
From Teams to Knots: Activity-Theoretical Studies of Collaboration
and Learning at Work (2008), Learning by Expanding: An Activity-
Theoretical Approach to Developmental Research, 2nd Edition (2015),
and Studies in Expansive Learning: Learning What Is Not Yet There
(2016), all published by Cambridge University Press.
 Expertise in Transition
Expansive Learning in Medical Work

YRJÖ ENGESTRÖM
University of Helsinki
and
University of California, San Diego
 University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom
One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia
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79 Anson Road, #06-04/06, Singapore 079906

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521407854
DOI: 10.1017/9781139023009
© Yrjö Engeström 2018
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2018
Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Inc.
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-0-521-40448-8 Hardback
ISBN 978-0-521-40785-4 Paperback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs
for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not
guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
 Contents

Preface page vii

Part I The Theoretical Landscape

1 Toward a New Framework for Understanding Expertise 3

Part II Expertise as Object-Oriented Activity

2 Constructing the Object in the Work Activity of Primary

Care Physicians 35
3 Objects and Contradictions as Drivers of Expert Work 57
4 Spatial and Temporal Expansion of the Object 71

Part III Expertise as Knotworking

5 The Emergence of Knotworking in Medicine 85

6 Knotworking as Expansive Decision-Making 111
7 Knotworking as History-Making 137

Part IV Expertise as Expansive Learning

8 Expansive Visibilization of Medical Work 167

9 Expansive Learning in a Hospital 200
10 The Horizontal Dimension of Expansive Learning 216

v
vi Contents

Part V Toward Collaborative and

Transformative Expertise

11 From Stabilization Knowledge to Possibility Knowledge in

Expert Work 241
12 Expertise in Transition 248

References 257
Index 273
 Preface

This book condenses the lessons and insights I have gained over a period
of 30 years of research and formative interventions in medical work and
expertise. My argument is that our predominant notions of expertise
are foundationally insufficient in the face of the present challenges of an
interconnected and unpredictable world. This book builds a perspective
of transition toward collaborative and transformative expertise. Such a
possibility is made real when practitioners and their clients take actions
informed by this perspective.
Medical expertise has a long history of steadfast individualism on the
one hand and intense collaboration on the other hand. The intense collab-
oration is vividly manifest in surgical operations, such as the one depicted
on the cover of this book. Yet this intense collaboration seldom extends
beyond the walls of the operating theater into today’s fragmented multi-
organizational fields of medical care. In these broader arenas, individu-
alism and compartmentalization prevail.
Medical expertise is also deeply dilemmatic in its relation to change.
Medicine embraces rapid development of new treatments, medications,
and technologies on the one hand. On the other hand, it stubbornly
resists major shifts in the organization of work and reallocation of
resources. The stubborn resistance is vividly manifest in the poor perfor-
mance of medicine in handling chronic illnesses and health problems of
populations living in poverty.
These two dilemmas are so persistent that our very concept of medical
expertise needs to be rebuilt. Cosmetic improvements will not do the job.
The analyses, findings, and ideas presented in this book have emerged in
multiple successive research projects, in collaboration with a good number

vii
viii Preface

of colleagues. I am grateful to Paul Adler, Eeva Ahonen, Tuula Arvonen,

Frank Blackler, Aaron Cicourel, Michael Cole, Ritva Engeström, Jouni
Helenius, Rick Iedema, Anu Kajamaa, Hannele Kerosuo, Kirsi Koistinen,
Päivikki Lahtinen, Päivi Laurila, Kirsti Launis, Kimmo Leppo, Philippe
Lorino, David Middleton, Anna-Liisa Niemelä, Jaana Nummijoki, Kaija
Saarelma, Osmo Saarelma, Tarja Saaren-Seppälä, Annalisa Sannino, Riitta
Simoila, Toomas Timpka, and Hanna Toiviainen. The contributions of
these colleagues range from critical commentaries to collaborative data
collection and joint analyses.
This book reports on the experiences of a number of patients.
Collaborative and transformative medical expertise is continuous negoti-
ation and hybridization of the insights of medical professionals and their
patients. Without patients’ insights, accounts, and actions, medical exper-
tise would at best be merely top-down engineering. I am grateful to the
patients who gave their time and efforts to the research and intervention
projects that form the basis of this book.
This book is dedicated to Annalisa and Jurij Enzo. Our collaboration
and love keep us in transition.
 Part I

THE THEORETICAL LANDSCAPE

 1

Toward a New Framework for

Understanding Expertise

Studies of expertise commonly start out with extraordinary performances,

such as a championship-level chess game. These studies typically con-
clude that the most important factor behind extraordinary skill is huge
amounts of rather repetitive practice. In other words, standard studies
of expertise seek mundane processes and explanations behind extraordi-
nary performances.
In this book I move in the opposite direction. I start out with mundane
performances in health care workplaces. Behind these mundane work
activities I uncover extraordinary potentials and processes that make the
continued flow and ongoing transformation of expert work possible.
In other words, this book is not about universal cognitive mechanisms
supposedly found in the minds of such prototypical lonesome experts as
master chess players or physicists solving well-constrained mathematical
problems. This book looks at expertise as everyday work. Such work is
carried out by mixed groups and communities of people in conditions
where disruptions and unexpected events are the rule rather than the
exception. This means, among other things, that expertise is not limited
to professionals who have received extensive formal training in their
respective fields.
Two classes of mundane events are becoming increasingly pervasive
and “normal,” yet also increasingly difficult to deal with for traditional
studies of expertise. These events are disturbances or breakdowns on
the one hand and rapid transformations in the contents of work, tech-
nologies, and organizational patterns on the other hand. The two are
interconnected. The introduction of novel tasks, technologies, and orga-
nizational patterns often increases the likelihood of disturbances and

3
4 Expertise in Transition

breakdowns – and recurring disturbances often force practitioners and

their management to seek new socio-technical solutions and ways to orga-
nize work (Hirschhorn, 1984; Perrow, 1984; Zuboff, 1988). These events
make it difficult to build expertise on huge amounts of repetitive prac-
tice in relatively stable conditions. The conditions do not remain stable.
Experts must face, diagnose, and resolve novel situations for which they
often have little or no directly applicable prior practice.
These factors create situations in which employees at all levels of the
hierarchy, and increasingly also their clients, face tasks that they find
impossible to solve. There is something curious about this impossibility.
Each individual, including highly educated professionals and managers,
may testify that the situation was clearly beyond his or her control. Yet,
most of those situations are somehow resolved and the work goes on.
Moreover, often none of the persons involved can quite reconstruct or
fully understand what actually happened and how the solution was
found. In other words, people at work somehow go beyond their own
limitations all the time. What makes this possible is a question I try to
answer in this book.

Traditional Approaches to Expertise

During the past few decades, the cognitive foundations of expertise
have been established as a central research theme for cognitive science
and artificial intelligence. Despite – and partly because of – important
achievements in these fields, our understanding of expert thinking and its
formation at work is ready for a major transformation.
There is a pervasive dualism in Western conceptions of human cogni-
tion. The dualism is expressed in a number of related versions: analytical
vs. intuitive; explicit vs. tacit; scientific vs. experiential; paradigmatic vs.
narrative, and so on. Collins (1990, p. 4) characterized the two poles
as “algorithmic” and “enculturational” and observed: “We can contrast
two models of learning: an ‘algorithmic model,’ in which knowledge is
clearly statable and transferable in something like the form of a recipe,
and an ‘enculturational model,’ where the process has more to do with
unconscious social contagion.”
In studies of expertise, the algorithmic or human information-
processing approach was launched by Herbert Simon and his colleagues
in studies of playing chess and solving physics problems (Newell & Simon,
1972; Chase & Simon, 1973; Simon & Simon, 1978). Representative
collections of research continuing and expanding on this tradition include
 Toward a New Framework for Understanding Expertise 5

The Nature of Expertise, edited by Chi, Glaser, and Farr (1988); Toward
a General Theory of Expertise, edited by Ericsson and Smith (1991);
The Psychology of Expertise, edited by Hoffman (1992); Expertise and
Technology, edited by Hoc, Cacciabue, and Hollnagel (1995); The Road
to Excellence, edited by Ericsson (1996); Expertise in Context, edited
by Feltovich, Ford, and Hoffman (1997); The Cambridge Handbook of
Expertise and Expert Performance, edited by Ericsson et al. (2006); and
Development of Professional Expertise, edited by Ericsson (2009).
The emphasis of this approach has shifted somewhat from general
mechanisms of perception, memory, and problem-solving to knowledge-
based and domain-specific issues of expertise. Although the classical
well-constrained domains of chess and physics are still at the core of
experimental research, more recent studies also include laboratory
simulations and even observational field studies of real tasks of profes-
sional practice, chiefly in music, sports, medicine, law, and computer
programming.
In practice, much of this work equates expertise with excellence. In
their introductory chapter, Ericsson and Smith (1991) define the “orig-
inal expertise approach” as seeking to “understand and account for what
distinguishes outstanding individuals in a domain from less outstanding
individuals in that domain” (p. 3). They point out that the approach
focuses on those cases where the outstanding behavior can be attributed
to “relatively stable characteristics of the corresponding individuals”
(p. 3). The traditional study of expertise is basically the identification
of superior and stable individual performances that are reproducible
under standardized laboratory conditions. Given these requirements, it
is no surprise that the most frequently studied form of expert perfor-
mance is memory for meaningful stimuli from a well-constrained task
domain (Ericsson & Smith, 1991, p. 23). Ericsson and Smith summarize
the empirical findings of the human information-processing approach to
expertise as follows:

The superior performance consists of faster response times for the tasks in the
domain, where we include the superior speed of expert typists, pianists, and
Morse code operators. In addition, chess experts exhibit superior ability to plan
ahead while selecting a move. . . . In a wide range of task domains experts have
been found to exhibit superior memory performance. (p. 38)

In the overview of their volume, Glaser and Chi (1988, p. xvii–xx) sum-
marized their view of the central findings of this approach in the form of
seven points: (1) experts excel mainly in their own domain; (2) experts
6 Expertise in Transition

perceive large meaningful patterns in their domain; (3) experts are

fast: they are faster than novices at performing the skills of their domain,
and they quickly solve problems with little error; (4) experts have supe-
rior short-term and long-term memory; (5) experts see and represent a
problem in their domain at a deeper (more principled) level than novices
do; novices tend to represent a problem at a superficial level; (6) experts
spend a great deal of time analyzing a problem qualitatively; (7) experts
have strong self-monitoring skills.
In contrast to the algorithmic approach, the enculturational approach
to expertise sees thinking and knowledge as embedded in social situations,
practices, and cultures. Knowledge and thought cannot be divorced from
their corresponding skills and actions. As Collins (1987, p. 331) points
out, “An apprenticeship, or at least a period of interpersonal interac-
tion, is thought to be the necessary prelude to the transfer of skill-related
knowledge.” The mastery exhibited by an expert is above all tacit and
intuitive. It is based on years of practical experience, not on the teaching
of verbalized concepts and explicit algorithms. A strong formulation of
this approach was put forward by Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus (1986) in
their book Mind over Machine. An early collection of research within
this approach may be found in the volume Knowledge, Skill and Artificial
Intelligence, edited by Göranzon and Josefson (1988). Proponents of this
approach seek philosophical support in the works of Polanyi and in late
Wittgenstein (e.g., Nyíri & Smith, 1988).
The two approaches have often been presented as mutually exclusive
rivals. There is, in fact, a very conspicuous aspect in which they seem to
represent opposing views, namely the explicitness or verbalizability of
expert thinking and knowledge. For Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1986, p. 30),
“an expert’s skill has become so much a part of him that he need be no
more aware of it than he is of his own body.” For Glaser and Chi (1988,
p. xx), “Experts seem to be more aware than novices of when they make
errors, why they fail to comprehend, and when they need to check their
solutions.” Dreyfus and Dreyfus see expert thinking as typically a non-
symbolic process, whereas Glaser and others seem to take some sort of
symbolization for granted.
However, this difference is less absolute than it first seems. Robert
Hamm (1988) points out that the degree of explicitness and verbaliza-
tion, as well as the use of analytical or intuitive modes of thinking, is
dependent on the task at hand. Tasks of solitary problem-solving in a
familiar domain are often accomplished without externally noticeable
symbolic means. Tasks requiring negotiation and agreement among
 Toward a New Framework for Understanding Expertise 7

members of a team can hardly be accomplished without some sort of

explicit symbolic means.
Whatever importance the differences between the two approaches
may have, their fundamental similarities are striking. These similari-
ties have been largely overlooked in the literature, probably because
they are mainly taken as self-evident assumptions by proponents of
both approaches. They may be expressed in the form of three central
propositions. I will formulate these three ideas polemically. The first part
of each proposition is a positive statement; the latter part expresses a neg-
ative implication of the first part.
1. Locus of expertise: Expertise consists of superior and stable indi-
vidual mastery of discrete tasks and skills. The understanding of
expertise does not require that a more encompassing collective
activity be taken as a unit of analysis.
2. Composition of expertise: Within a given domain of knowledge
and practice, expertise is universal and homogeneous, and each
domain is relatively self-sufficient. The aim is to identify “the
expert” in a given field. There is no need to cross boundaries and
build hybrids between substantively different types of expertise
within the given domain, and collaboration across domains is not
a core feature of – but an extension of – expertise.
3. Nature of learning involved in expertise: Expertise is acquired
through internalization of experience, gained gradually by
massive amounts of practice in the stable skills exhibited by the
established masters of the given specialty (the famous novice–
expert continuum). Expertise does not include questioning or
reconceptualizing the skills and knowledge of established masters,
nor the generation of culturally deviant and novel models of
knowing and practice.
These three are core ideas of an individualist view, which depicts the
mind as a solitary, self-sufficient mechanism (see Marková, 1982).
Individualism goes hand in hand with an assumption of a stable status
quo, a reluctance to focus on and conceptualize the creation of new cul-
ture as an ongoing collaborative achievement.
Serious problems in mainstream models of expertise began to surface
in the 1980s and 1990s. A number of studies on expert decision-making
found a pervasive tendency toward overconfidence and compartmentali-
zation in the judgments of experts in various domains. Massive amounts
of experience in no way guarantee an improved ability to deal with
8 Expertise in Transition

uncertainty and probabilistic reasoning tasks (Brehmer, 1980). Experts

often “appear to be mainly interested in how consistent the evidence is
with the hypothesis they are testing and fail to consider its consistency with
[an] alternative hypothesis” (Ayton, 1992, p. 95). Sternberg and Frensch
(1992, p. 197) pointed out that “it is exceedingly difficult to break up and
reorganize an automatized local processing system to which one in all
likelihood no longer even has conscious access.” In a similar vein, Argyris
(1992) coined “skilled incompetence” as the dilemma of professionals. In
an insightful early paper, Shchedrovitskii and Kotel’nikov (1988, p. 58)
summed up the problem that was emerging:

Today, in operating the technical systems we have created, and in the process
of our ever-expanding appropriation of the world around us, we continu-
ally encounter assignments and tasks whose solution is beyond the capacities
of any one person and requires the participation of a large team that includes
representatives of different professions, different scientific disciplines, and
different subjects. However, the coordinated organization of all these people into
one working system has, as a rule, proved impossible: a person’s thinking, orga-
nized by profession and subject, poses obstacles that are difficult to overcome,
and a high level of professionalism interferes with, more than helps to achieve,
joint team effort.

These critiques have continued and expanded. Hatchuel and Weil (1995)
demonstrated the limits of traditional notions of expertise in conditions of
continuous change in organizations. Faulkner, Fleck, and Williams (1998,
p. 22) pointed out that “in order to make sensible and fair decisions,
politicians, managers and (most of all) citizens need to draw not only
on the expertise and tools of scientists and technologists, but also on
crucial social and economic knowledge which technical people gener-
ally lack and/or undervalue.” Martin (1996) presented a set of cases in
which people confronted established experts. Selinger and Crease (2006)
published a collection of philosophical discussions of the limits of exper-
tise. Much of the dissatisfaction with dominant views of expertise was
summed up by Freedman (2010) in his book Wrong: Why Experts Keep
Failing Us – and How to Know When Not to Trust Them.
Finally, there is the ever-popular genre, spanning the years from
Illich (1973) to Susskind and Susskind (2015), of critiquing dominant
forms of expertise as restrictive monopolies of self-serving professions.
Suggested solutions range from Illich’s preindustrial “tools for convivi-
ality” to the supposedly liberating impact of postindustrial digital tech-
nologies, promising to make expert knowledge accessible to everybody.
Predictably, these critiques have generated a countercritique that argues
 Toward a New Framework for Understanding Expertise 9

that the denigration of expertise is a threat that leads to populism and

irrationalism (Nichols, 2017).

Going Beyond Individualism and Stability in the Study of Expertise

In the early 1990s, Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991) opened what
was to become a multifaceted stream of discussions and studies on situ-
ated learning. They suggested that the proper unit of analysis of skilled
human activity is a community of practice rather than an isolated indi-
vidual. Skill, knowledge, and competence reside in local working commu-
nities, not in transportable packages or in the heads of individual subjects.
They also suggested that the foundational mechanism of becoming com-
petent in a domain is legitimate peripheral participation in a relevant
community of practice rather than transmission of knowledge in school-
like forms. Legitimate peripheral participation may best be observed in
various settings of apprenticeship.
Two years later, Carl Bereiter and Marlene Scardamalia (1993)
published a book titled Surpassing Ourselves. They also criticized
strictly individualist notions of expertise and suggested that teamwork
should be taken seriously as a variety of expertise. More important, they
suggested that expertise should be reconceptualized as a process of going
beyond the normal course of learning, as progressive problem-solving.
According to these authors, experts “tackle problems that increase their
expertise, whereas nonexperts tend to tackle problems for which they do
not have to extend themselves” (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1993, p. 78).
Instead of trying to reduce novel problems to simple components that
can be handled with familiar routine procedures, experts construct new
concepts and methods for unfamiliar cases.
In 1995, Edwin Hutchins published a book titled Cognition in the
Wild. He maintained that cognition in real-world settings is typically not
a solitary achievement of an individual but a distributed achievement of
a functional system consisting of human practitioners, their artifacts, and
their representations. Cognitive performance such as expert problem-
solving is best analyzed as the propagation of representational states
across humans and artifacts in a functional system, for example, in a unit
responsible for the navigation of a large ship or in the cockpit of a pas-
senger jet. The acquisition of expertise takes place as members of such
distributed functional systems gradually acquire a broader and more flex-
ible mastery of the task domain for which the system is responsible, and
as the system itself adapts to changing circumstances.
10 Expertise in Transition

Figure 1.1. Early landmarks in practice-based studies of expertise.

The three books are important landmarks of a wave of research

and theorizing that opened up a new practice-based perspective on
expert work and cognition. This wave was continued and enriched by
Engeström and Middleton (1996), Keller and Keller (1996), Grint and
Woolgar (1997), Wenger (1998), Heath and Luff (2000), John-Steiner
(2000), Luff, Hindmarsh, and Heath (2000), Engeström, Lompscher, and
Rückriem (2005), and others. We might talk about a turn to collective,
culturally situated practices of expertise.
The contributions of Lave and Wenger, Bereiter and Scardamalia, and
Hutchins may be characterized with the help of a two-dimensional con-
ceptual space depicted in Figure 1.1. The vertical dimension represents
the locus of expertise, ascending from the traditional cognitivist notion of
the sphere of an isolated individual to the sphere of a team or functional
system, to a community of practice – and potentially all the way up to
a field of multiple interacting communities dealing with partially shared
objects and tasks.
Along this vertical dimension, Bereiter and Scardamalia (1993) stayed
closest to the traditional emphasis on the individual expert. Hutchins
(1995) focused on relatively well-bounded functional systems or teams,
 Toward a New Framework for Understanding Expertise 11

while Lave and Wenger (1991) discussed at least potentially larger

and more diverse communities of practice. None of the three seriously
addressed the possibility that expertise might be located and distributed
in the sphere of fields of multiple interacting activity systems.
In this book, I approach expertise as an increasingly multi-sited phe-
nomenon in which various forms of movement, boundary crossing, trans-
lation, and negotiation are of central importance. The need for multi-sited
and mobile research has been emphatically acknowledged, if not often
practiced, in ethnography (Marcus, 1998; Newman, 1998; Burawoy,
2000), as well as in organizational and management literature, which
in the 1990s radically shifted its emphasis onto multi-organizational
partnerships and alliances (Alter & Hage, 1993; Huxham, 1996; Doz
& Hamel, 1998; Hargrove, 1998; Sarason & Lorentz, 1998; Sullivan,
1998; Spekman, Isabella, & MacAvoy, 2000). It is time to expand studies
of expertise to encompass this sphere. Perhaps more important, exper-
tise needs to be understood as movement among the spheres depicted in
Figure 1.1.
The horizontal dimension in Figure 1.1 represents key processes in
the formation and performance of expertise. The traditional cognitivist
notion of transmission of procedural and propositional knowledge and
tacit skill through massive amounts of repetitive practice is depicted
as the left end of the axis. Lave and Wenger as well as Hutchins took
apprenticeship-like learning or “legitimate peripheral participation” in
fairly stable settings as the foundational process, largely leaving aside
issues of radical change, creation, and expansion in expert work and
cognition. Bereiter and Scardamalia focused on “progressive problem-
solving,” which takes the expert beyond the given task and procedures.
However, the sphere of progressive problem-solving was conceptualized
as continual improvement of performance in a given world rather than as
questioning and changing the world itself.
Again, a curious lag may be observed. Organizational and manage-
ment literature has for quite some time been preoccupied with the per-
vasive challenge of radical, discontinuous change (e.g., Kotter, 1996;
Brown & Eisenhardt, 1998; Kanter, 1989; Beer & Nohria, 2000). This
book will expand the analysis of expertise into processes of learning that
involve practitioners facing and shaping such radical transformations
at work. We may call this challenge “learning what is not yet there”
(Engeström, 2016).
After the emergence of the new wave epitomized by the works of Lave
and Wenger, Bereiter and Scardamalia, and Hutchins, conceptualizations
12 Expertise in Transition

of expertise have evolved in several promising directions. One of these is

represented by studies of naturalistic decision-making (Hoffman, 2007a;
Mosier & Fischer, 2011), which increasingly seeks to understand “what
happens when domain practitioners are forced, for one reason or another,
to work outside of their comfort zone” (Hoffman, 2007b, p. 3). Although
promising, these studies predominantly rely on relatively traditional ana-
lytical approaches and tools such as cognitive task analysis (CTA), which
offer little in terms of theoretical resources for extending the units of
analysis beyond the individual.
Another important strand of recent research stems from sociology
and builds on the notion of interactional expertise (Collins & Evans,
2007; Gorman, 2010). Interactional expertise is defined as “the ability
to master the language of a specialist domain in the absence of prac-
tical competence” (Collins & Evans, 2007, p. 14). The theory of interac-
tional expertise tackles the challenge of bridging expert knowledge and
lay knowledge:

As well as being needed in some approximate form by successful participatory

sociologists, ethnographers, and social anthropologists, mastery of interactional
expertise is also the goal of specialist journalists; it is needed by salespersons and,
as we will argue, by managers; it is often the medium of specialist peer review
in funding agencies and journal editing . . . it is the medium of interchange in
properly interdisciplinary, as opposed to multidisciplinary, research; . . . finally,
on those occasions when activists or other concerned persons are driven to it, it
can be the medium of interchange between scientists and groups of the public.
(Collins & Evans, 2007, pp. 31–32)

Interactional expertise has been intensely criticized and debated (Collins &
Evans, 2002; Jasanoff, 2003; Rip, 2003; Wynne, 2003). For the purposes of
this book, Figure 1.1 offers a framework for identifying major limitations
of the theory of interactional expertise. First of all, in the theory of inter-
actional expertise, the individual remains the carrier of expertise. This
renders the theory rather uninteresting from the point of view of exam-
ining collectives as loci of expertise. Second, interactional expertise is
depicted as an intermediate level or stage in a basically linear progres-
sion, from “no expertise” to “contributory expertise” (Collins & Evans,
2002, p. 254), and the acquisition of interactional expertise is defined
as “linguistic socialization” (Collins, Evans, & Gorman, 2010, p. 12)
or “immersion in the discourse of the community” (Evans & Collins,
2010, p. 53). In other words, the theory of interactional expertise is also
quite traditional in its understanding of learning. In strictly separating
language and practice, it even reduces apprenticeship-like learning to a
 Toward a New Framework for Understanding Expertise 13

purely linguistic exercise: “It provides no access to other parties’ material

culture except insofar as that material culture is represented in discourse”
(Collins, Evans, & Gorman, 2010, p. 12).
From the point of view adopted in this book, the most interesting
new development in studies of expertise may be found in the work of
Edwards (2010) on relational expertise. Although partly building on the
idea of interactional expertise, Edwards goes beyond its linguistic bias
in putting the objects and practices of expert work in the center of her
analyses. At the same time, Edwards seems to be deliberately ambiguous
about the locus of expertise and notes: “My own work . . . is at a middle
layer of relational action, located between the system and the individual”
(Edwards, 2010, p. 140). In a similar vein, she takes an ambiguous stance
with regard to the horizontal dimension of Figure 1.1, the nature of
learning in expertise. Edwards states that her primary concern “is not
with the system and how it changes” but “with practices, how they are
navigated and negotiated, questioned and developed” (p. 5). In other
words, learning is seen as not only internalization of the given culture
but also as externalization and change (p. 67), but change seems to be
primarily limited to small-scale shaping of specific actions and practices.
Finally, a number of recent studies have focused on knowledge-sharing
among professional experts (Styhre, 2011), on structures of scientific
collaboration across organizational boundaries (Shrum, Genuth, &
Chompalov, 2007), and on learning in large-scale collaborative projects
(Boisot et al., 2011). Along with efforts to theorize interactional and rela-
tional expertise, these studies point to the need to expand our under-
standing of expertise by extending our movement along the axes of
Figure 1.1.
Expansive movement along the two axes of Figure 1.1 points toward
the possibility of collaborative and transformative expertise. Analysis
and practical cultivation of such movement requires strong theoretical
frameworks. This book presents and uses cultural-historical activity
theory and, more specifically, the theory of expansive learning, as such
a framework.

Activity Theory as a Framework

Above, I identified three central assumptions behind traditional approaches
to expertise. These have to do with the locus of expertise, the composi-
tion of expertise, and the nature of learning involved in expertise. The
implications of cultural–historical activity theory may be summarized
14 Expertise in Transition

Figure 1.2. The structure of a human activity system (Engeström, 2015, p. 63).

as an alternative set of assumptions related to these three issues. The

first part of each proposition is a positive statement, and the latter part
expresses a negative implication of the first part.
1. Locus of expertise: Expertise resides in object-oriented collective
activity systems mediated by cultural instruments. Expertise cannot
be meaningfully reduced to individual competency.
2. Composition of expertise: Expertise is inherently heterogeneous
and increasingly dependent on crossing boundaries, generating
hybrids, and forming alliances across contexts and domains. There
is no universally valid, homogeneous, self-sufficient expertise.
3. Nature of learning involved in expertise: Expertise is increasingly
faced with the challenge of radical transformations that require
culturally novel solutions and learning about what is not yet there.
Practice and emulation of established masters alone cannot meet
today’s demands for transformative expertise.
In activity theory, a collective, artifact-mediated, and object-oriented
activity system, seen in its network relations to other activity systems, is
taken as the prime unit of analysis. Goal-directed individual and group
actions and action clusters, as well as automatic operations, are rela-
tively independent but subordinate units of analysis, eventually under-
standable only when interpreted against the background of entire activity
systems. Activity systems realize and reproduce themselves by generating
actions and operations. The dynamic structure of an activity system can
be depicted with the help of Figure 1.2.
The uppermost sub-triangle of Figure 1.2 may be seen as the “tip of
the iceberg” representing individual and group actions embedded in a
collective activity system. The object is depicted with the help of a circle
 Toward a New Framework for Understanding Expertise 15

Figure 1.3. Two interacting activity systems as a minimal model for the third
generation of activity theory (Engeström, 2001, p. 136).

indicating that object-oriented actions are always, explicitly or implicitly,

characterized by ambiguity, surprise, interpretation, sense-making, and
potential for change. There are multiple mediations in an activity system.
The subject and the object, or the actor and the environment, are medi-
ated by instruments, including material tools as well as signs, symbols,
and representations of various kinds. The less visible social mediators of
activity – rules, community, and division of labor – are depicted at the
bottom of the model. Among the components of the system, there are
continuous transitions and transformations. The activity system inces-
santly reconstructs itself.
Today activity theory develops conceptual tools to understand dia-
logue, multiple perspectives, and networks of interacting activity systems.
A constellation of at least two interacting activity systems is frequently
used as an extended unit of analysis (Figure 1.3).
In Figure 1.3, the object moves from an initial state of unreflected,
situationally given “raw material” (e.g., a specific patient entering a
physician’s office) to a collectively meaningful object constructed by the
activity system (e.g., the patient constructed as a specimen of a biomed-
ical disease category and thus as an instantiation of the general object of
illness/health), and moves to a potentially shared or jointly constructed
object (e.g., a collaboratively constructed understanding of the patient’s
life situation and care plan). The object of activity is a moving target, not
reducible to conscious short-term goals. In the following chapters, I will
time and again return to elaborate on the concept of object, perhaps the
most challenging theoretical construct of activity theory.
Activity systems are heterogeneous, multi-voiced formations. An
activity system is a community of multiple points of view, traditions, and
interests. The division of labor in an activity creates different positions
for the participants; the participants carry their own diverse histories,
16 Expertise in Transition

and the activity system itself carries multiple layers and strands of history
engraved in its artifacts, rules, and conventions. The multi-voicedness is
multiplied in networks of interacting activity systems. It is a source of
trouble and a source of innovation, demanding actions of translation and
negotiation.
Activity systems take shape and get transformed over lengthy periods
of time. Their problems and potentials can only be understood against
their own history. History itself needs to be studied as local history of
the activity and its objects, and as history of the theoretical ideas and
tools that have shaped the activity. Thus, medical work needs to be ana-
lyzed against the history of its local organization and against the more
global history of the medical concepts, procedures, and tools employed
and accumulated in the local activity.
Contradictions are the prime source of change and development in
activity systems. Contradictions are not the same as problems or conflicts.
Contradictions are historically accumulating structural tensions within
and between activity systems. An activity system is constantly working
through tensions and contradictions within and among its elements.
Contradictions show themselves in disturbances, often taking the shape
of discursive manifestations such as dilemmas, conflicts, and double binds
(Engeström & Sannino, 2011). In this sense, an activity system is a virtual
disturbance-producing machine.
The primary contradiction of activities in capitalism is that between
the use value and exchange value of commodities. This primary contra-
diction pervades all elements of our activity systems. The work activity of
general practitioners in primary medical care may serve as an illustration.
The primary contradiction, the dual nature of use value and exchange
value, can be found by focusing on any of the elements of the physician’s
work activity. For example, the instruments of this work include a tre-
mendous variety of medications and drugs. But they are not just useful
devices for healing – they are commodities with prices, manufactured for
a market, advertised and sold for profit. Every doctor faces this contra-
diction in his or her daily decision-making, in one form or another.
Activities are open systems. When an activity system adopts a new ele-
ment from the outside (for example, a new technology or a new object),
this often leads to an aggravated secondary contradiction where some
old element (for example, the rules or the division of labor) collides with
the new one. Such secondary contradictions generate disturbances and
conflicts, but also innovative attempts to change the activity. The stiff hier-
archical division of labor lagging behind and preventing the possibilities
 Toward a New Framework for Understanding Expertise 17

opened by advanced instruments is a familiar example. A typical sec-

ondary contradiction in the work activity of general practitioners is the
tension between traditional biomedical instruments for diagnosis and
classification on the one hand and the increasingly ambivalent and com-
plex nature of the object – that is, of patients’ problems and symptoms –
on the other hand. Patients’ problems often do not comply with the
standards of classical diagnosis and nomenclature. They require an inte-
grated social, psychological, and biomedical approach, which may not
yet exist.
Contradictions are not just inevitable features of activity. They are
“the principle of its self-movement and . . . the form in which the devel-
opment is cast” (Ilyenkov, 1977, p. 330). This means that new qualitative
stages and forms of activity emerge as solutions to the contradictions of
the preceding stage or form. This in turn takes place in the form of “invis-
ible breakthroughs,” innovations from below. Ilyenkov (1982) notes:

In reality it always happens that a phenomenon which later becomes universal

originally emerges as an individual, particular, specific phenomenon, as an excep-
tion from the rule. It cannot actually emerge in any other way. Otherwise history
would have a rather mysterious form. Thus, any new improvement of labour,
every new mode of man’s action in production, before becoming generally
accepted and recognised, first emerge[s] as a certain deviation from previously
accepted and codified norms. Having emerged as an individual exception from
the rule in the labour of one or several men, the new form is then taken over by
others, becoming in time a new universal norm. If the new norm did not origi-
nally appear in this exact manner, it would never become a really universal form,
but would exist merely in fantasy, in wishful thinking. (pp. 83–84)

Activity systems move through relatively long cycles of qualitative

transformation. As the contradictions of an activity system are aggra-
vated, some individual participants begin to question and deviate from
its established norms. In some cases, this escalates into collaborative
envisioning and a deliberate collective change effort. An expansive trans-
formation is accomplished when the object and motive of the activity
are reconceptualized to embrace a radically wider horizon of possibilities
than in the previous mode of the activity. A full cycle of expansive trans-
formation may be understood as a collective journey through the zone
of proximal development of the activity, which is “the distance between
the present everyday actions of the individuals and the historically new
form of the societal activity that can be collectively generated as a solu-
tion to the double bind potentially embedded in the everyday actions”
(Engeström, 2015, p. 138; italics in the original).
18 Expertise in Transition

Standard theories of learning are focused on processes in which a sub-

ject acquires some identifiable knowledge or skills in such a way that a
corresponding relatively lasting change in behavior may be observed. It
is a self-evident presupposition that the knowledge or skill to be acquired
is itself stable and reasonably well-defined and that there is a competent
“teacher” or authority who knows what is to be learned.
Many of the most intriguing kinds of learning in work organizations vio-
late this presupposition. People and organizations continually learn some-
thing that is not stable, not even defined or understood ahead of time. In
important transformations of our personal lives and organizational practices,
we must learn new forms of activity that are not yet there (Engeström, 2016).
They are literally learned as they are being created. There is no competent
teacher, or there are many competing ones. Standard learning theories have
little to offer if one wants to understand these processes.
Gregory Bateson’s (1972) theory of learning is one of the few
approaches helpful for tackling this challenge. Bateson distinguished
among three levels of learning. Learning I refers to conditioning, acquisi-
tion of the responses deemed correct in the given context – for instance,
the learning of correct answers in a classroom. Bateson points out that
wherever we observe Learning I, Learning II also is going on: people
acquire the deep-seated rules and patterns of behavior characteristic of
the context itself. Thus, in classrooms, students learn the “hidden curric-
ulum” of what it means to be a student: how to please the teachers, how
to pass exams, how to belong to groups, etc. Often the context bombards
participants with contradictory demands. Even the seemingly self-evident
tension of school instruction – be active and take initiative versus be quiet
and follow the instructions – may generate a double bind with explosive
consequences (Hœg, 1994; Engeström, 1996). Such pressures can lead
to Learning III, where a person or a group begins to radically question
the sense and meaning of the context and to construct a wider alterna-
tive context. Learning III is essentially a collective endeavor. As Bateson
points out, processes of Learning III are rare and dangerous: “Even the
attempt at Level III can be dangerous, and some fall by the wayside.
These are often labeled by psychiatry as psychotic, and many of them
find themselves inhibited from using the first-person pronoun” (Bateson,
1972, pp. 305–306).
Bateson’s conceptualization of Learning III was a provocative pro-
posal, not an elaborated theory. The theory of expansive learning develops
Bateson’s idea into a systematic framework. Learning III is seen as learning
activity that has its own typical actions and tools. The object of expan-
sive learning activity is the entire activity system in which the learners are
 Toward a New Framework for Understanding Expertise 19

Figure 1.4. The expansive learning cycle.

engaged. Expansive learning activity produces culturally new patterns of

activity. Expansive learning at work produces new forms of work activity.
The theory of expansive learning is based on the dialectics of ascending
from the abstract to the concrete. This is a method of grasping the essence
of an object by tracing and reproducing the logic of its development, of
its historical formation through the emergence and resolution of its inner
contradictions. A new theoretical idea or concept is initially produced in the
form of an abstract, simple explanatory relationship, a germ cell. This initial
abstraction is enriched and transformed step-by-step into a concrete system of
multiple, constantly developing manifestations (Engeström, Nummijoki, &
Sannino, 2012). In an expansive learning cycle (Figure 1.4), the initial simple
idea is transformed into a complex object, into a new form of practice. At the
same time, the cycle produces new theoretical concepts – theoretically grasped
practice – concrete in systemic richness and multiplicity of manifestations.
The expansive cycle begins with individual subjects questioning the
accepted practice, and it gradually expands into a collective movement or
institution. In this framework, abstract refers to partial, separated from
the concrete whole. In empirical thinking based on comparisons and
classifications, abstractions capture arbitrary, only formally interconnected
properties. In dialectical-theoretical thinking, based on ascending from the
abstract to the concrete, an abstraction captures the smallest and simplest,
genetically primary unit of the whole functionally interconnected system
(see Ilyenkov, 1977; Davydov, 1990; Falmagne, 1995).
The task of this book is to examine and test the explanatory power
of these basic tenets and concepts of activity theory as a framework for
20 Expertise in Transition

understanding expertise. The theoretical principles and concepts are

themselves further elaborated in the empirical chapters that follow.

Toward a Developmental Methodology

Ethnographic and cognitive studies of work have taken important steps
forward in recent years. Powerful microlevel methodologies and theo-
ries such as ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and distributed
cognition have been developed. However, a nagging question sometimes
arises (e.g., Randall, Hughes, & Shapiro, 1993; Rogers, 1997): What
difference do these studies make in practice? In this vein, Grudin and
Grinter (1994) wrote about the ethnographers’ deep professional bias
against intervention,

Although ethnographers know that introducing technology disrupts work, they

are not trained to invent organizations, to assess the costs of change, or to deter-
mine the likelihood of successful adoption. And even change that some would
regard as positive might be questioned by ethnographers. (pp. 56–57)

After examining the problem in some detail, Rogers (1997, p. 69)

drew the following conclusion: “It is time for a change. Rather than
always take a backseat role, researchers need to become more proac-
tive in their involvement with the people and objects of their study. This
means engaging more in an ongoing dialogue with the various groups
of people working or designing together (i.e., the users, the managers,
and the designers).” Rogers emphasized that such ongoing dialogue is
informal and opportunistic, moving with the ebb and flow of the tide of
obstacles, problems, and developments. She observed that this form of
proactive research “does not lend itself to any formalization” (Rogers,
1997, p. 72). Rogers emphasized that the researcher should refrain from
explicit recommendations. The researcher was depicted as a mediator
and facilitator. Rogers seemed to enjoy having noticed that “there was
even a joke at the end of this process – that the company could usefully
employ me as a secretary to type up the lists [of problems experienced by
the workers]” (Rogers, 1997, p. 71).
The basic stance described by Rogers is of course not new. It is
common to many variations of action research (Reason & Bradbury,
2008), including the Scandinavian version called “democratic dialogue”
(Toulmin & Gustavsen, 1996). From my perspective, informal and
opportunistic dialogue is an unsatisfactory alternative to the delivery
of packaged prescriptions by managers, designers, and consultants.
 Toward a New Framework for Understanding Expertise 21

Remaining a mediator or secretary without substantive input based on

rigorous analysis of the activity and its history is too modest an alterna-
tive to decontextualized principles and guidelines.
The dichotomy of obtrusive prescription from above versus minimal
informal facilitation is actually quite prevalent in the available micro-
level approaches. Ethnographic studies have traditionally been preoc-
cupied with observing and understanding stable orders, routines, and
repeatable procedures. The issue of change has been relatively alien to
them. In this regard, they seem to be inherently handicapped in dealing
with the turbulent worlds of work and technology.
In this book, I argue for a reconceptualization of the possible role
of research in facilitating practical change. Ambitious interventions
require an ambitious theory. At the core of any intervention is the
question of development. Developmental theorizing has been largely
avoided by ethnographers, possibly fearing deterministic and evolutionist
implications. In the face of the pervasive and often dramatic changes
going on in workplaces, such avoidance amounts to hiding one’s head
in the sand.
In the view advocated in this book, development is local qualitative
reorganization or re-mediation of activity systems that attempts to resolve
their inner contradictions. Development goes on in the activity systems
we study; they have their own developmental dynamics. Decontextualized
prescriptions typically lead to solutions alien to the local activity system’s
developmental dynamics and are thus rejected or unpredictably altered
in practice.
This would seem to support the minimalist approach suggested by
Rogers (1997). However, there is nothing untouchable or sacred about
local developmental dynamics. On the contrary, outside influences from
neighboring systems constantly enter into the local systems and trigger
novel developmental processes. It is this very triggering that is particu-
larly interesting for researchers curious about developmental potentials.
Why do some outside influences lead to dramatic expansions while others
stagnate and die away? Why is the yield of some small interventions tre-
mendous, while many large-scale interventions lead to miserable results?
Cultural-historical activity theory suggests that the answer is closer
than we often realize. Dig where you stand. In other words, “to under-
stand how a practice may enable or disable, how it may figure in develop-
ment, we must know its social history” (Modell, 1996, p. 488).
Although history helps us uncover the contradictions and potentials
of an activity system, it does not tell us how those contradictions are
22 Expertise in Transition

to be resolved. Modell (1996, p. 492) notes: “ ‘Development’ is a direc-

tional notion, an idea concerned not with contingent behavior alone
(however processually conceived) but with origins and destinations, with
transformations assessed in view of ‘potential’ and thus teleological. . . .
Change does not merely accrete.”
In the approach advocated here, the direction of development – “Which
way is up?” – is an issue of local negotiation and struggle. Research aims
at developmental re-mediation of activities. In other words, research
makes visible and pushes forward the history and contradictions of the
activity under scrutiny, challenging the actors to appropriate and use new
conceptual tools to analyze and redesign their own practice. The norma-
tive or teleological determination of the desirable direction is viewed as a
mundane performance, accomplished by people on daily basis. Thus, it is
not something that researchers should fear and shy away from. Instead,
the mundane accomplishment of directionality can be made explicit. This
means that the different voices involved in the determination of direction,
including the voices of the researchers, are identified, and clashes among
them are regarded as an opportunity to move toward a clearer view of the
contradictions. Such an approach does not eliminate the power relations
and constraints at play, but it helps to demystify them and potentially to
rearrange them by capitalizing on gray areas of uncertainty.
These gray areas of uncertainty or “underdetermination” may
be opened up if we reconceptualize our very notion of development
(Engeström, 1996). Instead of just benign achievement of mastery,
development also should be viewed as a partially destructive rejection
of the old. Disturbances and ruptures involving negation, rejection, and
destruction are often the first decisive indications of significant devel-
opmental processes. Furthermore, instead of just vertical movement
toward higher levels of performance or mastery in some domain, devel-
opment should be also viewed as horizontal movement across borders.
In other words, developmental transformations always involve shifts
among contexts and new combinations of contexts. The transforma-
tion of an activity system is never an isolated process; it also means
redefinition of its boundaries and thus renegotiation of its external
relationships.
This view implies that ethnography is not in itself a sufficient or privi-
leged method. Yet ethnography is definitely needed. More specifically, we
need a new kind of developmental ethnography in studies of work and
other activities. Such a developmental ethnography of collective activity
systems must be particularly attuned to recording and analyzing troubles
 Toward a New Framework for Understanding Expertise 23

and disturbances, as well as innovative deviations from the normal

scripted course of action.
From the point of view of mainstream social science, there are two
essentially moral arguments against interventionist research. The conser-
vative moral argument says that the active involvement of the researcher
spoils objectivity by mixing the researcher’s values into the processes to
be recorded and interpreted neutrally. The radical moral argument says
that interventions in workplaces unavoidably benefit capital and man-
agement, making the researcher actually an instrument of exploitation.
Both of these are arguments for purity.
A more calm variant of the anti-interventionist stance insists on
the lack of generalizability of the findings as the criterion that makes
interventions questionable, and prescientific in the best case. It is said that
in altering the status quo, intervention by definition creates an exception,
a unique case that cannot be used as a basis of generalization.
The common statistical view regards as general only such features that
exist in sufficiently great quantities in a given representative pool of data.
Features not exceeding the given limits are considered accidental and not
significant. In effect, this procedure attributes significance only to features
that have already become prevalent.
There is, however, an alternative view of generalization. The alterna-
tive was demonstrated by Karl Marx. As is well known, he claimed that
the industrial working class would play a decisive role in the political and
economic development of nations. When he was writing the first volume
of Capital, the working class of the most industrialized nation, England,
made up only about 8% of the population. From a statistical point of
view, Marx’s claim seemed to be nonsense. History proved otherwise.
In the alternative perspective advocated in this book, generaliza-
tion is seen as the material process of becoming general of an emerging
new foundational relation – a germ cell of a new form of practice. The
researchers’ task is to identify and conceptualize those budding new
relations or germ cells, to help them unfold and become visible, and to
record and support their generalization in practice. In other words, devel-
opmental research based on activity theory constructs and tests in prac-
tice historical hypotheses concerning zones of proximal development of
the activity systems under scrutiny.
For this type of developmental research, a methodology of forma-
tive interventions is needed (Engeström, 2011; Engeström, Sannino, &
Virkkunen, 2014). Formative interventions differ from predominantly
linear interventions in that the desired outcomes are not known ahead
24 Expertise in Transition

of time or dictated by the interventionist. The participants analyze the

history, the disturbances, and the contradictions of their own activity; they
construct a vision of its zone of proximal development; and they design a
new concept and model for the activity. In other words, the participants
engage in an expansive learning effort. This can be supported and guided
by a method such as the Change Laboratory, specifically created for the
purpose of fostering expansive learning (Sannino, Engeström, & Lemos,
2016; Sannino & Engeström, 2017).

Why Medical Expertise?

The objects of medical work changed dramatically after World War II. As
infectious and parasitic diseases have increasingly come under control,
the prevalence of chronic illnesses has increased. Chronic illnesses include
cancers, cardiovascular illnesses, renal diseases, respiratory diseases,
diabetes, arthritis, and severe allergies. These illnesses require what
Wiener, Fagerhaugh, Strauss, and Suczek (1984, p. 14) called “halfway
technologies,” medical interventions applied after the fact in an attempt
to compensate for the incapacitating effects of a disease whose course
one is unable to do much about. They noted:

That these illnesses cannot be “cured” but must be “managed” makes them
different in many respects from acute illnesses, the model around which health
care was traditionally built. A brief look at the salient qualities of chronic illness
makes the differences apparent. Chronic illnesses are uncertain: their phases are
unpredictable as to intensity, duration, and degree of incapacity. Chronic illnesses
are episodic: acute flare-ups are followed by remissions, in many ways restricting
a “normal” life. Chronic illnesses require large palliative efforts: symptomatic
relief (from pain, dizziness, nausea, etc.) is often as necessary as the overall pro-
gress of treatment. Chronic illnesses are often multiple: long-term breakdown of
one organ or physical system leads to involvement of others. One fact becomes
obvious: halfway technologies are not only prolonging life but are stretching out
the illness trajectories. By trajectories we mean not just the physical course of
illness but all the work that patients, staff, and kin do to deal with the illness, and
all the social/psychological consequences that encircle the illness course. (Wiener,
Fagerhaugh, Strauss, & Suczek, 1984, pp. 14–15)

One of the consequences is that patients move constantly between home

and various caregivers. “They cycle through the hospital, then go to the
clinic or doctor’s office, return home, go back to the hospital during acute
episodes, and again back to their homes. The problems of coordinating
the care given in the hospital, clinic, and home become immense” (ibid.,
p. 15). The authors concluded that the inability to cope with chronic
illness stems largely from the “standard categorical-disease perspective”
 Toward a New Framework for Understanding Expertise 25

dominant in industrialized countries. This perspective directs public

attention and allocation of funds to the fight against specific illnesses,
such as heart disease, cancer, HIV, and AIDS. But it also feeds competition
and fragmentation among health specialists and specialties, and diverts
attention away from the organization of collaborative care around actual
human beings, who are typically suffering not just from a single well-
bounded disease but from a complex bundle of illnesses and symptoms
(ibid., p. 35).
A chronically ill patient typically becomes an object for a number
of physicians, each viewing the patient from the perspective of his or
her own specialty. Each specialty tends to assert the primacy of its own
interest, and to lose interest when the main responsibility is assigned to
another specialty. Bensman and Lilienfeld (1991) observed:

Primary-care physicians . . . become the mediators between specialists. Since they

are less specialized than the consultants, they are not likely to be able to assert
their interest in the patient as a totality. Nor are they able to defend the interests
of the patient in the face of more knowledgeable and prestigious specialists.
This phenomenon within medicine is likely to result in what physicians call
“Ping-Ponging” the patient. The patient is the Ping-Pong ball, and the players
may be a group of specialists who bounce a patient from one to the other. They
may hope that a satisfactory diagnosis will emerge that transcends the individual
specialties of the collected assemblage of individuals and specialists. The injunc-
tion of colleagueship may result in all other consultants allowing one to “test” his
diagnosis before the others, who will have their turn in due course. In the mean-
time, the effect of continuous tests, diagnostic procedures, and examinations may
be as painful and as life-threatening as the disease itself. (Bensman & Lilienfeld,
1991, p. 219)

The multiplying nature of chronic illness further complicates the issue.

The plurality of specialists are all likely to be attracted to the symptom or condi-
tion that takes on a primacy because of their own specialty. And so multiple and
often conflicting treatments are prescribed. The drugs used may also counteract
one another, or produce negative synergistic effects. (ibid., p. 220)

These basic observations should make it clear why medicine is a highly

relevant domain for analyzing the challenge of collaborative and trans-
formative expertise. Their importance is accentuated by ongoing large-
scale organizational transformations in health care, namely the formation
of multi-organizational strategic alliances and “integrated healthcare
systems.” Scott, Ruef, Mendel, and Caronna (2000) comment:
Alliances are preferred because they eliminate much of the need for capital invest-
ment or organizational restructuring while at the same time allow independent
organizations to coordinate their efforts formally. Alliances provide the primary
26 Expertise in Transition

foundation for the rapid development of “integrated healthcare systems” – the

newest form of choice in the medical world. These “systems” are, at present,
highly diverse, some combining only service units, others including purchasers,
financing mechanisms, and/or physicians; some are built around hospitals as their
central units, others around physician or medical groups. Their organizational
connections may involve vertical or horizontal integration, or combinations of
a wide variety of looser linking mechanisms – “virtual” integration – including
contracts, exclusive or preferred relationships, alignment of incentives, and inte-
grated information systems. (p. 15)

Scott et al. (2000, p. 355) conclude that “much of the interest and com-
plexity of today’s healthcare arena, compared with its condition at mid-
century, is due not simply to the numbers of new types of social actors
now active but also to the multiple ways in which these actors have
become interpenetrated and richly connected.” Medical work is not only
about treating patients and finding cures anymore. It is increasingly about
reorganizing and reconceptualizing care across professional specialties
and institutional boundaries. This challenge of “clinical integration” is
not easily accomplished. As Shortell et al. (2000, p. 69) state, “overall,
clinical integration for the management of people with chronic illness is
still largely a promise in search of performance.”
Historically, health care has evolved into myriad disease-oriented
specializations based in hospitals. They are complemented by primary
care clinics, charged with speedy treatment of nonserious routine medical
problems and with screening and referring forward potentially serious
cases. This has led to a dilemma. What is left in the shadows is a diffuse
but evidently growing portion of patients experienced by doctors as dif-
ficult, demanding, or complex (see, e.g., Rogers, Hassell, & Nicolaas,
2001). These patients are not usually difficult in the traditional sense of
the biomedical “seriousness” or diagnostic difficulty of their illness. Often,
though not always, they have a history of very frequent consultations, or
what may be labeled as “excessive use” of health care services.
Some authors argue that these patients, so-called heartsink cases, are
difficult in their attitudes and relations to physicians (O’Dowd, 1988).
Using the frequency of consultations as their criterion, Gill and Sharpe
(1999) conducted a careful literature review of relevant studies and
found little evidence for the heartsink stereotype. Instead, they found
that this heterogeneous group of patients has high rates of physical dis-
ease, psychiatric illness, and social difficulties. Patients with both physical
and psychiatric disorders, medical–psychiatric comorbidity, were much
more common among frequent consulters than among normal attenders.
One prototype is a combination of chronic physical disease (e.g., type 2
 Toward a New Framework for Understanding Expertise 27

diabetes) and various other more or less chronic conditions, including

psychiatric disorders and problems of unhealthy lifestyle.
Both traditional specialty-oriented medical thinkers and neoliberal
market-oriented reformers in health care tend to marginalize and exclude
this poorly understood but increasingly important group of patients,
turning them into “rubbish” that practitioners try to avoid and get rid of
(Mizrahi, 1986; Engeström & Blackler, 2005). On the other hand, many
payment schemes may actually push these patients to multiple parallel
strands of poorly coordinated specialist care when a continuous relation-
ship with a general practitioner in primary care would actually be the
best solution for the patient.
In any case, the triple phenomenon of increasing chronic illness,
increasing life expectancy, and increasing comorbidity is a virtual eco-
nomic time bomb in industrialized countries (Georgeson et al., 2005;
Thrall, 2005). In their careful study, Starfield et al. (2005) found a very
high salience of comorbidity, or multimorbidity, in the care of elderly
patients in the United States. The central role of primary care physicians
in the care of chronic conditions is increasingly recognized in principle,
but Starfield et al. (2005) found that it was common for specialists to
play a major role in the care of many patients with comorbid conditions
and observed:
There may be legitimate questions about the need for specialist care. Because
specialists are more likely than generalists to suspect serious abnormalities, they
are more likely to do extensive and unnecessary procedures. . . . Inappropriate use
of specialists could contribute to explaining why costs are higher in areas with a
greater number of specialists, even though there is no improvement in outcomes
among the elderly. (p. 221)

In other words, there is a real and growing set of contradictions cen-

tered around patients with multiple chronic illnesses (comorbidity,
multimorbidity), who tend to be either marginalized as nuisances or
pushed to fragmented and expensive specialist care. This emerging object
requires new forms of collaborative and transformative expertise.
At the same time, as one of the oldest, most prestigious, and most
carefully protected professions, medicine carries within its very identity
a tremendous historical ballast of individualism, compartmentalization,
and hierarchical authority.
Medical sociology has largely been a captive of this ballast. As
Atkinson (1995, p. 34) points out, we know next to nothing “about the
myriad interactions – some fleeting and informal, others more formally
contrived – through which medical practitioners consult one another,”
28 Expertise in Transition

and there is far too little research on how medical practitioners from
different specialties cooperate or compete in the management of partic-
ular conditions. In Atkinson’s words, “the contemporary sociological
literature all too often portrays a solitary craft worker, who makes no
use of other experts (ibid. p. 34).” Studies of interprofessional care (e.g.,
Kvarnström, 2008; Reeves et al., 2009; Nugus et al., 2010; Supper et al.,
2015) show that the involvement of multiple caregivers is still typically
depicted as an extension of existing expertise, not as a qualitatively new
challenge that requires rethinking our very idea of expertise.
While an increasing number of researchers now at least acknowledge
the need to study medical work as multi-sited and collaborative, there is
minimal awareness of the need to study how practitioners and patients
cope with, shape, and create transformations in their work. Stability
is still the dominant tacit assumption in ethnographic and discourse-
analytic studies of medical work, as well as in cognitive studies of medical
decision-making and problem-solving.
However, the world of health care is in turmoil. Although significant
vestiges of individual craft professionalism still persist, the main forms
of organizing health care today are the hierarchical bureaucracy typ-
ical to public health care systems on the one hand and market-driven
care typical of private and mixed systems of health care on the other
hand. The former is collectively oriented but inflexible and resistant to
change; the latter is agile and flexible but oriented to the maximization of
profit for owners and enterpreneur practitioners. Some authors, notably
Adler, Kwon, and Heckscher (2008) and Maccoby (2006), argue that it
is possible to combine collectivity and flexibility by building collabora-
tive communities of medical work. Adler, Kwon, and Heckscher (2008,
p. 368) note: “The leitmotif of the new form of professionalism is col-
laborative interdependence. A growing number of hospitals are drawing
physicians into collaboration with nurses and other hospital staff to
improve cost-effectiveness and quality, often bringing together previously
siloed departments in the process.” This picture of health care as a field of
struggles and uncertainty (Figure 1.5) calls for transformative expertise –
willful agentic action to shape the future. It is a roadmap for building and
following the argument of this book.

The Method and Structure of the Book

This book is built on data and insights gained in successive projects
of research and formative interventions in health care activity systems
in Finland from the late 1980s to 2017. However, the book does not
 Toward a New Framework for Understanding Expertise 29

Figure 1.5. Health care as a field of uncertainty and struggle.

proceed in temporal order from the earliest studies to the most recent
ones. The chapters of the book are organized to generate a coherent,
empirically grounded conceptual framework for understanding collab-
orative and transformative expertise. In other words, this book is not a
narrative of research unfolding in time. It is a grounded proposal for a
theoretical framework and a vision for development.
The book was written over a lengthy period of time, in multiple cycles
of reanalyzing and reinterpreting the rich published and unpublished
materials produced in successive research projects. The reports from these
successive studies served as data for this book. The writing of the book
resembled work at a potter’s wheel. The reports from completed research
projects represented the wet clay, and the multiple rounds of reinterpre-
tation and reorganization of the material represented the repeating circular
movement of the wheel. The crucial issue is the eventual final shape of the
emerging pot: Will it be functional? Will it be beautiful? Here I find affinity
with the points on method made by the historian Eric Hobsbawm (1977):
What we need, both to make sense of what the inarticulate thought [is] and to
verify or falsify our hypothesis about it, is a coherent picture, or, if you prefer the
term, a model. . . . What we must normally do is to put together a wide variety
30 Expertise in Transition

of often fragmentary information; and to do that we must, if you’ll excuse the

phrase, construct the jigsaw puzzle ourselves, that is work out how such infor-
mation ought to fit together. . . . He [the researcher] must in a way know what he
is looking for and, only if he does, can he recognize whether what he finds fits
in with his hypothesis or not; and if it doesn’t, try to think of another model.
(p. 277)

What eventually became my working hypothesis and model is graphi-

cally represented in the four-field Figures 1.1, 1.5, 12.1, and 12.2. These
variations of the general working hypothesis are elaborated on, exam-
ined, and enriched in the nine substantive chapters of parts II, III, and
IV of the book. These chapters necessarily include some repetition and
overlap. The argument is built piece by piece like a jigsaw, or woven like
a textile with reoccurring themes and patterns.
Part II (Chapters 2 to 4) of the book focuses on the idea of collective
activity systems as loci of collaborative and transformative expertise.
Chapter 2 introduces the foundational concept of object as the center-
piece and driving force of medical work activity. It shows that the object
of medical work – the patient and the patient’s medical problem – is
constructed differently by different practitioners. This diversity is com-
plicated by the often radically different constructions of the object by the
physician and the patient. These differences are a call for joint articula-
tion and elaboration. In other words, differences cannot be eliminated;
they need to be made visible so that the different parties can find common
ground and take advantage of their differences.
Chapter 3 identifies linearization and lateralization as two qualita-
tively different strategies physicians use in constructing their objects.
Lateralization involves seeking connections among the patient’s problems.
The chapter shows that this strategy often meets with difficulties stemming
from the systemic contradictions in medical work. Contradiction emerges
as a foundational aspect of activity systems. Change and development
take place as emergence and resolution of contradictions within and
among activity systems.
Chapter 4 explores the temporal and socio-spatial expansion of
the object of medical work. In the temporal dimension, medical work
is increasingly faced with longitudinal care relationships and trajecto-
ries instead of only compact visits and episodes of care. In the socio-
spatial dimension, the object is increasingly difficult to compress into
what happens inside the walls of the doctor’s office or the clinic. As
chronic patients drift and move among multiple caregiver locations, the
object begins to encompass complex distributed networks of care. These
 Toward a New Framework for Understanding Expertise 31

transitions call for new instrumentalities that allow practitioners and

patients to grasp the expanding object.
Part III (Chapters 5 to 7) of the book examines knotworking as an
emerging form of organizing and fostering collaborative expertise.
Chapter 5 introduces the concept of knotworking, understood as rap-
idly pulsating, distributed, and partially improvised orchestration of
collaborative performance among otherwise loosely connected actors
and activity systems. The chapter argues that, supported by appropriate
instruments, knotworking can be deliberately cultivated. However, it will
also collide with the deep-seated division of labor perpetuating solo per-
formance and the equally persistent rule of solo responsibility among
medical practitioners.
Chapter 6 analyzes distributed medical decision-making in a
knotworking context. Decision-making actions are examined with
the help of the dimensions of expansion, now including the moral–
ideological dimension and the systemic–developmental dimension along
with the socio-spatial and temporal dimensions. Decision-making in a
knotworking context emerges as transformative negotiation among the
involved parties.
Chapter 7 discusses knotworking as history-making. When experts
and their clients or patients come together in episodes of knotworking,
they typically need to not only solve a practical problem but also to recon-
figure some of their own ways of working. The analysis of a knotworking
session indicates that such history-making is effective when practical,
consequential actions and future-oriented imagination occur in parallel
and enrich one another. In other words, bringing together the making
of specific decisions and bold modeling of more general new patterns of
practice is an important challenge and quality of knotworking.
Part III (Chapters 8 to 10) of the book analyzes expansive learning
as a key to transformative expertise. Chapter 8 approaches expansive
learning as deliberate attempts at making hidden aspects of work visible.
Such expansive visibilization moves from registering disturbances in indi-
vidual practitioners’ everyday work actions, to modeling the collective
activity system and its contradictions, and back to making redesigned
work actions and the entire reconfigured activity system visible.
Chapter 9 traces steps in an expansive learning cycle conducted in
a children’s hospital. The cycle is examined through the lens of four
questions: Who is learning? Why does learning happen? What is
learned? How does learning happen? I show that expansive learning is
also a process of horizontal or sideways learning in which a new concept
32 Expertise in Transition

of activity is formed through debates and shifts among alternative

conceptualizations.
Chapter 10 elaborates further on the horizontal dimension of expan-
sive learning. Drawing on the idea of cognitive trails, the chapter
demonstrates how expansive learning takes shape as renegotiation and
reorganization of collaborative relations and practices among and within
the activity systems involved.
Part IV (Chapters 11 and 12) of the book concludes and draws
together the analyses and arguments for collaborative and transformative
expertise. Chapter 11 points out that besides the dominant categorizing–
stabilization kind of knowledge, experts increasingly need dynamic pos-
sibility knowledge that takes the form of actionable models, visions, and
projections toward the future. Chapter 12 summarizes the perspective of
collaborative and transformative expertise as a zone of proximal devel-
opment for the development of expertise. It needs to be made real by
deliberate actions that articulate and concretize it.
 Part II

EXPERTISE AS OBJECT-ORIENTED ACTIVITY

 2

Constructing the Object in the Work Activity

of Primary Care Physicians

What is the object of your work? If you were asked this question, you
would probably hesitate awhile before answering. You might demand
that I tell you first what I mean by object. You might ask whether I am
interested in the objective – or goal – of your work. In general, you would
have a hard time formulating an answer.
Let us take a simple example. The blacksmith (subject) uses a hammer
(instrument) to mold a piece of iron (object). So the piece of iron is the
object. But at one moment the piece of iron is a shapeless chunk, at
another moment it is an identifiable, socially meaningful entity. Object
is both “anything presented to the mind or senses” and “an end or aim”
(Webster’s Dictionary, 1987, p. 257). So the object is both something
given and something projected or anticipated. This very duality of the
meaning of the term indicates that the concept of object carries in it the
processual, temporal, and historical nature of all objects. Objects are
objects by virtue of being constructed in time by human subjects. This in
no way diminishes their reality and materiality. But despite its materiality,
an unknown particle or a mineral in a rock is not an object for us before
we somehow make it our object – by imagining, by hypothesizing, by
perceiving, naming, and acting on it (Smith, 1996).
The construction of objects is more complicated than it seems. The
blacksmith cannot mold his or her object without tools. And the use of
tools already implies the creation and use of secondary instruments: signs
and models for representing, storing, guiding, transmitting, and commu-
nicating the procedures of tool use – what Rabardel and Waern (2003)
call “instrumental genesis.” Lektorsky (1984) observes:

35
36 Expertise in Transition

In the objects cognized, man singles out those properties that prove to be essential
for developing social practice, and that becomes possible precisely with the aid
of mediating objects carrying in themselves reified socio-historical experiences of
practical and cognitive activity. . . . In other words, the instrumental man-made
objects function as objective forms of expression of cognitive norms, standards,
and object-hypotheses existing outside the given individual. (p. 137)

In other words, objects are not constructed individually and arbitrarily.

They are constructed with the help of and under the influence of histor-
ically accumulated collective experience, fixated and embodied in medi-
ating artifacts.
The basic paradox of object construction has to do with the crea-
tion of the new. lf we construct objects only by looking through and
working with artifacts made by our predecessors, how can we ever see
and make anything truly new, qualitatively different from the inherited
standards? “By creating novel mediating artifacts,” one might answer.
As Lektorsky (1984, p. 142) points out, this means that the mediating
artifacts are taken as objects themselves, and “in this case they cease to
be mediators and assume the construction of a new system of mediator
objects, embodying the knowledge about them.” So the result is a circular
argument, not a solution to the paradox.
All this has practical relevance in today’s expert work activities. As
Leont’ev (1978; 1981) emphasizes, the true motive of activity is its object.
The motive of the blacksmith’s work activity resides in the iron – in the
societal meanings and relations embodied and molded in each piece of
iron the blacksmith makes his or her object. The notion of alienation
implies that the workers, the subjects of work activity, cannot construct
the object of their work as a meaningful motive.
The separation of ownership and the practical productive use of the
means of production, interwoven with an intricate division of labor
and the increasing abstractness of the object, make motive construc-
tion exceedingly difficult in many complex work organizations. And it
is seldom possible to revitalize traditional motives simply because the
object of work – what is actually produced and for what kind of uses –
must be continuously questioned and redesigned under market, techno-
logical, and legislative pressures.
ln the following pages, I examine the construction of the object in the
work activity of general practitioners in a health center. The research on
which this chapter is based was conducted in the municipal health center
of the city of Espoo in Finland. The health stations of the center served
the population as providers of primary health care services, which were
 Constructing the Object for Primary Care Physicians 37

at the time of the data collection free of charge, and presently are for
a small fee. At the time of the collection of our data, the services were
organized so that each inhabitant of the city could in principle use any
of the ten stations and any of the physicians working at those stations.
We videotaped 85 randomly chosen patient consultations at two stations,
one employing 10 general practitioners, the other employing 6. Together
these two stations formed a service district of the municipal health center.
After the videotaping, the patient and the doctor separately viewed the
videotape and gave a stimulated recall interview, interpreting the events
of the consultation and commenting upon them.

The Dual Viewpoints of the Doctor and the Patient

From the point of view of the physician, the object of activity is connected
to the patient. The patient is the initial physical carrier and embodiment
of the object, in whatever way the object is subsequently delineated and
conceptualized. The patient is the raw material, the perceptual-concrete
immediate appearance of the object. In every encounter, this raw mate-
rial is first transformed into a meaningful pattern of important features,
selected and arranged with the help of a more or less consciously used
mediating model. This selective meaningful pattern is subsequently used
as the basis for choosing examinations and therapeutic measures, leading
to a temporary or relatively permanent outcome – supposedly some sort
of an improvement in the health of the patient. This cycle may be repeated
at varying intervals and within different time scales, as Zerubavel (1979)
has shown.
For the patient, the object is different. The perceptual-concrete raw
material is pain: a feeling of ill health, worry, or more generally, sensu-
ously experienced problems or symptoms. The doctor looks at the patient
from the outside; the patient senses and experiences problems inside her-
self or himself. Both have quite different raw materials to start with. The
patient also transforms the raw material into some kind of a meaningful
pattern. She or he tries to make sense of the problem by using inter-
nalized or otherwise available culturally accumulated models. These are
seldom similar to those used by the doctor. Finally, the meaningful pattern
functions as the basis of the patient’s practical actions upon the problem.
Both the doctor and the patient use models as mediating artifacts in
relating to the object. In medical sociology and anthropology, the notion
of mediating models was pioneered by Kleinman (1980). He differen-
tiated between “general beliefs about sickness and health care” and
Other documents randomly have
different content
whose name is still held in veneration as the founder of Guy’s
Hospital, was the son of a coalheaver and lighterman. Very early he
seems to have contracted most frugal habits. According to Nichols,
he dined every day at his counter, with no other table-cloth than an
old newspaper; and he was quite as economical in his dress. In
order to get a frugal helpmate, he asked his servant-maid to become
his wife. The girl, of course, was delighted, but presumed too much
on her influence over her careful lover. One day, seeing that the
paviers, repairing the street in front of the house, had neglected a
broken place, she called their attention to it; but they told her that
Guy had carefully marked a particular stone, beyond which they
were not to go. “Well,” said the girl, “do you mend it; tell him I bade
you, and I know he will not be angry.” However, Guy was, and the
marriage did not take place. As a bachelor, Guy lived to a ripe old
age. The cost of building Guy’s Hospital was £18,793, end he left
£219,499 as an endowment. He left also money to Tamworth, his
mother’s birthplace, which he represented in parliament for many
years; £400 a-year to Christ’s Hospital, and £8,000 to his relative.—
Robert Dodsley, who made a handsome fortune as a publisher,
commenced life as a footman.—The far-famed Lackington was the
son of a drunken cobbler at Wellington, and had no education at all.
Loafing about the streets all day as a child, he thought he might turn
his talents to account by crying pies, and as a pie-boy he acquired
such a pre-eminence that he was soon engaged to vend almanacs.
At fourteen he left this vagrant life to be apprenticed to a
shoemaker. He came to London with half-a-crown and a wife; but in
time he scraped together £25, and started in business in Chiswell
Street. His plan was to sell for ready money, and at low prices. He
then bought remainders of books which were generally destroyed,
and thus he made a fortune. On his chariot, when he started one,
he put for his motto, “Small profits do great things.” Again, he was
very fond of repeating, “I found all I possess in small profits, bound
by industry, and clasped with economy.”
Few have done better than the Chamberses, of Edinburgh. After
months of pence-scraping and book-hoarding, Robert succeeded in
collecting a stock worth about fifty shillings; and with nothing but
these and his yearnings for independence, and his determination to
write books by-and-by, but at present to sell them, he, at the age of
sixteen, opened a little shop—a stall—in Leith Street. His brother
William also started as a bookseller and printer in the same
neighbourhood.
William Chambers was born in Peebles, April 16th, 1800; and Robert,
coming next in order in the family, was born July 10th, 1802. The
father carried on the hereditary trade of the manufacture of woollen
and linen clothes. The grandfather held the office of elder of his
church for the last thirty years of his existence. The grandmother
was a little woman of plain appearance, a great stickler on points of
controversial divinity, a rigorous critic of sermons, and a severe
censor of what she considered degenerating manners. The mother
was a beauty, and her pretty face led her into an alliance which, in
the end, could have been productive of little happiness. Mr.
Chambers speaks of his father as “accurate, upright, aspiring in his
tastes and habits, with a fund of humour and an immense love of
music.” He made some progress in science. “Affected, like others at
the time, with the fascinating works of James Fergusson on
astronomy, he had a kind of rage for that branch of study, which he
pursued by means of a tolerably good telescope, in company with
Mungo Park, the African traveller, who had settled as a surgeon in
Peebles, and one or two other acquaintances.” The failing of his
father was his pliancy of disposition. He was cheated with his eyes
open. For such men worldly ruin is only a question of time. In a
little while the family were driven from Peebles, and William had to
fight the battle of life on his own account. His education, which
closed when he was thirteen, had been by no means an expensive
one. Books included, it had cost somewhere about sis pounds. For
this he was well grounded in English. The most distressing part of
his school exercises consisted in learning by heart the catechism of
the Westminster Assembly of Divines—a document which he tells us
it was impossible for any person under maturity to understand, or to
regard in any other light than as a torture. In the case of the two
brothers there was a curious malformation. They were sent into the
world with six fingers on each hand, and six toes on each foot. By
the neighbours this was considered lucky. In the case of William,
the superfluous members were easily removed. It was not so with
Robert. The supernumerary toes on the outside of the foot were
attached to or formed part of the metatarsal bones, and were so
badly amputated as to leave delicate protuberances, calculated to be
a torment for life. This unfortunate circumstance, by producing a
certain degree of lameness and difficulty in walking, no doubt helped
to make Robert the studious and thoughtful man he was. Thus,
indisposed to boyish sports, his progress in education was rapid.
Indeed as William confesses, he was left far behind. In 1813, the
family difficulties came to a head, and an emigration from Peebles to
the gude auld town of Edinburgh was necessitated. Henceforth the
mother seems to have been the head of the family. Chambers
senior seems to have been a bit of an incumbrance. Poor
themselves, they were surrounded by companions in misfortune.
Widows of decayed tradesmen, teachers in the decline of life too old
to teach, licensed preachers to whom an unkind fate had denied all
church preferments, genteel unmarried women who had known
better times, and who had now to eke out a precarious existence by
colouring maps, or sewing fine needlework for the repository. This
little pauperised colony, clinging as it were on to the skirts of
respectability, was located on flats in that part of Edinburgh where
rents were not of the highest, nor the houses of the grandest
architectural character. Here they met with noteworthy individuals,
and here William found his first situation as a bookseller’s assistant,
with the magnificent salary of four shillings a-week. Lad as he was,
William then laid down a resolution, which was not only heroical,
considering the depressed circumstances of his family, which may
not only be held up as an example to others, but which laid most
assuredly the foundation of his success in after-life. “From
necessity,” he tells us, “not less than from choice, I resolved to make
the weekly four shillings serve for everything. I cannot remember
entertaining the slightest despondency on the subject.” For a lad of
fourteen thus to resolve, showed that he had the right spirit to
conquer circumstances, and to win an old age of respectability and
renown. As at this time his father was appointed commercial
manager of a salt manufactory, called Joppa Pans—a smoky, odorous
place, consisting of a group of buildings situated on the sea-shore,
half-way between Portobello and Musselburgh—William was left by
himself in Edinburgh to do the best he could. Of course he went to
lodge with a Peebles woman, and was surrounded by a host of
Peebleshire people, whose delight in the evening was to call up
reminiscences of texts, and preachers, and sermons, and to discuss
Boston’s “Marrow,” the “Crook in the Lot,” and the “Fourfold State.”
It is to be feared we have not much improved on this. Such modes
of spending the evening were certainly quite equal to the modern
ones of frequenting music-halls, or of reading some of the trash now
issued from the press. We must add that William Chambers had
read Franklin’s autobiography, and had imbibed somewhat of his
spirit. It is thus that a good, genuine book goes on bearing fruit. It
is thus a good example tells in all strata of society. It is thus the life
of one man is a blessing in all after time. William Chambers all the
while pursued with more or less diligence his studies. He always
rose at five in the morning to have a spell at reading. In the same
way he made some progress in French, with the pronunciation of
which he was already familiar, from the speech of the French
prisoners of war in Peebles. He likewise dipped into several books of
solid worth, such as Smith’s “Wealth of Nations,” Locke’s “Human
Understanding,” Paley’s “Moral Philosophy,” and Blair’s “Belles
Lettres.” His brother Robert, who had come to live with him, seems
also to have done the same. In 1816, the latter became self-
supporting; he had up to that time continued his studies in the hope
of becoming a clerk or teacher. All hope in that direction, fortunately
for himself and his country, was abandoned, and with a few old
books, the remnant of the family library, he started in the world as a
second-hand bookseller in Leith Walk. It was in 1819 that William
did the same—having left his employers—with five shillings in his
pocket, to which sum his weekly wages had latterly been
considerately advanced. Unfortunately, Robert had cleared out the
family stores, and there was no stock-in-trade with which William
could furnish his scanty shelves. He was so fortunate, however, as
to get a limited amount of credit from a London publisher of cheap
standard literature, and thus he began a career of which he or any
one else might well be proud. Bookselling by itself, however, was
not sufficient; he tried caligraphy; he taught himself bookbinding; he
mastered the art of printing; he became a publisher. His first book,
of course, was a cheap edition of Burns’ Songs.
Such is an outline of the career of the brothers. Then comes the old
story of success, of literary and business renown, of happy domestic
life, and of the end of all. Both brothers were indefatigable writers.
“Altogether,” writes William, “as nearly as can be reckoned, my
brother produced upwards of seventy volumes, exclusively of
detached papers, which it would be impossible to enumerate.” His
whole writings had for their aim the good of society, the
advancement, in some shape or other, of the true and the beautiful.
“It will hardly be thought,” he modestly and affectionately adds,
“that I exceed the proper bounds of panegyric in stating that, in the
long list of literary compositions of Robert Chambers, we see the
zealous and successful student, the sagacious and benevolent
citizen, and the devoted lover of his country.” A similar eulogium
may be pronounced on William himself.
Robert Chambers, the younger brother, thus makes us acquainted
with his evening studies while a lad at his native town of Peebles:—
“Among that considerable part of the population who lived down
closes and in old thatched cottages, news circulated at third or
fourth hand, or was merged in conversation on religious or other
topics. My brother and I derived much enjoyment, not to say
instruction, from the singing of old ballads, and the telling of
legendary stories, by a kind old female relative, the wife of a
decayed tradesman, who dwelt in one of the ancient closes. At her
humble fireside, under the canopy of a huge chimney, where her
half-blind and superannuated husband sat dozing in a chair, the
battle of Corunna and other prevailing news was strangely mingled
with disquisitions on the Jewish wars. The source of this interesting
conversation was a well-worn copy of L’Estrange’s translation of
Josephus, a small folio of date 1720. The envied possessor of the
work was Tam Fleck, ‘a flichty chield,’ as he was considered, who,
not particularly steady at his legitimate employment, struck out a
sort of profession by going about in the evenings with his Josephus,
which he read as the current news; the only light he had for doing
so being usually that imparted by the flickering blaze of a piece of
parrot coal. It was his practice not to read more than from two to
three pages at a time, interlarded with sagacious remarks of his own
by way of foot-notes, and in this way he sustained an extraordinary
interest in the narrative. Retailing the matter with great equability in
different households, Tam kept all at the same point of information,
and wound them up with a corresponding anxiety as to the issue of
some moving event in Hebrew annals. Although in this way he went
through a course of Josephus yearly, the novelty somehow never
seemed to wear off.
“‘Weel, Tam, what’s the news the nicht?’ would old Geordie Murray
say, as Tam entered with his Josephus under his arm, and seated
himself at the family fireside.
“‘Bad news, bad news,’ replied Tam. ‘Titus has begun to besiege
Jerusalem—it’s gaun to be a terrible business;’ and then he opened
his budget of intelligence, to which all paid the most reverential
attention. The protracted and severe famine which was endured by
the besieged Jews was a theme which kept several families in a
state of agony for a week; and when Tam in his readings came to
the final conflict and destruction of the city by the Roman general,
there was a perfect paroxysm of horror. At such séances my brother
and I were delighted listeners. All honour to the memory of Tam
Fleck.”
We must again quote from Robert’s reminiscences the following
characteristic anecdotes of the grandmother of the Chamberses:—
“She possessed a good deal of ‘character,’ and might also be taken
for the original of Mause Headrigg. As the wife of a ruling elder, she
possibly imagined that she was entitled to exercise a certain
authority in ecclesiastical matters. An anecdote is told of her having
once taken the venerable Dr. Dalgliesh, the parish minister, through
hands. In presence of a number of neighbours, she thought fit to
lecture him on that particularly delicate subject, his wife’s dress: ‘It
was a sin and a shame to see sae mickle finery.’
“The minister did not deny the charge, but dexterously encouraged
her with the Socratic method of argument: ‘So, Margaret, you think
that ornament is useless and sinful in a lady’s dress?’
“‘Certainly I do.’
“‘Then, may I ask why you wear that ribbon around your cap? A
piece of cord would surely do quite as well.’
“Disconcerted with this unforeseen turn of affairs, Margaret
determinedly rejoined in an under-tone: ‘Ye’ll no hae lang to speer
sic a like question.’
“Next day her cap was bound with a piece of white tape; and never
afterwards, till the day of her death, did she wear a ribbon, or any
morsel of ornament. I am doubtful if we could match this out of
Scotland. For a novelist to depict characters of this kind, he would
require to see them in real life; no imagination could reach them.
Sir Walter Scott both saw and talked with them, for they were not
extinct in his day.
“The mortifying rebuff about the ribbon perhaps had some influence
in making my ancestress a Seceder. As she lived near the manse, I
am afraid she must have been a good deal of a thorn in the side of
the parish minister, notwithstanding all the palliatives of her good-
natured husband, the elder. At length an incident occurred which
sent her abruptly off to a recently-erected meeting-house, to which
a promising young preacher, Mr. Leckie, had been appointed.
“It was a bright summer morning, about five o’clock, when Margaret
left her husband’s side as usual, and went out to see her cow
attended to. Before three minutes had elapsed, her husband was
aroused by her coming in with dismal cries: ‘Eh, sirs! eh, sirs! did I
ever think to live to see the day? O man, O man, O William—this is
a terrible thing, indeed! Could I ever have thought to see’t?’
“‘Gracious, woman!’ exclaimed the worthy elder, by this time fully
awake, ‘what is’t? is the coo deid?’ for it seemed to him that no
greater calamity could have been expected to produce such doleful
exclamations.
“‘The coo deid!’ responded Margaret; ‘waur, waur, ten times waur.
There’s Dr. Dalgliesh only now gaun hame at five o’clock in the
morning. It’s awfu’, it’s awfu’! What will things come to?’
“The elder, though a pattern of propriety himself, is not recorded as
having taken any but a mild view of the minister’s conduct, more
particularly as he knew that the patron of the parish was at Miss
Ritchie’s inn, and that the reverend divine might have been detained
rather late with him against his will. The strenuous Margaret drew
no such charitable conclusions. She joined the Secession
congregation next day, and never again attended the parish church.”
We now pass on to Mr. William Chambers. He gives us a capital
picture of an old Edinburgh book auction:—
“Peter was a dry humorist, somewhat saturnine from business
misadventures. Professedly he was a bookseller in South College
Street, and exhibited over his door a huge sham copy of Virgil by
way of sign. His chief trade, however, was the auctioning of books
and stationery at the agency office—a place with a strong smell of
new furniture, amidst which it was necessary to pass before arriving
at the saloon in the rear, where the auctions were habitually held.
Warm, well-lighted, and comfortably fitted up with seats within a
railed enclosure, environing the books to be disposed of, this place
of evening resort was as good as a reading-room—indeed, rather
better, for there was a constant fund of amusement in Peter’s caustic
jocularities—as when he begged to remind his audience that this
was a place for selling, not for reading books—sarcasms which
always provoked a round of ironical applause. His favourite author
was Goldsmith, an edition of whose works he had published, which
pretty frequently figured in his catalogue. On coming to these works
he always referred to them with profound respect—as, for example:
‘The next in the catalogue, gentlemen, is the works of Oliver
Gooldsmith, the greatest writer that ever lived, except Shakspeare;
what do you say for it?—I’ll put it up at ten shillings.’ Some one
would perhaps audaciously bid twopence, which threw him into a
rage, and he would indignantly call out: ‘Tippence, man; keep that
for the brode,’ meaning the plate at the church-door. If the same
person dared to repeat the insult with regard to some other work,
Peter would say: ‘Dear me, has that poor man not yet got quit of his
tippence?’ which turned the laugh, and effectually silenced him all
the rest of the evening. Peter’s temper was apt to get ruffled when
biddings temporarily ceased. He then declared that he might as well
try to auction books in the poor-house. On such occasions, driven to
desperation, he would try the audience with a bunch of quills, a
dozen black-lead pencils, or a ‘quare’ of Bath-post, vengefully
knocking which down at the price bidden for them, he would shout
to ‘Wully,’ the clerk, to look after the money. Never minding Peter’s
querulous observations further than to join in the general laugh, I,
like a number of other penniless youths, got some good snatches of
reading at the auctions in the agency office. I there saw and
handled books which I had never before heard of, and in this
manner obtained a kind of notion of bibliography. My brother, who,
like myself, became a frequenter of the agency office, relished Peter
highly, and has touched him of in one of his essays.”
A wealthy old man was Hutton, of Birmingham, who thus describes
his early struggles to set up in business as a bookbinder:—
“A bookbinder, fostered by the frame, was such a novelty that many
people gave me a book to bind, chiefly my acquaintances and their
friends, and I perceived two advantages attend my work. I chiefly
served those who were not judges; consequently, that work passed
with them which would not with a master. And coming from a
stockinger, it carried a merit, because no stockinger could produce
its equal.
“Hitherto I had only used the wretched tools and the materials for
binding which my bookseller chose to sell me; but I found there
were many others wanting, which were only to be had in London;
besides, I wished to fix a correspondence for what I wanted, without
purchasing at second-hand. There was a necessity to take this
journey; but an obstacle arose—I had no money.
“My dear sister raised three guineas; sewed them in my shirt collar,
for there was no doubt of my being robbed, and put eleven shillings
in my pocket, for it was needful to have a sop to satisfy the rogues
when they made the attack. From the diminutive sum I took, it may
reasonably be supposed I should have nothing left to purchase.
“On Monday morning at three, April 8th, I set out. Not being
accustomed to walk, my feet were blistered with the first ten miles.
I must not, however, sink under the fatigue, but endeavour to
proceed as if all were well; for much depended on this journey.
Aided by resolution I marched on.
“Stopping at Leicester, I unfortunately left my knife, and did not
discover the loss till I had proceeded eleven miles. I grieved,
because it was the only keepsake I had of my worthy friend, Mr.
Webb. Ten times its value could not have purchased it. I had
marked it with ‘July 22, 1742, W. H.’
“A mile beyond Leicester I overtook a traveller with his head bound.
‘How far are you going?’ he asked. ‘To London,’ replied I. ‘So am I.’
‘When do you expect to arrive?’ ‘On Wednesday night.’ ‘So do I.’
‘What is the matter with your head?’ said I; ‘have you been
fighting?’ He returned a blind answer, which convinced me of the
affirmative. I did not half like my companion, especially as he took
care to walk behind me. This probably, I thought, was one of the
rogues likely to attack me. But when I understood he was a tailor
my fears rather subsided, nor did I wonder his head was wrapped.
“Determined upon a separation, I marched apace for half-an-hour.
‘Do you mean to hold this rate?’ ‘It is best to hold daylight while we
have it.’ I found I could match him at walking, whatever I might do
at fighting. In half-an-hour more we came to a public-house, when
he gave up the contest. ‘Will you step in and drink?’ ‘No, I shall be
moving slowly; you may soon overtake me.’
“I stopped at Brixworth, having walked fifty-four miles, and my
whole expense for the day was fivepence.
“The next night, Tuesday the 9th, I reached Dunstable. Passing over
Finchley Common on the third day, I overtook a carter, who told me
I might be well accommodated at the ‘Horns,’ in St. John’s Street
(Smithfield), by making use of his name. But it happened, in the
eagerness of talking and the sound of his noisy cart, he forgot to tell
his name, and I to ask it.
“I arrived at the ‘Horns’ at five; described my director, whom they
could not recollect. However, I was admitted as an inmate, and then
ordered a mutton-chop and porter; but, alas! I was jaded, had
fasted too long; my appetite was gone, and the chop nearly useless.
“This meal, if it may be called a meal, was the only one during my
stay; and I think the only time I ever ate under a roof. I did not
know one soul in London, therefore could have no invitations. Life is
supported with a little; which was well for me, because I had but
little to give it. If a man has any money he will see stalls enough in
London, which will supply him with something to eat, and it rests
with him to lay out his money to the best advantage. If he cannot
afford butter he must eat his bread without. This will tend to keep
up his appetite, which will always give a relish to food, though
mean; and scantiness will add to that relish.
“Next morning I breakfasted in Smithfield, upon frumenty, at a
wheelbarrow. Sometimes a half-pennyworth of soup and another of
bread; at others bread and cheese. When nature calls, I must
answer. I ate to live.
“If a man goes to receive money it may take him long to do his
business. If to pay money, it will take him less; and if he has but
little to pay, still less. My errand fell under the third. I only wanted
three alphabets of letters, figures, and ornamental tools for gilding
books, with materials (leather and hoards) for binding.
“I wished to see a number of curiosities, but my shallow pocket
forbade. One penny to see Bedlam was all I could spare. Here I
met with a variety of curious anecdotes, for I stayed long, and found
conversation with a multitude of characters. All the public buildings
fell under my eye, which were attentively examined; nor was I
wanting in my inquiries. Pass where I would I never was out of the
way of entertainment. It is reasonable to suppose that everything in
London was new and wonderful to a youth who is fond of inquiry,
but has scarcely seen anything but rags and dung-carts.
Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s, Guildhall, Westminster Hall, &c., were
open to view; also both Houses (of Parliament), for they were
sitting. As I had always applied deification to great men, I was
surprised to see a hawker cram the twopenny pamphlets into a
member’s face, who, instead of caning her, took not the slightest
notice.
“I joined a youth who had business in the Tower, in hopes of
admission; but the warders, hearing the northern voice, came out of
their cells, and seeing dust upon my shoes, reasonably concluded I
had nothing to give, and, with an air of authority, ordered me back.
“The Royal Exchange, the Mansion House, the Monument, the gates,
the churches, many of which are beautiful; the bridges, river,
vessels, &c., afforded a fund of entertainment. I attended at
Leicester House, the residence of Frederick, Prince of Wales—
scraped acquaintance with the sentinels, who told me, had I been
half-an-hour sooner, I should have seen the prince and his family
take coach for an airing.
“Though I had walked 129 miles to London, I was upon my feet all
the three days I was there. I spent half a day in viewing the west
end of the town, the squares, the parks, the beautiful building for
the fireworks, erected in the Green Park, to celebrate the peace of
Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748. At St. James’s I accosted the guard at the
bottom of the stairs, and rather attempted to advance; but one of
them put forward the butt-end of his piece that I might not step
over. At St. James’s, too, I had my pocket picked of a handkerchief,
which caused me to return home rather lighter. The people at St.
James’s are apt to fill their pockets at the expense of others.
“Observing, in one of the squares, the figure of a man on horseback,
I modestly asked a bystander whom it represented? He observed, in
a surly tone, ‘It’s strange you could see nobody else to ask without
troubling me; its George I.’
“I could not forbear mentioning at night, to my landlord at the
‘Horns,’ the curiosities I had seen, which surprised him. He replied,
‘I like such a traveller as you. The strangers that come here cannot
stir a foot without me, which plagues me to that degree I had rather
be without their custom. But you, of yourself, find out more
curiosities than I can show them or see myself.’
“On Saturday evening, April 13th, I set out with four shillings for
Nottingham, and stopped at St. Alban’s. Rising the next morning,
April 14th, I met in the street the tailor with the muffled head, whom
I had left near Leicester. ‘Ah! my friend, what are you still fighting
your way up? Perhaps you will reach London by next Wednesday.
You guessed within a week the first time.’ He said but little, looked
ashamed, and passed on.
“This was a melancholy day. I fell lame, from the sinews of my leg
being overstrained with hard labour. I was far from home, wholly
among strangers, with only the remnant of four shillings. The
dreadful idea operated in fears!
“I stopped at Newport Pagnell. My landlord told me ‘my shoes were
not fit for travelling;’ however, I had no other, and, like my blistered
feet, I must try to bear them. Next day, Monday, 15th, I slept at
Market Harborough, and on the 16th called at Leicester. The
landlady had carefully secured my knife, with a view to return it
should I ever come that way. Reached Nottingham in the afternoon,
forty miles.
“I had been out nearly nine days;—three in going, which cost three
and eightpence; three there, which cost about the same; and three
returning, nearly the same. Out of the whole eleven shillings I
brought four pence back.
“London surprised me; so did the people, for the few with whom I
formed a connection deceived me by promising what they never
performed, and, I have reason to think, never intended it. This
journey furnished vast matter for detail among my friends.
“It was time to look out for a future place of residence. A large
town must now be the mark, or there would be no room for
exertion. London was thought on between my sister and I, for I had
no soul else to consult. This was rejected for two reasons. How
could I venture into such a place without a capital? And how could
my work pass among a crowd of judges? My plan must be to fix
upon some market town within a stage of Nottingham, and open a
shop on the market-day, till I should be better prepared to begin the
world at Birmingham.
“I therefore, in the following February, took a journey to that
populous place, to pass a propable judgment upon my future
success.
“I fixed upon Southwell as the first step of elevation, fourteen miles
distant, a town as despicable as the road to it. I went over at
Michaelmas, took a shop at the rate of 20s. a-year, sent a few
boards for shelves, tools to put them up, and about two hundred
weight of trash, which a bookseller would dignify with the name of
books (and with, perhaps, about a year’s rent of my shop); was my
own joiner, put up the shelves and their furniture, worth, perhaps,
20s., and in one day became the most eminent bookseller in the
place.
“During this wet winter I had to set out at five every Saturday
morning (carrying a burthen of three pounds’ weight to thirty), open
shop at ten, starve in it all day upon bread, cheese, and half a pint
of ale; take from 1s. to 6s., shut up at four, and by trudging through
the deep roads and the solitary night five hours more, arrive at
Nottingham by nine, carrying a burthen from three to thirty pounds,
where I always found a mess of milk porridge by the fire, prepared
by my valuable sister.
“Nothing short of a surprising resolution and rigid economy could
have carried me through this dreadful scene.” But Hutton did not
despair; he lived to a good old age, and was a wealthy man.
The life of Kelly, the London publisher, is full of interest. Thomas
Kelly was born at Chevening, in Kent, on the 7th of January, 1779.
His father was a shepherd, who, having received a jointure of £200
with his wife, risked the capital first in a little country inn, and
afterwards in leasing a small farm of about thirty acres of cold, wet
land, where he led a starving, struggling life during the remainder of
his days. When only twelve years old, barely able to read and write,
young Kelly was taken from school and put to the hard work of the
farm, leading the team or keeping the flock; but he was not strong
enough to handle the plough. The fatigue of this life, and its misery,
were so vividly impressed upon his memory, that he could never be
persuaded to revisit the neighbourhood in after-life; and though at
the time he endeavoured to conceal his feelings from his family, the
bitterness of his reflections involuntarily betrayed his wishes. He
fretted in the daytime until he could not lie quietly in his bed at
night; and early one morning he was discovered in a somnambulent
state in the chimney of an empty bedroom, “on,” as he said, “his
road to London.” After this, his parents readily consented that he
should try to make his way elsewhere, and a situation was obtained
for him in the counting-house of a Lambeth brewer. After about
three years’ service here the business failed, and he was
recommended to Alexander Hogg, bookseller, of Paternoster Row.
The terms of his engagement were those of an ordinary domestic
servant; he was to board and lodge on the premises, and to receive
£10 yearly; but his lodging, or, at all events, his bed, was under the
shop counter.
Alexander Hogg, of 16, Paternoster Row, had been a journeyman to
Cooke, and had very successfully followed the publication of
“Number” books. In the trade he was looked upon as an unequalled
“puffer;” and when the sale of a book began to slacken, he was
wont to employ some ingenious scribe to draw up a taking title, and
the work, though otherwise unaltered, was brought out in a “new
edition,” as, according to a formula, the “Production of a Society of
Gentlemen: the whole revised, corrected, and improved by Walter
Thornton, Esq., M.A., and other gentlemen.”
Kelly’s duties were to make up parcels of books for the retail
booksellers; and his zeal displayed itself even in somnambulism; for
one night, when in a comatose state, he actually arranged in order
the eighty numbers of “Foxe’s Martyrs,” taken from as many different
compartments. He spent all his leisure in study, and soon was able
to read French with fluency, gaining the proper accent by attending
the French Protestant School in Threadneedle Street. The good old
housekeeper, at this time his only friend, was a partaker of all his
studies; at all events, he gave her the benefit of all the more
amusing and interesting matter he came across. His activity, though
it rendered the head shopman jealous, attracted Hogg’s favourable
attention, and the clever discovery of a batch of stolen works still
further strengthened the interest he felt in the serving-boy. The
thieves, owing to the lad’s ingenuity, were apprehended and
convicted, and Kelly had to come forward as a witness. “This was
my first appearance at the Old Bailey; and as I was fearful I might
give incorrect evidence, I trembled over the third commandment.
How could I think, while shaking in the witness-box, that I should be
raised to act as her Majesty’s First Commissioner at the Central
Criminal Court of England?”
Half of his scanty pittance of £10 was sent home to aid his parents;
and as his wages increased, so did his dutiful allowance. In this
situation Kelly remained for twenty years and two months, and at no
time did he receive more than £80 per annum; and it is believed that
when his stipend reached that petty maximum, he defrayed the
whole of his father’s farm rent. That he was not entirely satisfied
with his prospects is evident from the fact that, about ten years after
he joined Hogg, he accepted a clerkship in Sir Francis Baring’s office;
but so necessary had he become to the establishment he was about
to leave, that his master prevailed upon him to accept board and
residence in exchange for what assistance he might please to render
over the usual hours. After six weeks of this work, poor Kelly’s
health began to suffer, and it was plain that he must confine his
labours to one single branch of trade. “Thomas,” said his master,
sagaciously enough, though, probably, with a view to his own
interests, “you never can be a merchant, but you may be a
bookseller.” This advice chimed in with his inclination, if not with his
immediate prospects, and Kelly devoted himself to bookselling.
At length Hogg, falling into bad health, and desiring to be relieved
from business, proposed to Kelly that he should unite in partnership
with his son; but Kelly thought it better to start on his own account.
In 1809, therefore, he commenced business in a little room in
Paternoster Row, sub-rented from the landlord, a friendly barber.
For the first two years his operations were confined solely to the
purchase and sale of miscellaneous books on a small scale, and the
limited experiment proved successful. Of Buchan’s “Domestic
Medicine” he bought 1,000 copies in sheets, at a low price, and
having prefixed a short memoir of his author, and divided them into
numbers, or parts, he went out himself in quest of subscribers; and
1,000 copies of the “New Week’s Preparation” were treated in like
manner, and with similar success. Kelly lived to be Lord Mayor of
London.
Mr. Routledge, the founder of the well-known publishing-house of
that name, commenced business by opening a little shop in Ryder’s
Court, Leicester Square, for the sale of cheap and second-hand
books.
Few booksellers have done better than the Heywoods of
Manchester. Abel began life as a warehouse-boy, on the scanty
pittance of 1s. 6d. a-week. John Heywood, at the age of fourteen,
found employment as a hand-loom weaver. Within ten years his
wages rose from 2s. 6d. a-week to 30s., and when in receipt of this
latter sum he regularly allowed his mother 20s. a-week. For some
time he was with his brother, and then he took a little shop. It has
been truly remarked by Mr. Henry Curwen, in his “History of
Booksellers,” that the career of the two Heywoods is a striking
example of the labour, energy, and success which Lancashire folk are
apt to think the true attributes of the typical Manchester man.
 CHAPTER VII.
MONEY-MAKING MEN IN THE PROVINCES.

In 1875 a sensational paragraph appeared in most of the daily

papers, announcing the death of “an old Mr. Attwood,” who was
declared to have been a bachelor, and “the giver of all the
anonymous £1,000 cheques.” It was further stated that he had
given away £350,000 in this way—£45,000 within the last year; that
he had died intestate, leaving a fortune of more than a million
sterling, and that a thousand-pound note was found lying in his
room as if it had been waste paper. The truth of the matter, as we
are informed by a connection of the family, is this. Mr. Benjamin
Attwood was a brother of Mr. Thomas Attwood, who was well known
forty years ago as a leader of the Birmingham Political Union, and
one of the first members for that borough. He was not a bachelor,
but a widower, and the fortune which he has left is believed to be
much less than the above-named sum, though its exact amount is
not yet known. After making a competent fortune by his own
industry, Mr. Attwood, some time ago, inherited enormous wealth
from a nephew, the late Mr. Matthias Wolverley Attwood, M.P., and
he determined to dispose of this accession to his income by giving it
partly to his less prosperous kinsfolk, and partly to charitable
associations. He would often call at a hospital or other benevolent
institution, and leave £1,000, asking simply for an acknowledgment
in the Times, and never allowing his name to be published. In this
way he distributed larger sums than that mentioned in the original
rumour. It would be wrong to regard Mr. Attwood as an eccentric
man. His life was quiet, gentlemanlike, and unassuming, with no
special peculiarities, and his only motive for secret almsgiving was
the desire to do good in an unobtrusive manner. He was one of
those truly charitable men who loved to do good without letting his
left hand know what his right hand did, and he would probably have
been better pleased had his secret been kept after his death as well
as it was during his life.
They are fortunate men these provincial Crœsuses, and don’t let the
grass grow under their feet. In the art of money-making they need
learn nothing of Cockneys or Americans, but perhaps might teach
them something as to the way to get on in the world. One of the
most successful of this class was Sir Richard Arkwright, the famous
inventor and the improver of cotton-spinning machinery. Sir Richard
was born in 1732, and married, first, Patience Holt, of Lancaster, and
second, Margaret Biggins, of Pennington. He was the son of poor
parents, and the youngest of thirteen children. He was never at
school; and what little he did learn was without aid. He was
apprenticed to a barber; and after learning that wretched business,
set up for himself as a barber in Bolton, in an underground cellar,
over which he put up the sign-board with the curious wording,
“Come to the Subterraneous Barber—he shaves for a Penny,” painted
upon it. Carrying away, by his low prices, the trade from the other
barbers in the place, they reduced their prices to his level.
Arkwright then, not to be outdone, and to keep the lead in the
number of customers, put up the announcement of, “A Clean Shave
for a Halfpenny,” which, no doubt, he found answer well. After a
time he quitted his cellar, and took to tramping from place to place
as a dealer in hair. For this purpose he attended statute fairs, and
other resorts of the people, and bought their crops of hair from girls,
bargaining for and cutting off their curls and tresses, and selling
them again to the wig-makers. He also dealt in hair-dye, and tried
to find out the secret of perpetual motion. This led to mechanical
pursuits; he neglected his business, lost what little money he had
saved, and was reduced to great poverty. Having become
acquainted with a watchmaker named Kay, at Warrington, and had
assistance from him in constructing his model, he first, it is said,
received from him the idea of spinning by rollers—but only the idea,
for Kay could not practically tell how it was to be accomplished.
Having once got the idea, Arkwright set to work, and neglected
everything else for its accomplishment; and, in desperation and
poverty, his poor neglected wife, who could only see waste of time
and neglect of business in the present state of affairs, and ruin and
starvation in the future, as the consequence, broke up his models, in
hope of bringing him hack to his trade and his duties to his family.
And who can blame the young wife? The unforgiving husband,
however, separated from her in consequence, and never forgave
her. His poverty, indeed, was so great at this time, that, having to
vote as a burgess, he could not go to the polling-place until, by
means of a subscription, some clothes had been bought for him to
put on. Having re-made and pretty well completed his model, but
fearful of having it destroyed, as Hargreave’s spinning-jenny had
been by a mob, Arkwright removed to Nottingham, taking his model
with him. Here, showing his model to Messrs. Wright, the bankers,
he obtained from them an advance of money on the proper
condition of their sharing in the profits of the invention. Delay
occurring in the completion of the machine, the bankers
recommended Arkwright to apply to Jedediah Strutt (ancestor of the
present Lord Belper), of Derby, who, with his partner, Reed, had
brought out and patented the machine for making ribbed stockings.
Strutt at once entered into the matter, and by his help the invention
was completed. Thus the foundation of the fortune of the
Arkwrights was laid, and thus arose their cotton-mills, and their
residence (Wellersley Castle) near Matlock. Arkwright was knighted
in the year 1786, and in the same year was High Sheriff of
Derbyshire. He died in 1792.
Mr. Thorneycroft, who realised an immense fortune in the iron-trade,
at the Shrubbery Works, near Wolverhampton, was the son of a
working-man, and himself educated to earn his bread by the sweat
of his brow. In his youth he proved himself a most skilful and
trustworthy servant to his employers in the iron-trade; and when
about twenty-six years of age commenced a small business on his
own account.—Mr. Thomas Wilson, whose work, the “Pitman’s Pay,”
had a national reputation, who died at Gateshead in 1858, at the
ripe age of eighty-four, after having achieved a large fortune, began
life by working in a colliery. At nineteen years of age he was a
hewer in the mine. At sixteen he had sought more congenial
occupation, in which he might profit by the little culture he had won
by the sacrifice of needful rest; but he failed in the attempt, and
retired to his darksome drudgery. In time he got to be a
schoolmaster; and afterwards the humble pitman became a
merchant prince.—Andrews, a famous Mayor of Southampton,
passed the first years of his life in utter poverty, working as a farm
lad, at threepence a-day, from nine to twelve years of age; then
getting employment as a sawyer; next as a blacksmith; but always
with aspirations for something better.
The first Sir Robert Peel was the third son of a small cotton-printer in
Lancashire. Enterprising and ambitious, he left his father’s
establishment, and became a junior partner in a manufactory,
carried on at Bury by a relative, Mr. Haworth, and his future father-
in-law, Mr. Yates. His industry, his genius, soon gave him the lead in
the management of the business, and made it prosperous. By
perseverance, talent, economy, and marrying a wealthy heiress—
Miss Yates, the daughter of his senior partner—he had amassed a
considerable fortune at the age of forty. He then began to turn his
mind to politics; published a pamphlet on the national debt; made
the acquaintance of Mr. Pitt, and got returned to parliament (1790)
for Teignmouth, where he had acquired landed property which the
rest of his life was spent in increasing. In Greville’s journals we
read:—“Grant gave me a curious anecdote of old Sir Robert Peel. He
was the younger son of a merchant; his fortune very small, left to
him in the house, and he was not to take it out. He gave up the
fortune, and started in business without a shilling, but as the active
partner in a concern with two other men—Yates, whose daughter he
afterwards married, and another, who between them made up
£6,000. From this beginning he left £250,000 a-piece to his five
younger sons, £60,000 to his three daughters, each; and £22,000 a-
year in land, and £450,000 in the funds to Peel. In his lifetime he
gave Peel £12,000 a-year; the others £3,000, and spent £3,000
himself. He was always giving them money, and for objects which, it
might have been thought, he under-valued. He paid for Peel’s house
when he built it, and for the Chapeau de Paille (2,700 guineas) when
he bought it.”
In his biography, Sir William Fairbairn describes the heroic way in
which he mastered the difficulties of early years, and became
famous. It really seems that there is something in the air, or in the
nature of the inhabitants, of the northern districts of the kingdom,
which has a tendency, more or less, to make a man rise in the
world. The poet tells us how

“Caledonia, stern and wild,

Is meet nurse for poetic child.”

Though, as to that, neither Burns nor Scott had much to do with

that part of Scotland we call stern and wild. But the country may
claim to do more for her sons. Every one of them seems born with a
thirst for getting on in the world, for revolving not to be contented
with that position in life in which Providence has placed him; and
thus it is, that when we come to examine minutely into the lives of
our heroes, industrial or otherwise, we find that most of them were
Scotchmen, or, more or less, had Scotch blood in their veins.
Of this we have a remarkable illustration in the case of the late Sir
William Fairbairn, who was, moreover, a worthy representative of a
class of men to whom we owe, in a large measure, the wealth and
prosperity our country now enjoys.
William Fairbairn was born in the town of Kelso, in Roxburghshire on
February 19th, 1789. His father, Andrew, was descended, on the
male side, from a humble but respectable class of small lairds, or, as
they were called, Portioners, who farmed their own land, as was the
custom in Scotland in those days. On the female side the pedigree
may have been of higher character, for Andrew’s mother was said by
him to have claimed descent from the ancient border family of
Douglas. She was a tall, handsome, and commanding woman, and
lived to a great age. William’s mother was a Miss Henderson, the
daughter of a tradesman in Jedburgh, and the direct descendant of
an old border family of the name of Oliver, for many years
respectable stock-farmers in a pastoral district at the northern foot
of the Cheviots. The lad was early sent to school, and made fair
progress in what may be called a plain English education. He was
fond of athletic exercises, and one of his feats was to climb to the
top of the mouldering turrets of the old abbey at Kelso. In the
autumn of 1799, the position of the family materially altered. The
father was offered the charge of a farm, 300 acres, in Ross-shire,
which was to be the joint property of himself and his brother, Mr.
Peter Fairbairn, for many years a resident in that county, and
secretary to Lord Seaforth, of Castle Braham; and there, in an evil
hour, the family removed. But it was there that young William, who
was compelled to make himself generally useful, first exhibited his
taste for mechanics. The father next became steward to Mackenzie,
of Allan Grange; and at the school at Mullochy, which the boy
attended, he describes the advantage derived by himself and his
brother from wearing Saxon costumes instead of Tartan kilts. The
master was a severe disciplinarian, and he found English trousers
very much in the way of his favourite punishment. After two years
the family moved south, and William’s father became steward to Sir
William Ingleby, of Ingleby Manor, near Knaresborough. After a few
months spent in improving himself in arithmetic, in studying book-
keeping and land surveying, William, being a tall lad of fourteen, was
sent to work at Kelso. About this time the family were in much
difficulty; but the father got a better post at Percy Main Colliery, near
North Shields, and his son followed him there. Wages were very
high, and the demoralisation amongst the men was such as, Sir
William tells us, he never saw before or since. Pitched battles,
brawling, drinking, and cock-fighting, seemed to be the order of the
day. Among the pit lads boxing was considered a necessary
exercise. And Fairbairn tells us he had to fight no less than
seventeen battles before he was enabled to attain a position
calculated to insure respect. In March, 1804, he was put into a
better and more definite position by entering regularly on a course
of education as mechanical engineer. He was bound apprentice to
the millwright of the colliery for seven years, and was to receive
wages beginning with five shillings a-week, and increasing to
twelve. Sometimes, he tells us, with extra work he doubled the
amount of his wages, by which he was enabled to render assistance
to his parents. This, we take it, shows the lad was a good one, and
the bad manners of his mates had not corrupted him. This appears
still further when we see how resolute were his efforts after self-
improvement. “I became,” he writes, “dissatisfied with the persons I
had to associate with at the shop; and feeling my own ignorance, I
became fired with ambition to remedy the evil, and cut out for
myself a new path of life. I shortly came to the conclusion that no
difficulties should frighten, nor the severer labour discourage me in
the attainment of the object I had in view. Armed with the
resolution, I set to work in the first year of my apprenticeship, and
having written out a programme, I commenced the winter course in
double capacity of both scholar and schoolmaster, and arranged my
study as follows:—Monday evenings for arithmetic, mensuration,
&c.; Tuesday reading, history, and poetry; Wednesday, recreation,
reading novels and romances; Thursday, mathematics; Friday Euclid,
trigonometry; Saturday, recreation and sundries; Sunday, church,
Milton, and recreation.” In this noble course the young man
persevered, in spite of the ridicule of his mates. The battle thus
manfully begun was fought bravely to the last. He was aided in his
studies by a ticket, given him by his father, to the North Shields
Subscription Library; and by the same tender passion which turned
Quentin Mastys from a blacksmith into an artist. We quote Sir
William’s account of his intellectual improvement whilst making love
to the lady whom, however, he did not ultimately marry. During his
courtship, he tells us, “I was led into a course of letter-writing, which
improved my style, and gave me greater facilities of expression. The
truth is, I could not have written on any subject if it had not been for
this circumstance; and my attempts at essays, in the shape of
papers which I had read with avidity in the Spectator, may be traced
to my admiration of this divinity.
“In the enthusiasm of my first attachment, it was my good fortune
to fall upon a correspondence between two lovers, Frederick and
Felicia, in the ‘Town and Country Magazine’ for the year 1782, Nos. 3
and 4. This correspondence was of some length, and was carried
from number to number in a series of letters. Frederick was the
principal writer; and although greatly above me in station, yet his
sentiments harmonised so exactly with mine, that I sat down at
Frederick’s desk and wrote to my Felicia with emotions as strong as
any Frederick in existence. Frederick, by his writing, was evidently a
gentleman; and in order to prepare myself for so much goodness as
I had conjured up in Mary, I commenced the correspondence by first
reading the letter in the magazine, and then shut the book for the
reply, and to write the letter that Frederick was supposed to have
written. I then referred to the book, and how bitter was my
disappointment at finding my expressions unconnected and
immeasurably inferior to those of the writer. Sometimes I could
trace a few stray expressions which I thought superior to his; but, as
a whole, I was miserably deficient. In this way did I make love, and
in this way I inadvertently rendered one of the strongest passions of
our nature subservient to the means of improvement. For three
successive winters I contrived to go through a complete system of
mensuration and as much algebra as enabled me to solve an
equation, and a course of trigonometry, navigation, heights and
distances, &c. This was exclusive of my reading, which was always
attractive, and gave me the greatest pleasure. I had an excellent
library at Shields, which I went to twice a-week, and here I read
Gibbon’s ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,’ Hume’s ‘History of
England,’ Robertson’s ‘History of Scotland,’ ‘America,’ ‘Charles the
Fifth,’ and many other works of a similar character, which I read with
the utmost attention. I also read some of our best poets, amongst
which were Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost,’ Shakspeare, Cowper, Goldsmith,
Burns, and Kirke White. With this course of study I spent long
evenings, sometimes sitting up late; but having to be at the shop at
six in the morning, I did not usually prolong my studies much
beyond eleven or twelve o’clock.
“During those pursuits I must, in truth, admit that my mind was
more upon my studies than my business. I made pretty good way in
the mere operative part; but, with the exception of arithmetic and
mathematics, I made little or no progress in the principles of the
profession; on the contrary, I took a dislike to the work and the
parties by whom I was surrounded.
“The possession of tools, and the art of using them, renewed my
taste for mechanical pursuits. I tried my skill at different
combinations, and, like most inventors whose minds are more intent
upon making new discoveries than acquiring the knowledge of what
has been done by others, I frequently found myself forestalled in the
very discovery which I had persuaded myself was original. For many
months I laboured incessantly in devising a piece of machinery that
should act as a time-piece, and at the same time as an orrery,
representing the sun as a centre, with the earth and moon, and the
whole planetary system, revolving round it. This piece of machinery
was to be worked by a weight and a pendulum, and was not only to
give the diurnal motions of the heavenly bodies, but to indicate the
time of their revolutions in their orbits round the sun. All this was to
be done in accordance with one measure of time, which the
instrument, if it could be completed, was to record. I looked upon
this piece of machinery as a perfectly original conception, and
nothing prevented me from making the attempt to carry it into
execution but the want of means, and the difficulties which
surrounded me in the complexity and numerous motions necessary
to make it an useful working machine. The consideration of this
subject was not, however, lost, as I derived great advantage in the
exercise which it gave to the thoughts. It taught me the advantage
of concentration and of arranging my ideas, and of bringing the
whole powers of the mind with energy to bear upon one subject. It
further directed my attention to a course of reading on mechanical
philosophy and astronomy, from which I derived considerable
advantage.
“Finding the means at my disposal much too scanty to enable me to
make a beginning with my new orrery, I turned my attention to
music, and bought an old Hamburgh fiddle, for which I gave half-a-
crown. This was a cheap bargain, even for such a miserable
instrument; and what with new bracing of catgut and a music-book,
I spent nearly a week’s wages, a sum which I could ill afford, to
become a distinguished musician. I, however, fresh rigged the
violin, and with a glue-pot carefully closed all the openings which
were showing themselves between the back and sides of the
instrument. Having completed the repairs, I commenced operations,
and certainly there never was a learner who produced less melody
or a greater number of discords. The effect was astounding; and
after tormenting the whole house with discordant sounds for two
months, the very author of the mischief tumbled to pieces in my
hands, to the great relief of every member of the family.”
As an illustration of the benefit of learning a business well, I will
quote a paragraph from the “busy hives around us.” After describing
the large establishment of Messrs. Kershaw, Leese, and Co.,
Manchester, the writer adds—“There is a moral to our sketch. Mr.
Kershaw, owner of a splendid warehouse, two factories, a cotton
lord, merchant prince, and senator of the realm, was once a poor
Manchester boy, and is not an old man now (1878). As he set
Manchester an example of good taste and wise magnificence, so he
stands an example to all young men of what untiring diligence may
achieve. He rose in his house of business because he learned his
business well. He waited not upon fortune from without, but worked
out his own future from within. He became one of the many of the
illustrious men whom Lancashire points to as her pride.”
Who has not heard of Sir Titus Salt? His beneficence, especially, has
made him famous; his name is a veritable household word. The
founder of Saltaire is, in many respects, no ordinary man. He is one
of those who have neither been born great nor had greatness thrust
upon them. He has achieved it, and achieved it worthily. Possessed
of large intellect, immense strength of mind, and remarkable
business acumen, he gained a princely fortune, and made himself
one of Yorkshire’s chief manufacturers.
Sir Titus was born in Morley, near Leeds, on the 20th of September,
1803. Some time after his birth, his father, Daniel Salt, removed to
Bradford, where he became an extensive wool-dealer, and by-and-by
took his son into partnership. At once the young man’s rare
business qualities showed themselves, and the speculations of the
firm—now Daniel Salt and Co.—grew larger than ever. Hitherto,
however, the Russian Donskoi wool—in which they dealt extensively
—had been used only in the woollen trade. The young man saw
that it would suit the worsted trade as well; so he explained his
views to the Bradford spinners, but they would scarcely listen to
him. They knew, said they, the Russian wool was valueless to
them. Young Mr. Salt was not disheartened by this. Not he! To
prove his theory, he commenced as a spinner and manufacturer
himself, and his fortune was assured. The wants of his trade led him
occasionally to Liverpool; and it was on one of these visits that the
scene took place which Charles Dickens, in his own inimitable way,
described in “Household Words.” Says he:—

“A huge pile of dirty-looking sacks, filled with some fibrous

material, which bore a resemblance to superannuated horse-
hair, or frowsy elongated wool, or anything unpleasant or
unattractive, was landed in Liverpool. When these queer-
looking bales had first arrived, or by what vessel brought, or for
what purpose intended, the very oldest warehousemen in
Liverpool docks couldn’t say. There had once been a rumour—a
mere warehouseman’s rumour—that the bales had been
shipped from South America, on ‘spec.,’ and consigned to the
agency of C. W. and F. Foozle and Co. But even this seems to
have been forgotten, and it was agreed upon by all hands, that
the three hundred and odd sacks of nondescript hair-wool were
a perfect nuisance. The rats appeared to be the only parties
who approved at all of the importation, and to them it was the
finest investment for capital that had been known in Liverpool
since their first ancestors had emigrated thither. Well, these
bales seemed likely to rot, or fall to the dust, or be bitten up for
the particular use of family rats. Merchants would have nothing
to say to them. Dealers couldn’t make them out.
Manufacturers shook their heads at the bare mention of them;
while the agents of C. W. and F. Foozle and Co. looked at the bill
of lading—had once spoken to their head clerk about shipping
them to South America again.
“One day—we won’t care what day it was, or even what week
or month it was, though things of far less consequence have
been chronicled to the half-minute—one day, a plain business-
looking young man, with an intelligent face and quiet reserved
manner, was walking along through these same warehouses in
Liverpool, when his eye fell upon some of the superannuated
horse-hair projecting from one of the ugly dirty bales. Some
lady-rat, more delicate than her neighbours, had found it rather
coarser than usual, and had persuaded her lord and master to
eject the portion from her resting-place. Our friend took it up,
looked at it, felt at it, rubbed it, pulled it about; in fact, he did
all but taste it; and he would have done that if it had suited his
purpose—for he was ‘Yorkshire.’ Having held it up to the light,
and held it away from the light, and held it in all sorts of
positions, and done all sorts of cruelties to it, as though it had
been his most deadly enemy, and he was feeling quite
vindictive, he placed a handful or two in his pocket, and walked
calmly away, evidently intending to put the stuff to some
excruciating private torture at home. What particular
experiments he tried with this fibrous substance I am not
exactly in a position to state, nor does it much signify; but the
sequel was that the same quiet business-looking young man
was seen to enter the office of C. W. and F. Foozle and Co., and
ask for the head of the firm. When he asked that portion of the
house if he would accept eightpence per pound for the entire
 contents of the three hundred and odd frowsy dirty bags of
nondescript wool, the authority interrogated felt so confounded
that he could not have told if he were the head or the tail of the
firm. At first he fancied our friend had come for the express
purpose of quizzing him, and then that he was an escaped
lunatic, and thought seriously of calling for the police; but
eventually it ended in his making it over in consideration of the
price offered. It was quite an event in the little dark office of C.
W. and F. Foozle and Co., which had its supply of light (of a very
injurious quality) from the old grim churchyard. All the
establishment stole a peep at the buyer of the ‘South American
Stuff.’ The chief clerk had the curiosity to speak to him and
hear the reply. The cashier touched his coat tails. The
bookkeeper, a thin man in spectacles, examined his hat and
gloves. The porter openly grinned at him. When the quiet
purchaser had departed, C. W. and F. Foozle and Co. shut
themselves up, and gave all their clerks a holiday.”

Thus Mr. Salt (afterwards Sir Titus) became the introducer and
adapter of alpaca wool; and in a few years his wealth was
enormous.
Seventeen years afterwards Mr. Salt left Bradford, the scene of his
great success. He saw with sadness that the great Yorkshire town
was becoming over-crowded, dirty, and smoky to a degree, and he
made up his mind that the condition of his factory workers, at any
rate, should be improved. Hence he purchased a tract of land on
the banks of the river Aire above Shipley, and founded Saltaire—a
true palace of industry.

“For in making his thousands he never forgot

The thousands who helped him to make them.”

The new works were opened in 1853, when a grand banquet took
place, at which members of parliament, mayors, and magistrates
were present, besides between 2,000 and 3,000 of Mr. Salt’s
workpeople, who had marched in procession from smoky Bradford to
the fair country he had chosen for their future labours.
Sir Titus was made a baronet in 1869, and some years previously he
held the position of president of the Bradford Chamber of
Commerce. He has also been chief constable, magistrate, and
parliamentary member for the Bradford borough, the inhabitants of
which have shown their appreciation of his services and generosity
by erecting a handsome statue to him.
 CHAPTER VIII.
ECCENTRIC MONEY-MAKERS.

A CURIOUS romance adds one more instructive fact to point the moral
of a miser’s life, and of “the love of money.” For many years past an
old man might have been seen carrying an old bag on his shoulders,
scraping up odds and ends from the gutter, and garbage from the
streets. This man’s home was in a London suburb, a wretched room
filled with rubbish—old pieces of iron and brass, bits of string, &c.
Around the room were tin deed-boxes, which some of his friends
half suspected must be possessed of properties of more or less
value. The wretched man lived on what he chanced to pick up by
the way, or what was given to him by the charitable, who thought
him to be a beggar. He used to attend one of our metropolitan
hospitals as an out-patient, receiving advice and medicine gratis.
This man died in the midst of squalid wretchedness and apparent
want. His friends at once proceeded to ransack the place in search
for his money; the deed-boxes proved to be “dummies,” containing
only strings and tapes, and for some time the search proved
fruitless. At last, however, the old chair in which he used to sit was
found to contain, in the worn-out cushion, a bundle of most valuable
securities, amounting to £60,000, and a will. This will, after leaving
£100 each to his executors, devised all the residue of his property to
two institutions—one moiety to the Royal Free Hospital, Gray’s-inn-
road, in which institution he used to obtain advice and medicine
gratis, as above; and the other half to the Royal National Lifeboat
Association. So that these two useful institutions will receive
£30,000 each, and possibly more, as the result of this “miser’s”
wealth! Search is being made for further documents amid the heaps
of rubbish that have been allowed to accumulate in the wretched
man’s attic. The case constitutes a sad and melancholy illustration
of this fallen nature of ours, in one of its most afflicting forms of
eccentricity and madness.
In the case of the Dancers, we have it recorded that their money-
grubbing propensity was prominent in three generations of the
family. The grandfather, the father, and the children, were all misers
—the lot of them, Daniel Dancer, Esq., appears to have been the
most distinguished. He lived on the Weald of Harrow, where he had
a little estate of about eighty acres of rich meadow-land, with some
of the finest oak timber in the kingdom on it. Besides, there was a
good farm belonging to him, worth at that time, if properly
cultivated, more than £200 a-year. One day, coming to London to
invest £2,000 in the funds, a gentleman, who met him near the
Exchange, mistaking him for a beggar, put a penny in his hand—an
affront which, it is needless to say, the beggar pocketed. In spite of
the fact that his wretched abode was often broken into, he made a
great deal of money by his penurious habits. It took many weeks to
explore the contents of his dwelling. As much as £2,500 were found
on the dung-heap in the cow-house; and in an old jacket, carefully
tied and strongly nailed to the manger, was the sum of £500 in gold
and bank-notes; £200 were found in the chimney, and an old teapot
contained bank-notes to the value of £500. Lady Tempest and
Captain Holmes, his heirs, were benefited by the old miser’s savings
to the extent of about £3,000 a-year.
Money is sometimes strangely made. For instance, there is the case
of Gully, who was M.P. for Pontefract in 1832. “He was taken out of
prison,” writes Mr. Charles Greville, “twenty-five or thirty years ago
by a gentleman to fight Pierce, surnamed the Game Chicken. He
afterwards fought Belcher (I believe), and Gregson twice, and left
the prize-ring with the reputation of being the best man in it. He
then took to the turf, was successful in establishing himself at
Newmarket, where he kept ‘a hell,’ and began a system of corruption
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