So up the stairs to the top of the house our page now travels, within the hands of the luckless apprentice, for in the closet of the attic, under a sloping roof sit the readers. Three men usually, and the only ones within this series of dark caverns who have ink upon their hands and fingers, but have not been turned black as chimney sweeps by it. And these men scour the printed proof for error, blunder, and misspelling. By daylight or lamplight or a candle’s weak glow, these mistakes are found and marked.
Back down the stairs the paper then travels, where the compositor sighs upon the errors that must now be corrected. Then, once amended, ‘proof’ is yelled again. Three times, this printer’s round jig is danced before any form might find itself despatched to press for printing.
And then, down in the basement, the print run starts. On four sturdy iron presses—secured to the floor solid as teeth in a lion’s jaw—the pressmen, stripped to the waist, begin their work. When handling paper, a pressman’s touch can be gentle as a lady with her skirts. But once these men are printing, once they are caught in the rhythm of inking and sliding and levering, they appear like great goliaths goading a metal beast. And, above them, the readers grab their vibrating ink pots, the compositors steady their clicking letters, Linus Gray weights down his quivering papers, and the devil apprentice upon the stairs, or in a closet, or in a cupboard steadies himself as the whole house upon Water Lane begins to shake under this industry.
Thomas Kinsman mastered every procedure within this print house; he was accurate at case, strong at press and steadfast at office; but the task upon which he truly excelled beyond all other was as a reader. None queried Linus Gray’s boast that his Black Tom was the best reader in the whole of London. None, excepting for one man.
This learned man, this ‘scholar of high reputation’, upon becoming aware that the reputed reader at Gray and Co. was indeed a nigger, decided that he would do better to read his pamphlet for error himself.
‘Your negro boy,’ the scholarly man told Linus with a smile, ‘would soon be up to the ears in pumpkins and would only work on it half an hour a day.’ And he laughed heartily while continuing, ‘I make no claim upon those words, for they are in fact the wisdom of Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish man of letters, in his discourse upon the negro question.’
And fourteen errors that clever man found within his paper; fourteen mistakes upon the first proof sheet; fourteen and it took him only three days to find them. Linus gave the man’s proof to his ‘negro boy’ to read, and within less than half an hour Thomas had found sixty-nine more.
When the ‘scholar of high reputation’ called to claim his printed pamphlet, Linus summoned the eighteen-year-old Thomas to him. And Thomas Kinsman, standing straight-backed before that learned gentleman said, ‘Sir, as the philosopher John Stuart Mill so wisely deduced, if negroes had worked no more than half an hour a day, would the sugar crops have been so considerable?’
As an apprentice, Thomas Kinsman gained a knowledge of the world and the way of it that, for all his education, he had hitherto not known. For Linus Gray was a free-thinker and most of the men that ever worked for him knew it. There was a club for mutual improvement—for which Linus Gray provided the stock of books, drawing materials and papers—that was held in the basement room of a nearby house for any of his workers who wished to join. It cost sixpence to attend (three pennies extra in winter for a coal fire to be lit) and tuppence fine for any who could, but did not turn out.
As the group of seven men met three hundred days of the year from eight o’clock until the hour of eleven, Thomas joined them. For he had no wish to sit lonely in his room every evening, or to spend that time in avoidance of Susan Gray upon the stairs with her broom. And Thomas Kinsman will eagerly tell you that, within the dark, damp, gloomy closeness of that basement room, his mind steadily opened, like a bird freshly hatched from its egg that discovers a wide world in which one day it must have the strength to fly.