Sue Reid on the background to Mill Girl . . .

Mill Girl was the first 'My Story' I wrote for Scholastic. I loved writing it. It's the imaginary diary of a 19th century mill worker's thirteen year old daughter, Eliza. Telling Eliza's story as a diary really let me close into Eliza's thoughts and feelings. Eliza lives in Manchester, which she absolutely hates. She can see the mill where her father works from her bedroom window and she wishes wishes wishes they could all go back to live in the countryside where her grandfather was born. She has all sorts of dreams and plans for her future, but she is a poor girl, so has to leave school and go out to work to help her family. Eliza rebels against what's expected of her, like any modern teenager might, though the choices for poor people in those days were very limited, and for girls even less.

Eliza was 13 in 1842, the height of what we now call 'the Industrial Revolution'. I'd always wanted to write a story about the Industrial Revolution because it fascinates me. It was a period of exciting and dramatic change - when people who for hundreds of years had always lived and worked in the countryside were forced to find work in the new factory towns which sprang up in the north. At school my teacher had made the subject dreary – long reams of parliamentary acts that we had to memorise. Nothing about the lives of ordinary people, and it was ordinary people I wanted to find out about. I picked the early 1840s because it was a time of hope as well as despair, when workers rebelled against their masters and dreamed of a better future.

Before I could begin writing, I had to do a lot of research. I'd set the book in Manchester, because it was a very important mill town in the 1840s. After reading as much as I could about the period I went up to Manchester to explore the city and try and find out more what it might have been like to have been a mill girl living there in the mid 19th century. I went to an area of the city called Ancoats, which was where a lot of mill families lived crowded together in 'back to back' houses near the factories where they worked. Of course Manchester is a very different city now to the dirty smoky place it was then and it took an enormous effort to see it as my heroine Eliza would have done. However, there were still mills in Ancoats – huge empty buildings, some of the earliest mills ever built. I walked round the quiet rooms and tried to imagine them filled with big noisy spinning machines and weaving looms. But to see a working factory I had to go north of Manchester, to a place called Helmshore in Lancashire. In the weaving shed a few looms were turned on to give me an idea how noisy it would have been. Even with just a few looms running the din was tremendous – if you try and imagine a million knitting needles or typewriters clacking away it will give you a tiny idea what it was like.

In the spinning room I saw how scary it must have been for a child crouching under a spinning machine ready to snatch up the waste, and how tiring and boring the work must have been – hour after hour in a hot and dusty room.

You can visit some of the places I did to find out what life was like for a family like Eliza's. Here are some suggestions: Helmshore Textile museums, Helmshore, Lancashire, and Quarry Bank Mill, Styal, Wilmslow, Cheshire. In Manchester there are some excellent museums where you can find out about the machines that were transforming people's lives and industry, and get more of an idea what it was like to be alive at that time. Try the Museum of Science and Industry, and the People's Museum.