ABSTRACT
ALTHOUGH most of the glass in the Merseyside area was, by 1830, being made at factories in and about St. Helens, the town’s reputation as a glassmaking centre still rested upon the one giant plate glassworks at Ravenhead. It is true that in 1832 the various St. Helens glasshouses paid in excise duty £54,000 out of a total of £82,000 raised from the nine firms comprising the Liverpool Collection ; yet the Excise Commissioners’ total income from all the factories in the kingdom amounted to £680,000. Almost £300,000 of this came from the Tyne, for more than two centuries the home of the English window glass manufacture, and the Midlands contributed about £150,000. Even Warrington, not thought of as a glassmaking town nowadays, then paid £40,000 in duty. 1 The powerful position of the factories of the north-east seemed well-nigh impregnable for, as one of their proprietors boasted, they made more window glass than all the other works in the country put together. 2 Long before the century was out, however, preeminence in this branch of the industry was to pass to St. Helens, as it had already done in the manufacture of plate glass. But in the 1830s the balance of power was only just starting to change ; Newcastle’s aim, as William Pilkington of St. Helens wrote to his brother, was “ to prevent us upstarts from growing greater.” 3
