ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Huntley and Palmers’ biscuit factory, and consequent conditions in Reading in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the case of the biscuit factory, there is something of this double optic also. But in its heyday it was an organisation more determining than determined by its local context. During the 1890s the factory’s experience was increasingly shaped by forces outside the town, beyond its immediate control; forces which were of importance in the experience of many other organisations in the town not directly involved with production. William Isaac’s personal anxieties and commitments always came through more strongly than did those of other Palmers on the many occasions like this in the life of the mid- to late nineteenth-century factory. William Isaac Palmer, for example, was important in the explosive economic growth of the factory. The product was more important to him than productivity or than the rate of return on capital invested.
