The table illustrates data about silk factories and their workers in England and Wales from 1851 to 1901. Overall, the total number of workforce decreased as time passed while the factories increased theirs. An interesting point is that despite being initially in small numbers, the factories had more workers.
Looking at the information in more details, in 185, males and females were at their peak at 53,964 and 76.786, respectively before both experiencing a significant fall by around 10,000 employees in the next 10 years. Similarly, this trend continued to plummet, with women decreasing gradually to 25,567 in the final year, being about 12,000 more than man workers were.
When it comes to factories’ number, there were fluctuations. They grew dramatically to 761 from 272, reaching their peak in the first decade. After that, however, they started to decrease substantially to 623 in 1901, in spite of a small rise in 1881.