Very wrong indeed.

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William was born into poverty in Full Street, Derby, on September 30, 1723. His father was a woolcomber by trade, though often he was without work. A regular of the ale-house, his father had squandered a successful start in life with his hard-earned apprenticeship and exhibited a lack of application and effort once married. As a result of this, the level of poverty that William experienced as a child – a level which got worse upon the death of his mother in 1733 – was something that he never, ever forgot.

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In his autobiography, William mentions that there were many occasions that he, alongside his mother and his siblings, ate nothing at all. "At one time", says Hutton, "I fasted from breakfast one day to noon the next" before he ate a hastily-made pudding of flour and water.

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Though his school life was short and inadequate, he was at least taught to read by his father but with a father who also believed in physical punishments, Hutton’s early years were not just full of poverty but were also an extremely harsh environment.

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From the age of seven he began to work at the Silk Mill in Derby from 5am in the morning till 7pm in the evening and for his first year there he was too small to even reach the machines and had to wear a pair of pattens – overshoes that are somewhat similar to clogs – to enable him to do so.

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Working at the mill was, in itself, a brutal experience for him. In later life he often referred to the ‘ignorance and vulgarity’ of the mill-hands and the slightest mistake from any of the children working there could result in a physical beating. Hutton himself was beat so hard with a cane on one occasion that the scar it left remained with him, both physically and mentally, for the rest of his life.

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He was to spend seven years at the mill before he left and moved to Nottingham where he spent another seven years to a stockinger. During this period, he would often visit Derby for a few days and after one visit, at Christmas 1745, he began to bind and repair old books. In 1749, when he had decided to adopt this trade full-time, he walked from Nottingham to London and back again to purchase the tools required. He performed both legs of the journey within nine days – it seems long walks were a forte for Hutton as he is also regarded to be the first person in modern times to walk the entire length of Hadrian's Wall - and in 1750 he settled in Birmingham where he established himself as a bookbinder and bookseller.

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In 1755, Hutton married Sarah Cock from Aston-on-Trent and they had three sons and a daughter. In 1756 Hutton opened a paper warehouse – the first in Birmingham – which became profitable. Now freed from his childhood poverty, he built a country house on Bennetts Hill in Washwood Heath and bought a house in High Street.

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Amongst the various book he wrote, Hutton published his History of Birmingham in 1782 and his History of Derby in 1791 and during his later life visited Derby on occasional intervals. During one of these visits in 1803, he found out that every person he had known at the Silk Mill had now passed away.

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Hutton died in 1815 and at the time was perhaps never truly valued by the town of his birth – his legacy, however, remains with us to this day.

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This author still uses his book regularly whilst writing for Derby Uncovered. If you remember the story of the daredevil, the tight rope, the Cathedral tower and the donkey or indeed the gruesome tale of John Crossland executing his own father and brother to avoid the hangman himself, you can thank William Hutton for both of them – that was the original source material I used.​​