In 1813, as the Napoleonic Wars created a yarn shortage in Great Britain, a Yorkshire weaver called Benjamin Law worked out how to add rags to virgin wool to create an inferior yarn called “shoddy”. By 1855, factories were grinding 35 million pounds of rags annually, though a negative public perception, which persists in the definition of “shoddy”, clung to the industry. In 1871 Charles Dickens defended it as an “honest imposture” that employed hundreds of hands, though in Bleak House he condemned his rag-and-bottle merchant, Mr Krook, to the fate of spontaneous combustion.