"The most marked traits in the character of Arkwright were his wonderful ardor, energy, and perseverance. He commonly laboured in his multifarious concerns from five o'clock in the morning till nine at night; and when considerably more than fifty years of age, --feeling that the defects of his education placed him under great difficult and inconvenience in conducting his correspondence, and in the general management of his business,--he encroached upon his sleep, in order to gain an hour each day to learn English grammar, and another hour to improve his writing and orthography! He was impatient of whatever interfered with his favorite pursuits; and the fact is too strikingly characteristic not to be mentioned, that he separated from his wife not many years after their marriage, because she, convinced that he would starve his family [because of the impractical of his schemes], broke some of his experimental models of machinery."

Edward Baines, The History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain (1835), as cited in Spielvogel, Western Civilization, 5th ed., p. 554.