The Luddite Novels

Geology, Luddism, History and the Novel

Geology ensured that Yorkshire was at the heart of both the traditional and the industrial wool trade.   In Medieval times the grazing opportunities of not only the lush lowlands but the more sparse fodder of the South Pennines allowed the cultivation of sheep for their wool.   

  Sheep graze on Pule Hill                                                                      Ignoring Pule Hill these sheep prefer to graze close to Mount 

                                                                                                               Road and the A62 to the alarm of motorists...

                                                                                                               Across the road are spoil heaps from the construction of the 

                                                                                                              Standedge Tunnel.  The industrial world is rarely far away in the                                                                                                                                                        

                                                                                                                                                 South Pennines.

The landscape is so vast it frequently absorbs the grazing flocks:the white dot is a sheep's head 

looking up from rough grazing on Dog Hill north of Marsden. 

 The water of these Millstone Grit hills proved excellent at washing wool and the force of the flow of local streams and rivers was used for powering fulling mills that scoured and thickened the wool.   

Bradley Brook, south of Slaithwaite

Though water-powered mills had existed since the Middle Ages their proliferation in the South Pennine area came about when they were used to run machines that could process cloth more swiftly and cheaply than humans.    The water wheels were gradually replaced with more powerful steam engines that could be easily supplied from local coal measures.   Consequently the South Pennines was at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution and the social problems it triggered.  The most violent and visible protest came through the Luddite movement where the new machinery was targeted and destroyed in an attempt to preserve jobs.  

Though the Luddite movement began in Nottingham and spread to Lancashire and then Yorkshire, it is the events of Yorkshire that have mostly attracted the attention of writers.  This is because it was in Yorkshire that two of the most significant events in the brief history of Luddism took place; the defeated attack on Rawfolds Mill, owned by Mr Cartwright and the assassination of the owner of Ottiwell’s mill, Mr Horsfall.    However disguised, these tend to be the central points of the social realist narrative of Luddism in Yorkshire because the writers want to make larger claims about the morality engendered by the economic/historic process of industrialisation.  They realise that the subject is larger than Yorkshire itself, part of a process that would encompass not just Britain but the whole world.

The site draws on the following sources:   

Historical Accounts:

Print:

Brooke, Alan, Kipling, Lesley, Liberty or Death: Radicals, Republicans and Luddites 1793 to 1823, Huddersfield, Garian Press, 1993  2nd expanded edition, Huddersfield,  Huddersfield Local History Society, 2012

Kipling, Lesley, Hall, Nick, On the Trail of the Luddites, Pennine Heritage Network, n.d.

Peel, Frank, The Risings of the Luddites, Heckmondwike, T. W. Senior, 1880 [on demand reprint]

                     The Risings of the Luddites, Chartists and Plugdrawers , Heckmondwike, T. W. Senior,

                      1880 https://archive.org/stream/risingsluddites00peelgoog#page/n16/mode/2up

Reid, Robert, Land of Lost Content: The Luddite Revolt 1812, London, Heinemann, 1986

Web:

http://ludditebicentenary.blogspot.co.uk

http://www.marsdenhistory.co.uk/

https://undergroundhistories.wordpress.com/a-catalogue-of-the-textile-mills-and-factories-of-the-huddersfield-area-c-1790-1914/

Editions of novels used:

Banks, Mrs George Linnaeus, Bond Slaves – the Story of a Struggle, 1893 (Manchester, Northern Grove Publishing Project, 2012)

Bronte, Charlotte, Shirley, 1848 (London, Dent, 1968)

Bentley, Phillis, Inheritance, 1931 (London, Gollanz, 1979)

Bentley, Phillis, Ned Carver in Danger, 1967 (London, Macdonald, 1967)

Colbeck, Alfred Scarlea Grange or A Luddite’s Daughter, (London, The Religious Tract Society,

                             1893)Aka: In the Toils of the Luddites, (London, The Religious Tract Society, nd)

Henty, G. A., Thorough the Fray: A Tale of the Luddite Riot, 1885 (‘On Demand’ reprint, 2015)

Lodge, Arthur, (AL) Sad Times: A Tale of the Luddites, 1866 (Huddersfield, Joseph Woodhead, 1870)

Lodge, Arthur, (AL) Forty Years Ago: a Sketch of Yorkshire Life and Poems, 1869  (Huddersfield, Jos. Woodhead 1869)

Sykes, D.E.F., Walker, George, Ben ’O’ Bills: The Luddite, 1910 (Huddersfield, Lambsbreath, 1988)

Trant, William, Daisy Baines the Luddite’s Daughter, 1880 (Huddersfield Weekly News anonymous serial, 16 Oct 1880-2 April 1881, transcription)

Collection of Luddite Writings

Binfield, Kevin (ed), Writings of the Luddites, Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 2004

Luddism General

As the word ‘Luddism’ has been adopted and transmitted over the centuries, so it has been depoliticised, to signify ignorant opposition to technology.  The term reached the ITV Thunderbirds are Go! Series in 2015 with this modern meaning; the story of the episode Unplugged (2 May 2015) shows well-meaning ecologists manipulated by a sinister self-interested criminal.   It is a plot that could have been borrowed from the novelists Banks, Bentley or Sykes/Walker.

Even the Victoria Web sees the movement as an apolitical spontaneous series of outbreaks:

‘There does not seem to have been any political motivation behind the Luddite riots; equally, there was no national organisation.  The men merely were attacking what they saw as the reason for the decline in their livelihoods.’

http://www.victorianweb.org/history/riots/luddites.html

It is easy to see Luddism as an anomaly, merely a series of violent attacks that were defeated by violence.  The defeat of the attacks on Rawfolds Mill in Yorkshire and on Burton’s Mill, Manchester, in April 1812, caused the confidence of the movement to falter.    In 1815 the cessation of the American War and the Napoleonic  Wars allowed trade to improve and employment to increase,  though by then  a new system had emerged where cloth workers were factory hands rather than artisans.

Bradley Mills from Cowcliffe standing above modern warehouses.

In April 1812 a Luddite attack was repulsed (Kipling/Hall p 7) 

Ernst Toller: The Machine Breakers 1919

Nevertheless the assumption might be that the subject of the Luddites would mostly appeal to left wing writers with revolutionary tendencies, writers like Ernst Toller, whose The Machine Breakers was written whilst he was imprisoned for his part in the creation of the Bavarian Soviet Republic in 1919.   http://spartacus-educational.com/FWWtoller.htm

However, on the surface at least, the story of the Luddites is the story of failure so Banks and Sykes/Walker treat the subject as a moral lesson on how easily the labouring classes can be lead astray.   Toller, despite his socialism, treats the Luddites in a similar way.   The Machine Wreckers is set in Nottingham, rather than Yorkshire, and has a ‘Ned Lud’ amongst its characters but otherwise its working class characters are familiar ones from the Luddite novels.   Most of the workers are embodiments of misery and despair addressed by voices of reason and unreason.  The twist in The Machine Wreckers is that the most violent agitator, John Wibley, turns out to be a double agent whilst the voice of reason belongs to Jimmy Cobbet; a man more akin to Fabians than rebels .  He is a worker who imagines a day when the workers will be masters of machines and factories joined with ‘the workers of the world in fellowship’ (The Machine Wreckers, trns Ashley Dukes, London, Nick Hern Books, 1995, Act V, Scn 3, p72).   What wrecks the Luddites is what wrecked the Spartacus uprising; premature local action.    Nevertheless, after the defeat of the Bavarian Soviet by force, it could be consoling for the left to consider that this earlier defeat of workers’ power had not stopped the growth of a politically conscious proletariat from 1819-1919

Other Luddite novels shift the focus radically.  Bronte’s Shirley and Bentley’s Inheritance create narratives more interested in sexual mastery and being mastered than in social justice.

History /Fiction and the Ambiguity of the Left

Was Luddism an attempt by a skilled group of workers to maintain their privileged position as a labour elite or were they to be considered as the armed vanguard for the cause of workers’ rights?  The careful way in which Luddism in Yorkshire initially attacked only the technology that affected their work might suggest their main concern was simply preservation of their jobs, as many of the ‘General Lud’ letters testify:  ‘We give you Notice when the Shers is all Broken the Spinners shall be the next if they be not taken down vickerman tayler Hill he has had is Garde but we will pull all down som night and kill him that Nave and Roag,’ (Brooke/ Kipling,  p18).   The later targeting of masters might suggest the inspiration of the French Revolution and the determination to destroy the new masters in the interests of creating a new political order.    It is certainly significant that when George Mellor was awaiting execution in York he sent forward his signature and those of fellow Luddites to be put on a petition for Parliamentary reform.  They had no expectation such reform would save them from execution or benefit only croppers. 

In Chapter 15 of Capital Volume 1 Marx put this conflict in a far-reaching historical context that traces resistance to machinery amidst the labouring classes.    Despite an angry analysis of the sufferings of the labouring classes through the adoption of machinery, he seems to feel machinery represented the future and protest the past: (Capital Volume 1, Trns Ben Fowkes, London, Penguin, 1976, pps492-643).  https://archive.org/details/MarxCapitalVolume1ACritiqueOfPoliticalEconomy

A steam winding machine in the National Railway Museum York embodies the power of 19th century technology. 

Later left wing historians are prepared to be more positive:  

http://inhistorics.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/failure-of-luddites.html

More recently such historians have been interested in pointing out the association of Luddism with Republicanism and political revolution.    The title of Alan Brooke and Lesley Kiplings’ 1993 book Liberty or Death Radicals, Republicans and Luddites 1793 to 1823, contextualises Luddism as part of an unbroken spectrum of working class resistance extending to the emergence of the Chartists.  More generally various modern anti-technology leftist and popular groups are proud to claim descent from the Luddites: http://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/articles/mr-luds-song

Consequently, as labour politics and the use of technology remain fraught, Luddism has remained a controversial subject up to the present day as the following pages explore looking at the way historians and writers of fiction have treated key incidents:

• 1. Three key issues raised by Luddism.

  2. Interpretations of significant acts during the Luddite movement.

  3. Commentaries on the individual novels.