THE LUDDITE NOVELS 1: BRONTE, SHIRLEY

 The Centres of Yorkshire Luddism

1] Almondbury & Castle Hill 2] Milnsbridge 3] Warren House 4] Rawfolds 5] Hartshead 6] Dumb Steeple 7 Three Nuns 7] The Shears 8] The Yew Tree 9] The Star 10] Brighouse and Raistrick 11] Bradley Woods 

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

Genesis

The Luddites evidently made a deep impression on Charlotte that was first reflected in her fiction when she was around 16 .    As children she and her siblings invented an imaginary colony based in West Africa.  As the children grew up, so the imaginary kingdom was subdivided into two private worlds  around 1831.  Anne and Emily wrote about  Gondal whilst Charlotte and Branwell wrote about Angria.  

https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/bront-juvenilia-the-history-of-angria

The prose about Gondal does not survive but sections of the chronicle about Angria do.   In Francis Beer's edition of The Juvenalia of Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte, (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1986) is a tale called Marion v Zenobia.  At this point in the development of Gondal the imaginary land is starting to sound more like Yorkshire than Africa as there is a casual reference to industrial unrest:  'The workmen at the principle mills and furnaces struck for an advance in wages, and, the masters refusing to comply with their exorbitant demands, they all turned out simultaneously,' (Beer, p 218).   Though the Luddites attacked mills rather than organised strikes,  the next sentence shows that Charlotte had the events of 1812 in mind: 'Shortly after, Colonel Grenville, one of the great mill-owners was shot,' (Beer, p 218).   The imagination of the 16 year old Charlotte is more bloodthirsty than the 33 year old who wrote Shirley.  Colonel Grenville, unlike his counterpart in Shirley is killed, not merely wounded.  Unlike Horsfall in reality or Moore in fiction, Grenville is given a military rank, in keeping with an imaginary land founded by soldiers led by the Duke of Wellington.   Charlotte reports, without comment or protest, that the 'assassins' 'were interrogated by torture' (Beer p 218) as though this is the standard procedure in Angria.    Nonetheless the brutality does not work.   These fictional assassins remain as silent as the mortally wounded men interrogated after the attack on Rawfolds: 'they remained inflexible, not a single satisfactory answer being elicited from them,' (Beer, p 218). The mature Charlotte felt that the moral, economic and political problems dealt with so casually in a couple of sentences deserved the attention of a full-length novel: Shirley.

Names and Geography   

The names of the places of the novel are invented and the characters of the Luddite conflict are renamed.  The mill owners  William Horsfall and William Cartwright are merged in the figure of Robert Moore.    The militant parson Hammond Roberson, who Charlotte knew, is mildly satirised as the Rev. Matthewson Helstone, a rector who ‘should have been a soldier’ (Ch III, p 27 ).  The result is a characteristic Bronte transposition of Yorkshire into social and psychological myth.   The text absorbs actual biographical and historical incidents but places them in a generalised ‘West Riding of Yorkshire’.    This produces a text of highly charged fictionality.  Readers are likely to recognise the attack on Moore’s mill as an adaptation of the attack on Rawfolds Mill but only a few friends of Charlotte would realise that Shirley’s self-cauterisation after an attack by a rabid dog (Ch XXVIII, p 401) is modeled on Emily’s similar action (See Juliet Barker, The Brontes, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1994 Chap 21, p 612)   This both fulfills and challenges the expectations of the mid-19th century reader.  Incidents dramatic enough to anticipate the ‘sensation’ novel of the 1860s turn out to be based on fact not invention but innocuous facts are concealed by the  renaming of parishes.   ‘Whinbury’ and ‘Nunnely’ displace Hartshead and Haworth.  ‘Hartshead Moore’ seems to become ‘Stilbro’ Moore’, Moore’s mill is sited at ‘Hollow Mill’, not Rawfold, and Rev Helstone is given the parish of ‘Briarfield’ instead of his model’s Liversedge.  Luddites are not called Luddites, they are simply ‘Yorkshire rioters’ (Ch XIX,p 272).

Hartshead Moor, renamed 'Stillsboro Moor' 

The transformation of Hartshead Moor and Rawfolds Mill show Charlotte wanting to move beyond the limits of realism.   Shirley herself initially appears confident that Hollow’s Mill can be accommodated by a Romantic sensibility: ‘I like that romantic Hollow, with all my heart’.  The assertion is immediately questioned: ‘Romantic – with a mill in it?’   Shirley defends her aesthetics:  ‘The old mill and the white cottage are each admirable in its way,’ but she may be being merely provocative: ‘Mischief, spirit and glee sparkled all over her face’, (Ch XI, p 161). All that is unequivocal about the scene is her financial interest: ‘Half my income comes from the works in that Hollow’ (Ch XI, p 162).  The authorial tone used for describing similar scenes is more sombre.   One of the first landscapes of the book is of Stillboro’ Moor at night where the sky becomes ‘a muffled streaming vault, all black, save where, towards the east, the furnaces of Stilbro’ iron works threw a tremulous lurid shimmer on the horizon’, (Ch2, p 12).  It is an essay in Industrial Romanticism where the sensual words ‘tremulous’ and ‘shimmer’ are separated by the hostile word ‘lurid’.  It embodies the ambiguities of Joseph Wright of Derby’s industrial paintings, such as 1773 The Iron Forge Viewed From Without  http://www.arthermitage.org/Joseph-Wright-of-Derby/Iron-Forge-Viewed-from-Without.html.  

More significantly it resembles the biblical and mythological paintings of John Martin who the Brontes admired.  Martin became famous through canvases that feature sinister expanses of darkness broken by ‘lurid’ light.   Similar compositions inform the Great Day of His Wrath, 1853, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Martin_(painter)#/media/File:John_Martin_-_The_Great_Day_of_His_Wrath_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

and the Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, 1823-7 http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/paintings/the-expulsion-of-adam-and-eve-from-paradise-37061

However by the end of the book readers discover that the ‘romantic hollow’ will be obliterated by Robert Moore’s expansive plans (see Ecology: Exploitation or Preservation? ).   The truce between the Romantic and the Industrial has ended long ago with the triumph of the industrial; there has been a fall.

Barkisland Mills post-industrial phase, 2016.

They have been converted to luxury flats and now nestle in a 'romantic hollow'. 

On a more biographical level places Charlotte knew well were renamed but not transformed for the purposes of the novel.   Oakwell Hall, Birstall, a boarding school in Charlotte’s day, became Shirley’s house ‘Fieldhead’, whilst Red House, Gomersal, belonging to her friend Ellen Nussey’s family, became ‘Briarmains’.  As the Kirklees tourist pamphlet points out Charlotte changed little of either interior or exterior of Red House, mentioning the beauty of the stained glass windows in Chapter 9.  https://www.kirklees.gov.uk/leisure/museumsGalleries/pdf/bronteYorkshire.pdf

                         Oakwell Hall, Birstall, 'Fieldhead'                                                     The Red House, Gomersal, 'Briarmains'

Conflict /Ecology Politics

The myth of The Fall is crucial to Shirley.    ‘Hollow Moor’ is set in a ‘sweet glen’ (Ch XIX, 274), which does not match the site of Rawfolds Mill. Cartwright built his mill on the Spen River halfway up a gentle gradient from Liversedge to Cleckheton.   

An unromantic ruin on the flat ground to the west of where Rawfolds would have stood. 

Arthur Pollard’s the Landscape of the Brontes (London, Webb & Bower, 1988), includes a picture of Hunsworth Mill, Cleckheaton, as the original of Robert Moore’s mill.   By 1992 the mill was demolished.  The photograph Pollard includes on page 162 does not show evidence of a ‘hollow’ but  a mill built in a place of natural beauty would be common in the Calder and Colne Valleys:

A romantic ruin: the tower of Penny Hill Mill dominates its valley.

Shirley needs Moore's mill to be set in a beauty spot to make several significant contrasts as The Fall is remythologised in ecological, social and economic terms.  

Consequently the description of the aftermath of the attack is highly wrought moving from symbolism into realism: ‘All the copse up the Hollow was shady and dewey, the hill at its head was green; but just here in the centre of the sweet glen, Discord, broken loose in the night from control, had beaten the ground with his stamping hoofs, and left it waste and pulverised’, (Ch XIX, p 274).  This symbolic passage precedes the realistic description of ‘the yard thickly bestrewn with stones and brickbats’ (Ch XIX, p 274).   The last words of the book show that the industry of the mill itself has destroyed the glen: ‘The other day I passed up the Hollow, which tradition says was once green, and lone, and wild; and there I saw the manufacturer’s day-dreams embodied in substantial stone and brick and ashes – the cinder-black highway, the cottages, and the cottage gardens’.     So far this seems a realistic description, anticipating Ruskin’s sarcastic lecture to the manufacturers of Bradford in 1864 (see ‘Millscape, Estates’).   As the passage concludes, the tone and the symbolism become more Biblical: ‘there I saw a mighty mill, and a chimney, ambitious as the tower of Babel,’ (Ch XXXVII, p 511).  

At this point John Martin again becomes a more useful point of reference that Joseph Wright.   His 1841 painting Pandemonium not only suggests Mill architecture in its long facade, decorative tower and dark waters but also resembles Westminster Bridge and the Houses of Parliament that were being rebuilt in their present form.  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:John_Martin_Le_Pandemonium_Louvre.JPG 

With this sting in the tail Charlotte resists closure. Officially the politics of the novel are optimistic and similar to those of Mrs Gaskell’s Mary Barton: ‘No one thought of treating the workmen as brethren and friends, and openly, clearly, as appealing to reasonable men, stating the exact and full circumstances which led the masters to think it was the wise policy of the time to make sacrifices themselves, and to hope for them from the operatives’, (Mary Barton, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1987, [1848], Ch XVI p 213).  This is the equivalent passage in Shirley: ‘By speaking kindly to William Farren – who was a very honest man, without envy or hatred of those more happily circumstanced than himself; thinking it no hardship and no injustice to be forced to live by labour; disposed to be honourably content if he could but get work to do – Moore might have made a friend,’ (Ch VIII, p 109).     This is a complex sentence.    A list of the qualities of the ideal workman is forced into an ambiguous grammatical space created by two dashes.  The hope, laboriously built up clause by clause, is that William Farren represents the typical workman.  Most of the later Luddite novels have equivalent figures such as Luke Marner, (Through the Fray), Joseph Sowden (Bond Slaves) , Ben ‘o Bill’s (Ben o’ Bill’s) or the firer who tries to stop the Plug Rioters (Inheritance).  

Such hope is belied by the powerful symbol of ‘Babel’.  This suggests that the political divisions of Britain, let alone Yorkshire, are incapable of discovering a common language or a common purpose.    Characters with good intention in the novel are rendered helpless by the confrontational politics of Tory, Whig and Ludd.    Even the outspoken and active Shirley is forced to become a passive onlooker as Moore’s mill is attacked or the Romantic glen she admires is destroyed by Moore’s new works.  Charlotte would have every reason to be pessimistic.  Though she was born after the end of the Luddite riots, she grew up in an area racked by violent disputes between masters and operatives, often quelled by military intervention.  Shirley was written during the rise of Chartism.  In the north this often took the form of ‘Physical Force Chartism’, pressing workers’ demands for parliamentary reform and better working conditions through action such as disabling the steam boilers that ran the factories.   These actions acquired the nickname ‘The Plug Riots’.  As this website shows Haworth, far from being the isolated timeless spot Mrs Gaskell chooses to depict in her biography, was surrounded by factories and violent protest against working conditions: http://www.calderdale.gov.uk/wtw/sources/themes/plugriot.html  

Jane Eyre, published in 1847, takes for granted a large military presence in South Yorkshire: ‘The –th regiment are stationed there since the riots; and the officers are the most agreeable men in the world,’ (Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1966, Ch 12, p 390). 

Towers, derived from John Martin's pictures turn up in Charlotte Bronte's sketchbook.

This copy of a detail of one of her sketches suggests the supra-human grandeur created at Babel.  

Dominance and Sexual Politics

Robert, like the tower of Babel or a Greek tragic hero , has had the hubris to elevate himself over the rest of humanity.  He is nearly assassinated when he purses Luddites with as much vindictiveness as vindication.     His confrontation with the men who attack his mill is not subject to deep political analysis: ‘the indignant, wronged spirit of the Middle Rank bears down in zeal and scorn on the famished and furious mass of the Operative class,’ (Ch XIX, p 272).    Instead the clash appears to be a tragic conflict of male passion and will observed by a chorus of two women: ‘they could guess that the fighting animal was roused in every one of those men,’(Ch XIX, p 273).   In a similar spirit Robert treats the attack like a violent game:

                They heard the rebel leader cry, “To the back lads!”  They heard a voice retort, “Come round, we will meet you!” 

               “To the counting-house!” was the order again.

                “Welcome! – We shall have you there!” was the response. (Shirley, Ch XIX,272)

Most 19th century writers would have made their heroines faint at such a point but Charlotte rules this out: ‘they could not have fainted,’ (Ch XIX, p 273).   Instead they respond to the scene with excitement described in a sexualised language: ‘Both the girls felt their faces glow and their pulses throb’, ‘the demand throbbing in their throbbing pulses,’ (Ch XIX, p 273).    The word ‘throbbing’ here is clumsily emphatic, especially when it turns up twice within the same phrase; the word will be an equally repetitious part of the language and characterisation of Inheritance.  Unlike Inheritance however, male dominance is admired but resisted; Jane Eyre and Villette repeat the paradox.    The book decides that the submissive Caroline is the mate best suited to Robert.    The outspoken Shirley, who bears what was a man’s name in the 1840s, rejects Robert  with a feminist turn of phrase as she accuses him of believing her ‘a traitor to all my sisters,’ (Ch XXX, p 422).  She regards their role as economic partners as more important than a marriage link.   Before Robert marries Caroline, like Rochester in Jane Eyre, he has to be wounded and then recover.  Once more Charlotte disappoints expected novel and gender expectations; it is not Caroline who nurses Robert but ‘a sort of giantess’, ironically named ‘Mrs Horsfall,’ (Ch XXXII p 445).     

Nevertheless economically and socially the novel ends with Robert in a position of dominance over his workforce.  A dynamic new power has entered the valley, inserting itself into the enclosed worlds of Mr Yorke and the Reverend Helstone.   Moore fulfils, almost to the letter, the concept Carlyle invented; the ‘Captain of Industry’:

Captains of Industry are the true Fighters, henceforth recognisable as the only true ones: Fighters against Chaos, Necessity and the Devils and Jotuns [giants]; and lead on Mankind in that great, and alone true, and universal warfare; the stars in their courses fighting for them, and all Heaven and all Earth saying audibly, Well-done!,’ (Past and Present, Ch 4   http://www.online-literature.com/thomas-carlyle/past-and-present/42/  [1843] ) 

However attractive Charlotte might find this doctrine, both socially and sexually, she cannot be unequivocal about Moore.  His factory is compared to ‘Babel’ not the ‘New Jerusalem’, (Ch XXXVII, p 511). 

Quaker sweet manufacturers like the Rowntrees tried to make their factories places where their workers could improve their lives as well as earn wages.

Robert Moore may offer a Sunday School but Rowntrees Factory in York had this block (above) that once contained a canteen and a library for the workers.

Though the canteen and library were sold off, the Joseph Rowntree Theatre survives and is actively supported by many talented amateur groups. 

Race & Heartland

Sir Walter Scott’s 1820 novel Ivanhoe uses Yorkshire as a paradigm for the meeting of the races and cultures of Saxon and Norman from which will emerge the racial and cultural identity of Britain.   Shirley is less optimistic.  It emphasises the Yorkshire nature of the protagonists as if to seal off their infection from spreading to the rest of Britain.   Robert Moore’s proud display of a continental  French heritage would seem to make him equivalent to one of Ivanhoe’s arrogant Norman invaders but his servant localises him: ‘But your father war Yorkshire, which maks ye a bit Yorkshire too: and onybody may see ye’re akin to us,’ (Ch V, p 44).   An uneasy joke is made when Robert says, of Yorkshire folk: ‘You are savages, Joe,’ (Ch V, p 45).   Their ‘savagery’ seems to be confirmed by their ‘West Riding’ ‘rioters’ yell,’ as they attack the mill (Ch XIX, p 271).   The novel shows Yorkshire in need of civilising, though whether this will be the outcome of Moore’s ‘tower of Babel’ (Ch XXXVII, p 511) is left uncertain at the end.  All that is certain is that the narrator voice abandons any claim to authority.     The ‘judicious reader’ is warned that the ‘moral’ of the story will be hard to find and no [authorial] ‘directions’ will be offered to help find it (Ch XXXVII, p 511).    Consequently the last line is ambiguous in effect: ‘God speed him in his quest!’  (Ch XXXVII, p 511).   Is the tone despairing or jeering?   It anticipates the even more provocatively unsatisfying ending of Villette.

Certainly Shirley is more interested in disenchantment than enchantment.   The second to last paragraph includes a disconnected anecdote that claims ‘the fairish’ (fairies) have been displaced by the founding of the mill (Ch XXXVII, p 511).     Robin Hood is referred to in Shirley but he is not the vital figure of wild, loyal justice he is in Ivanhoe.  The ruins of the nunnery in which he was killed are simply a Picturesque part of a landscape abounding in ‘perfect, picture-like effects’ (Ch XII, p 167).   The narrative voice does not reassure readers that such spots will survive the industrialisation of the West Riding.

Dissent

Shirley is more interested in revealing the spiritual landscapes that underlie the earthly Romantic or economic landscapes it observes.  The story begins with a facetious description of ‘an abundant shower of curates’ that ‘has fallen upon the north of England’ (Ch I, p 1) but by page 8 it becomes apparent that these men carry pistols because of the anti-machinery violence.    Chapter IX continues the satire of what the 18th century called ‘enthusiastic’ religion, commenting on the vehemence of a ‘Wesleyan’ congregation:   ‘(Terrible, most distracting to the ear was the strained shout in which the last stanza was given),’ (Ch IX, p 115).  What seems required to counter-act dissent, of all kinds, is a vigorous ‘muscular’ Christianity, that is capable of brushing aside a Dissenters’ Whitsuntide picnic when that wishes to use the same lane as a Church of England outing.  In Chapter XVII the church band plays ‘Rule Britannia’, as if they are facing Napoleon, until:  ‘The enemy was sung and stormed down’ (p 239) and ‘forced to turn tail’ (p 240).    The incident recollects Patrick Bronte’s throwing into a ditch the drunk who confronted his Dewsbury Whitsun walk in 1810 (Barker, p 35) https://www.kirklees.gov.uk/visitors/documents/patrickbronte.pdf  Whit Walking continues at places like Saddleworth:

http://www.whitfriday.brassbands.saddleworth.org/Walks.html

This routing of Dissenters plays out as farce what elsewhere will be manifest as tragedy.  Shirley shows workers using the Bible in an ‘Antinomian fashion’ (Ch XIII, p 186) as their forerunners the Levellers did in Cromwell’s day.  Robert Moore is shot down by a man who quotes Proverbs 11.10 in the King James Version: ‘Where the wicked perisheth, there is shouting’, (Ch XXX, p 427).  The only way the novel can win this ideological battle is by calling Michael Hartley a ‘frantic Antinomian’ and a ‘mad leveller’ who dies of the DTs, (Ch XXXVII, p 502).  Implicitly his politics belong to a discredited past but, as the book ends showing the construction of a new tower of Babel, the issue remains unresolved.  

The towering Titanic Mills of 1911, like the contemporary liner, Titanic was named after the race of giants that defied the Greek gods.

The hubris of the ship now lies under 3,880 m of water but the Mills are a spa and luxury flats.