THE LUDDITE NOVELS 2: LODGE, SAD TIMES & FORTY YEARS AGO

 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 

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

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

Geography

In Forty Years Ago Lodge uses actual place names.  The loose anecdotes that make up the short story are centred round the actual village of ‘Kirkburton’, though it is called ‘Burtonkirk’, close to the 16th century ‘Woodsome Hall’.  In Sad Times Lodge follows the Victorian convention of partially blanking out place names, usually with a strong clue beforehand.  By this convention ‘Huddersfield’ is rendered ‘the market town of H –’ (Ch XIII, p 141).  Fewer clues are given as to the village in which the novel is set: ‘R –’ is simply ‘a small, snug, little place’ (Ch I, p 5).  Chapter II places the village next to another village ‘on the road to Wakefield’ containing a Red Lion pub (p 14).   If Forty Years Ago is any guide, the story is based in the Kirkburton area.  Consequently the village could be ‘Rowley Hill’, now absorbed by the suburbs of Huddersfield.  It lies about ¼ of a mile east of the A642, the main modern road from Huddersfield to Wakefield and ¾ of a mile east of Woodsome Hall.    

Rowley Hill to the east of the A629.  Woodsome Hall is to the west on the floor of the valley.

The book needs a terrain where the modern cloth worker George can live close to Mr Scott’s old hall that appears to go back to at least the 16th century; Woodsome Hall was rebuilt in stone in 1517 and little changed afterwards: http://www.woodsome.co.uk/clubhouse/club_history/history_of_hall/ .  

      Woodsome Hall, fireplace

Woodsome Hall is on private property.  These pictures were taken by kind permission of the golf club that now occupies the site.

Forty Years is set around 1829 but there is no retrospective mention of the Luddites.  Like Sad Times the book is more interested in retelling stories of practical jokes and sentimental tragedies.   Despite being set seventeen years after the attack on Rawfolds Mill, it shows the local economy existing in a pre-factory mode.    Individual workers still take their cloth to a ‘warehouse’ called ‘Sugdens-at-Lees’ (Chp 1, p 13).   Though the epicentres of Luddite activity were to the west and north of Huddersfield in Marsden and Halifax, an enigmatic exchange in Chapter 2 refers to political unrest and violence being noted by Kirkburton men:

‘oud Woodhead keeps talking abaet th’ parliament abolishing this law and repealing that law, but I’ll tell yo’ what Billy, if they could nobbet abolish this starvation law that I’m suffering under just noen, it wud be one or the best things they’ve done lately,’ (Chp 2, p26)

Billy’s reply refers to continuing violence in the Huddersfield area encoded enigmatically by a reference to the government’s deployment of military power as like the ‘Janissaries of Constantinople’, in other words they are compared to the merciless killers of a despotic regime:

‘yar government wanted to stick their disciplining on tut shoulders of th’ Janissaries of Constantinople th’ last June, they raised up in a body agaen it, an dear o’ me what bloodshed there war,’  (Chp 2, p 26).

Alan Brooke refers to a radical politics meeting on 1 June 1829 and an anti-machine meeting on 15 June 1829 protesting about the unemployment and suffering in the region following the collapse of a Huddersfield bank and the spread of mills.   https://undergroundhistories.wordpress.com/repression-and-resistance-in-west-riding-luddism/   

Both meetings were held on Almondbury Bank, otherwise known as ’Radical Forest’.    The first was a gala like affair with bands, the second less ceremonial.   https://undergroundhistories.wordpress.com/we-are-weary-of-slavery/ 

'Radical Forest'. A little bit of 'forest' survives next to suburbs in Forest Road. 

Brooke does not say does not say if either meeting led to violence.    Forty Years might be recollecting a confrontation in this tense month that was not recorded or was not the result of these meetings.   Alternatively, in the case of Walshaw’s escape, it might simply be a credible invention.     Certainly the nostalgic tone of Forty Years ago cannot disguise that the two major stories are far from cheering.   The first is of a farmer becoming a beggar through debts incurred by the illness of his wife and the second is of an innkeeper’s daughter being seduced by a well-off man.    The second story is a ‘timeless’ Victorian favourite but the first would fit into the pattern of local bank crashes, bankruptcies and strikes that had followed the run on the London banks in 1825 and the national trade depression.   https://undergroundhistories.wordpress.com/we-are-weary-of-slavery/

Conflict/Politics

The depoliticisation of other Luddite novels is implicit but it is overt in Sad Times.  As Chapter I frankly admits:  ‘[Reader, if you think for a moment you are about to have a political story put the book aside at once, or you may be disappointed.]’ (p 7).    Indeed, despite the subtitle, very little of the book is about the Luddites, who have a major role in only three of the thirteen chapters.     The book anticipates Henty in so far as much of the text is occupied with the practical jokes of the apprentices Tom and Charley, as if it is to be a book addressed to young adults.   The book’s humour is inscribed as early as the second page where a long, facetious description of the Red Lion’s sign is inserted: ‘but, reader, imagine a smiling biped, around which hung a profusion of hair, four feet like four velvet pincushions’ (p 6) before jumping, via the political disclaimer, to an account of the starvation in a cropper’s cottage where a child is comforted with ‘a hard crust of dry bread; this bread had been given him every night for more than a week,’ (Ch I, p 7).   The book’s flippancy is increased by a bizarre rendition of Yorkshire dialect in which ‘B’ can sometimes stand for ‘M’ , as when old Jonas calls his daughter ‘Mary’  ‘Bary’ (Ch II, p 17) or ‘V’ as when he says ‘Barry weel’ for ‘Very well’ (Ch VI, p 56).

The central character, George Barsfield, is evidently modelled on George Mellor, even to the extent of providing him with the same pistol: ‘a deadly-looking weapon, nearly two feet long; the stock was mounted with brass, and the barrel some twelve inches in length’ (Ch I, p 9).  Surprisingly this weapon is never used in the book and this George is a follower, not a leader.  Anticipating Wat Hartland, he is torn between his duty to his sick wife and his Luddite oath: ‘Nay lass,... I mun goae, tha knows, I’ve sworn, an’ I cannot breyk my oeath,’ (Ch 1, p 9).  The oath is the expected ferocious one that ‘I’d follow an’ murder a traitorous Lud,’ (Ch IX, p 89). 

Reconstruction of George Mellor's pistol.

Patrick Bronte's pistol.

Guns were not uncommon in the West Riding, making it worthwhile for the Luddites to raid houses for weapons.

The small pistol immediately above is associated with Patrick Bronte who is said to have bought the gun after Luddites going to 

attack Rawfolds Mill passed close by his lodgings on Hartshead Moor.

The pointed and precise actions of the Luddites in targeting machines and the users of machines is replaced by a more general radicalism encapsulated in George’s frequent quotes from Burns.    Chapter IX begins with an epigraph from Burns that leads into George’s complaint about looking for unskilled work: ‘beg an’ pray ov a man to giv me a chance to mak him rich!’ (p 88) .  George goes on to quote Burns four times over the next two pages, seeing himself as the ‘Poor o’erlaboured wight’ (p 88), even though he is actually unemployed. 

Despite the book’s avoidance of political comment, Lodge is more interested than other novelists in showing the danger and inconvenience of living under constant surveillance by the military.   George has to elude a patrol in Chapter I and most of Chapter VI is preoccupied with Walshaw’s attempts to dodge the soldiers.   He fails and is imprisoned in a dark temporary guard-house ‘the place in which the village hearse had rested for years’ (p 61).  He escapes by climbing out of the chimney.    There is a possibility that this episode is based on an actual incident or folk-tale from Luddite times in so far as the author evidently knows something of the traditions of Yorkshire.    One of the leading characters is the fiddle player Old Jonas who is seen teaching dancing in Chapter VI.  There is a glimpse of the local celebrations of Bonfire Night in Chapter XI, accompanied by ‘the old fiddler playing one of his three tunes,’ (p 119) before Jonas dies after a dance lesson in Chapter XII.    As he lies dying the author recalls a tradition of racing at Yorkshire weddings, where the winner has the honour of escorting the bride.   With his last strength the old man tries to play ‘Flowers of Edinburgh’ and ‘The White Cockade’, tunes that are well-known within the English tradition, (p 128-9).  

Actual history is crammed into the last few pages of the book in Chapter XIII.  On page 139 the Luddites form up ‘thirteen abreast’ and attack ‘a little water mill’, that represents Rawfolds Mill.  Where Shirley takes an ironic pride in the Yorkshire attackers: ‘a West-Riding-clothing-district-of-Yorkshire rioters’ yell,’ (Ch XIX,  p 271-2), Lodge’s tone is aghast: ‘up went such a shriek as oh heaven! we hope may never be heard amidst Yorkshire hills and dales again,’ (Ch XIII, p 139).  Grammatical tenses are as unstable as the attitude.  The attack begins in past tense: ‘the men stood breathless, waiting further orders,’ then becomes present tense : ‘A dog barks violently,’ before reverting to past tense: ‘an alarm bell began to toll,’ (Ch XIII, p 139).   This instability reflects the authorial voice.  Writing in the 1860s after Huddersfield had experienced the abortive uprising of 1820 and been involved in the rise of the Chartists, Lodge has no reason to believe that ‘such a shriek’ will not arise again.   

A representation of the later steam-powered mill at Rawfolds. 

Like Wat, George returns from the attack to find his wife has died; unlike Wat he goes mad: ‘he … set up a harsh, wild, demoniac laugh.  His reason had fled’ (Ch XIII, p 141).  He is excused further duties and, despite the historical details of the pistol included in Chapter I, seems to have nothing to do with the assassination that occurs in the second to last paragraph of the book.   Quite who is killed and by whom is left deliberately unclear.  The victim is a ‘quiet, unassuming, gentlemanly man’ who is shot from ‘the corner of a plantation’ (Ch XIII, p 141).   This is not the choleric Horsfall of history and he does not die in an inn but ‘fell upon his horse’s neck a dying man’, (Ch XIII, p 141).  No arrests follow the shooting and Sad Times ends with George in the asylum and his children in ‘the parish poorhouse till, one by one, they were taken as parish apprentices,’ (Ch XIII, p 141-2).  Perhaps this is why so much of the book is taken up showing apprentices as well-fed, healthy, albeit mischievous beings.   

The final sentence of the book adds to the mystification by referring to ‘The memory of Mr. Scott and his wife lives still in the hearts of the country folks,’ as if they were the victims of the assassination before concluding ‘the eight and the sixteenth days of January in the year 1813, placed their marks at the foot of the blackest page in the history of our Hearths and our Homes,’ (Ch XIII, p 142).    Glancing at the Luddite Chronology shows that these dates are the trails of Horsfall’s assassins and of a body of men more generally accused of Luddite activities at York.    Readers who depend on Sad Times for their knowledge of Luddites are given no means of understanding why January 8th and 16th are so ominous.   Instead the book appears to be a local book addressed to local people who will remember who was killed by shots from a plantation.    Even in this respect the book is enigmatic.  George Mellor is a leading character but this is not the George Mellor notorious nationally and locally as a man condemned for being one of the leaders in the attack on Rawfolds and the killing of Horsfall.   The novel’s George Mellor is a mere follower in the attack on Rawfolds Mill.  Immediately after the attack he finds his wife dead which drives him into a madness that prevents him being called on to be part of the assassination squad.   Does a subversive message of doubt exist beneath the novel’s depoliticised surface?   Throughout the text the authorities are shown as simultaneously heavy-handed and inept through the army’s attempt to pacify the region; is a similar message being conveyed about the conviction of George Mellor?

All the valleys visible from Radical Forest, north of the hills behind Almondbury, have been urbanised.

Dissent

As in Shirley, Bond Slaves, Ben o’ Bills and Inheritance a struggle of conscience is set at the heart of the book. 

Sad Times anticipates Bond Slaves by making the chief Luddite into a figure with Satanic attributes.  At the attack on the mill he appears close to midnight: ‘Before the neighbouring church clock had chimed a quarter past eleven, a tall figure enveloped in a dark cloak and wearing a black mask,’ (Ch XIII, p137-8).  

The Luddite Leader as he might have been imagined by an illustrator of the time.

 The unhallowed nature of the enterprise commanded by this being is emphasised by two details.  Firstly the Luddites are described as ‘many of them poor, misguided men, to be hurled before their Creator, ere they had time to breathe one single prayer for the good of their erring souls,’ (Ch XIII, p 138) as if their damnation is the goal of the attack.  Secondly they are given the ‘strange and unusual’ order to ‘form thirteen abreast!’ (CH XIII, p 139), so they attack in a formation based on the Satanic number thirteen.

This climax in a Black Sabbath is not foreshadowed by the rest of the book.  In chapter I George attends a Luddite meeting which ends with what sounds like an extract from a Dissenting sermon:

‘Let us now like soldiers on the watch,

Put the soul’s armour on, alike prepared

For all a soldier’s warfare brings,’ (Ch I p 13)

In fact this is a quote from Joanna Baillie’s Ethwald a Tragedy of 1802

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=z8t0Y4UyNsYC&pg=PA195&lpg=PA195&dq=let+us+now+like+soldiers+on+the+watch&source=bl&ots=ujw0R61xr3&sig=hYg1GfCRELPjmXoGSPjr35IVcgE&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAGoVChMI-4_PqeTaxwIVSOsaCh1wsw8U#v=onepage&q=let%20us%20now%20like%20soldiers%20on%20the%20watch&f=false

Remarkably neither the Christianity of the Church of England nor of the Dissenters plays a leading role in the central debate between George and Mr Scott.  Like a good Christian Mr Scott gives charity to the George and his family.  In rhetorical twist, probably more ironic than Lodge intended, this is described as ‘only a mite from the giver,’ (Ch VII, p 70), reminding readers of Christ’s observation about God preferring the widow’s mites to the rich man’s bounty (Mark 12:38-44, King James Version, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark+12%3A38-44&version=KJV).

Woodsome Hall: Main entrance.

The meetings between George and Mr Scott echo the words of Mrs Cecil Alexander's 1848 hymn for children

'All things Bright and Beautiful':

The rich man in his castle,

The poor man at his gate, 

God made them high and lowly,

And ordered their estate.

http://www.umcdiscipleship.org/resources/history-of-hymns-all-things-bright-and-beautiful

Neither the hymn nor Sad Times imagines an end to a hierarchy in which the poor suffer and the rich do not. 

The advice that Scott gives, however,  draws from ‘the ancient philosopher Zeno’, ‘the law of nature’ and ‘the Stoics’.  Despite the antique sources from which Scott derives his wisdom, his advice is pragmatic and attuned to the Industrial Revolution; there is no future in being a cropper.     Scott advises George to forget his skills as a cropper and look for new work (Ch VII, pps 72-73).  George is represented as overwhelmed by this advice: ‘He spoke not’, ‘he staggered as he turned to leave’ (Ch VII, pps 73-4).  Nonetheless Chapter IX has difficulty showing that Stoicism is a solution to starvation. The only employment George can get is digging potatoes, an unskilled, low-wage job that cannot feed him and his family.   This is the chapter in which George quotes Burns.    The very fact that the debate has moved so far outside Christianity shows how intractable the economic and moral problems posed by the Luddites are felt to be.

Of all the Luddite novels Sad Times is the most conflicted and perplexed, offering no possible solution to the confrontation between masters and operatives, indeed it is hardly able to face depicting the conflict.  The text embodies a vertiginous contrast in which poverty is execrable but protest madness.  The only bridges thrown over this gulf are charity and stoicism.   The book’s morality may be satisfied by these gestures but the book’s plot is not.  Neither charity nor stoicism prevents the assault on the mill and the disastrous consequences afterwards.  What the text inadvertently reveals is what Marx mockingly called ‘the poverty of philosophy’.    The book shows, despite itself, that no amount of Stoicism or Christian forbearance can keep a starving family alive and that the military force deployed by the authorities around 1811 neither repressed protest nor solved the problems caused  by want in the district.  In Lodge's view the use of force by the labouring classes is equally futile; the novel offers no solutions and cannot establish a balance between the facetious humour of the opening and the despair of the ending.  

The book's imagination prefers to linger in the shelter of Woodsome Hall to exploring the new industrial landscapes of Huddersfield.

The courtyard of the hall looks insulated from time...