THE LUDDITE NOVELS ? 3:  PEEL, THE RISINGS OF THE LUDDITES

 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 

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

Fact or fiction?  

Though Frank Peel’s The Risings of the Luddites is considered the first history of the Luddite movement, it uses many of the techniques of a nineteenth century novel, very often offering recreated dialogue with no attribution of source.   Readers who randomly open the first edition in the middle of the book will find a conversation that sounds like it could have come from one of the preceding fictions about the Luddites, Shirley or Sad Times: ‘ “Curse the villain, Cartwright!  I will yet have his heart’s blood,” yelled Mellor ferociously, his lurid eyes flashing fire,’ (Peel, 1880, p 63) 

Indeed Peel’s Preface to the second edition implies that it was as much the book’s popularity as a novel (‘narrative’) than as a history that led to a second edition: ‘This rapid sale was owing doubtless to the fact that the narrative was of great local interest, rather than to any literary merit it possessed,’ (Peel, 1888, np) https://archive.org/stream/risingsluddites00peelgoog#page/n16/mode/2up

Despite Peel’s modesty about his literary pretensions, the book’s doubling in size has been achieved as much by new evocative passages as by  new evidence.   Where the first edition is matter of fact: ‘We purpose rewriting the history of the Luddites,’ (Peel, 1880, p 5), the second edition frankly courts readers who want drama as much as history.    The second edition opens with a bang not a whimper:

      The year 1811 came to an end like too many of its predecessors amidst awful scenes of carnage

      and confusion.   The demon of war which had ravaged for half a generation some of the fairest

      countries in the world, still stalked on unchecked  (Peel, 1888, p 9).

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

This goes along with a rewriting of the early part of the book.    This involves early chapters being reorganised and, in some cases, retitled more emotively.  Chapter XIII in the original was called’ The Soldier who was Flogged’; in the second edition this becomes Chapter XV and is called: ‘Punishment of a Traitor. – Mr Horsfall of Marsden.’  The punctuation leaves it ambiguous about whether the killing of Horsfall, like the flogging of the disobedient soldier, could be regarded as the ‘Punishment of a Traitor’ but the text makes it clear it is the soldier who is the ‘miserable traitor’ (Peel, 1880, p 46) https://archive.org/details/risingsluddites01peelgoog.

The flogging as it might have been illustrated by a contemporary artist. 

One of the most extreme examples occurs in the early part of the book when Luddites call on William Hartley to join an arms raid.  In the first edition his ‘agonised wife’ wife faints whilst his eldest daughter simply watches: ‘The poor girl huddled on her scanty clothing and came down,’ (Peel 1880, p 31) https://archive.org/details/risingsluddites01peelgoog In the second edition the description of the daughter is expanded:

       Her hair, black as a raven’s wings, hung in dishevelled masses down her shapely shoulders,

      strongly contrasted with her pallid face, and as she stood at the foot of the stairs, with eyes

      dilated by fear, she looked like a startled timorous fawn.  (Peel, 1888, p65)

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

Here Peel might have been influenced by the description of Daisy Baines:

       Her hair, a rich brown, drooped in careless profusion over a well-formed head, and fell soft as a

       shadow on a fair, polished neck , gracefully posed on shoulders worthy of a goddess.

(Chp I, Col 1, 16.10.1880)

This description of Hartley’s daughter adds nothing to the historical significance of the incident and appears to be invented by the second edition.   The rest of the expanded paragraph merely increases the drama of the reluctant Luddite parted from his lamenting daughter:

      Without speaking he kissed her fondly , and, pointing to her mother, disengaged himself from her

      clinging hands and strode rapidly after his friends.  (Peel, 1888, p 65)

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

Meantime, in both versions, the mother faints: 'but his agonised wife had swooned in her chair', (Peel 1880 p 31)

The fainting mother  as she might have been illustrated by a contemporary artist. 

The 'fainting woman' is a trope beloved by Victorian novelists wishing to show the vulnerability and sensitivity of females. 

The book was not only influenced by fiction but influenced subsequent fictions, especially in its characterisation of George Mellor.  George will never again be the helpless man on the verge of lunacy, as he is in Sad Times or the man pushed into extremism in Daisy Baines.    The fictions that follow Peel essentially accept his novelistic characterisation of Mellor:   ‘We have said that if there existed a particle of feeling in the dark, flinty heart of George Mellor it was certainly monopolised by his dead friend Booth,’ (Peel, 1880, p71).  This Chapter is entitled ‘A Deed of Blood’, and is followed by an epigraph from Cibber as if it was an episode in the Huddersfield Weekly News.  

The strangest borrowing from fiction occurs as a result of Peel’s admiration for Shirley.  This is evident when Peel quotes Charlotte Bronte on the character of the Rev Roberson (Peel, 1880, p 50) https://archive.org/details/risingsluddites01peelgoog, but Shirley is also an unacknowledged influence on Peel’s  account of the attack on Rawfolds.   Unlike contemporary newspaper reports Peel structures the attack round a dialogue between Mellor and Cartwright:

      “To the back, lads,” he cries.

     The defiant voice of Cartwirght is heard in reply: “Come round, we’ll meet you.” …

      Again Mellor cries, “To the counting house.”

      “Welcome!  We shall have you there, “ rings out the defiant voice once more,

   (Peel, 1880, p46) https://archive.org/details/risingsluddites01peelgoog

The model for this version of the attack is Shirley:

               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, p272)

Peel’s dramatic  ‘Then follows a terrific yell from the desperate multitude – a yell loud enough and wild enough to strike terror into the boldest heart, ‘ (Peel, 1880, p45) https://archive.org/details/risingsluddites01peelgoog

is a quieter echo of Shirley’s

       A yell followed this demonstration – a rioters’ yell – a North-of-England – a Yorkshire –  

      a West- Riding – a West-riding-clothing-district-of-Yorkshire rioters’ yell.   (Chp XIX, p272)

The attack on Rawfolds: reconstruction

Despite the impression of personal engagement given in Bronte and Peel the actual attack must have been confused and scarcely visible to either side.   The possibility of 'friendly fire' injuries from mis-aimed shots or ricochets must have been high.

Conflict /Politics

Consequently the text is frequently more interested in being emotive rather than analytical.   This often makes it hard to work out the politics of Peel, especially when the book was enlarged.    Both editions start by quoting on the title page the second stanza of the radical Gerald Massey’s ‘The Red Banner’:

Fling out the Red Banner!

Its fiery front under,

    Come, gather ye, gather ye,

Champions of Right!

And roll round the world

With the voice of God's thunder;

    The wrongs we've to reckon—

Oppressors to smite;

(The layout and punctuation are slightly different from the version on this site: http://gerald-massey.org.uk/massey/dpm_early_poems_3.htm. )

 This would imply sympathy for the Luddite’s cause and their use of violence: ‘oppressors to smite’.

As the book develops it is clear that Peel is more interested in suffering than smiting.   Like Sad Times, The Risings of the Luddites is keen to show the miseries faced by the deprived.  Where Sad Times uses the cottage of George Mellor to establish a pattern of a man driven to desperation by the sufferings of an ill wife and starving family, The Risings uses William Hartley.  When the Luddites come to take William on a mission his wife complains ‘God knows what is to become of us.  Our poor children have all gone supperless to bed, crying for food and we have none to give them,’ (Peel, 1880, p 31) https://archive.org/details/risingsluddites01peelgoog    The contemporary serial Daisy Baines and the subsequent novels, Scarlea Grange, Bond Slaves and Ben O’ Bills all have at least one family in a similar plight.  

One of Luddites wounded in the attack on Rawfolds is described as deserving pity: ‘the poor choking man,’ (Peel, 1880, p 52), https://archive.org/details/risingsluddites01peelgoog and Cartwright’s refusal to aid him and his fellow is described as ‘cruel’  (Peel, 1880, p 52),  https://archive.org/details/risingsluddites01peelgoog   However the mortally wounded Horsfall receive the same adjective ‘poor’ : ‘Poor Horsfall was laid upon a bed,’ (Peel, 1880, p 77) https://archive.org/details/risingsluddites01peelgoog.     Against this most of the adjectives applied to the Luddites are pejorative.   At best they are ‘misguided’ (Peel, 1880, p 56) https://archive.org/details/risingsluddites01peelgoog and the man seen as their guide, George Mellor is never the resourceful brave antagonist of Daisy Baines.  During the attack on Rawfolds where Cartwright is ‘intrepid’, ‘Mellor rushes about as if he were stark mad’, (Peel, 1880, p 46, p 47) https://archive.org/details/risingsluddites01peelgoog

The second edition of 1888 extends the frame of reference by linking the actions of the Luddites to the ‘Peterloo’ protest and the Chartist movement.   The Peterloo massacre was the most notorious example in the early 19th century of a peaceful protest being disrupted by military force deployed by local magistrates.    Casualties were something like 17 protesters killed and 700 wounded.  http://www.peterloomassacre.org/history.html.

Dragoon officer: reconstruction.

A Dragoon officer of the early 19th century.  Though the Dragoons and the Militia could be lethal instruments of law-enforcement in daylight in city streets they were less use during the Luddite disturbances.  They had to operate at night over rough and unfamiliar territory, often moorland.  Frequently, as in the reconstruction above, they might be distracted by the discharge of rockets to an area where the Luddites were not operating (see Brooke/Kipling p 49).  

The reference to Peterloo might be expected to tip the readers’ sympathies towards not only the suffering but also the protests of the poor: ‘Groans and cries were mingled with the wild shouts of the mad soldiery, and from ten thousand throats cries of “Butchers! Shame!  Shame!” were heard above the horrid confusion,’ (Peel, 1880, p 309)  https://archive.org/stream/risingsluddites00peelgoog#page/n318/mode/2up

This is not the case.  Peel is a keen advocate of free trade and complains of the laws which had been created over many centuries to protect the position of croppers: ‘These strange devices by which trade was then crippled are now fortunately unknown, but while they existed they must have cost the clothier more, by limiting his operatives in the field of industry, than any damage done by the Luddites,’ (Peel, 1880, p 33) https://archive.org/details/risingsluddites01peelgoog    There is an unexpected shift in this passage.  Far from the repeal of these laws being used to explain or justify the protest of the workers disadvantaged by machinery the page complains that it was the manufacturers who suffered through too much government intervention.

Cleverly Peel, rather than quote a government minister or a manufacturer on the benefits of machinery, quotes the radical William Cobbett’s ‘Letter to the Luddites’: ‘In these simple cases the question is decided at once in favour of the machine,’ (Peel, 1880, p159) https://archive.org/details/risingsluddites01peelgoog   This may have inspired Trant to have Waller argue against Cobbett in Daisy Baines: ‘Beside every cropping machine throws eight or nine men out o’ wark, an’  Cobbett doesn’t say eight or nine times more stuff’ll be wanted,’  (Chp XI, Col 3, 13.12.1880).

What neither Peel nor Trant nor consider is that Cobbett’s argument imagines the workers to be in control of the use of machines and that workers will be allowed to decide how and why they are used.  That this was not the case in the Luddite areas is not a matter Cobbett chooses to pursue.

Peel is not as radical as Cobbett or Trant and is more sanguine about Free Trade and the process now known as ‘trickle down’.    Where the first edition of The Risings ended enigmatically concerning laissez faire, the second, despite its record of another 36 years of suffering for the labouring classes, ends optimistically.

The end of the first edition is abrupt ‘there were many risings afterwards, as our old politicians will be well aware, but they were almost exclusively of a political character,’ (Peel, 1880, p 161), https://archive.org/details/risingsluddites01peelgoog.

The end of the second edition is expansive:

     Under a free trade regime the lot of the working classes was wonderfully changed for the better.            

    They gradually acquired a position and comforts to which as a body they had hitherto been

    strangers, and with increasing prosperity the old hatred for the classes above them was 

    moderated or died out, and ultimately constitutional agitation and moral suasion took the place

    of the violent, physical force methods, with which they had been long familiar.

   (Peel, 1888, p 353-4). https://archive.org/stream/risingsluddites00peelgoog#page/n318/mode/2up

The confidence that free-trade had ended violent industrial conflict was shown to be over-optimistic during the Leeds Gas Strike of 1890.  This took place some ten miles from Heckmondwike and two years after the publication of Peel’s second edition.  Striking gas-workers and their wives fought to try to stop the employers importing blackleg labour.   This Leeds City Museum website shows one of the sabres used by Leeds Police against strikers as if nothing had changed since Peterloo.  

http://secretlivesofobjects.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/leeds-gas-riots.html

Brooke and Kipling convincingly attribute the appearance of novels criticising the Luddites in the latter half of the 19th century to ‘the alarm of the middle classes at the revival of mass trade unionism and socialism in the 1880s and 90s,’(Brooke/Kipling, 1988, p 126).  Evidently writers like Banks were not a sanguine as Peel that free-trade could solve all discontents. 

Oral Tradition/Folklore

Peel was the last historian to be able to call on living memories of Luddite activities.  From the perspective of a modern historian his methods are more anecdotal than historical.  He gives no sources for his information for his informants are usually unnamed and it is difficult to work out where the information about a particular incident has come from.   A notable example occurs in the description of the attack on Rawfolds.   This is modelled on the fiction of Shirley but in the middle occurs a detail not mentioned by Bronte.    A man called   ‘John Walker’ thrusts ‘his pistol through the window’:

    “I was determined to do it,” he said afterwards, “though my hand was shot off, and hand and

    pistol had gone into the mill,’ (Peel, 1880, p47) https://archive.org/details/risingsluddites01peelgoog

Although ‘said afterwards’ makes it sound as if  Peel was told the tale by Walker himself , the story seems to be derived from Baine’s 1876 Yorkshire, Past and Present and the records of the trials. 

Other expansions in the second edition concern the escapes of Luddites.   At the end of chapter X there is the story of Crowther who hides in an unfinished building.    An extra chapter of this edition is called ‘The Two Deserters’ (Chp XII) and concerns the stories of Rayner and Naylor.  Both slip away from the Luddites as they march to attack Rawfolds, Naylor concealing himself under his own bed.  The story of Rayner is more picturesque.   Rayner is a ‘champion athlete’ of his village who runs back to his unnamed village somewhere near Brighouse from the Dumb Steeple, arriving back in his village as the church clock struck 13. (Peel, 1888, pps 106-109) https://archive.org/stream/risingsluddites00peelgoog#page/n118/mode/2up

 Reid points out that this tradition is likely to be without foundation as ‘Raynor’ cannot be traced (Reid, p 303, Endnote 2).  Even the village presents problems.  Raynor does not pass through Brighouse, so his village must lie to the east of Brighouse, north of the river Calder.   Most churches in this area were built after Luddite times.   Nevertheless the tale was happily taken over by Colbeck.     

Where the text is most specific about its sources the stories are likely to be of little historical importance.   The most significant examples are Peel’s anecdotes of practical jokes played during the Luddite scare.  It is possible he was inspired by this theme dominating Lodge's Sad Times. These stories appear to have derived  from the people involved, Jonathan Ovenden and Stephan Greenald, but they do not add anything of substance to questions such as the politicisation and organisation of the Luddites.  If there were witnesses who knew anything about such matters they did not communicate with Peel even 68 years after the event. 

One of the 'Local Reminiscences' accepted by later historians, such as Kipling/Hall, is that George Mellor, Thomas Brook, Joseph Drake, Benjamin Walker and James Haigh  asked for refreshment at the village of Clifton after the were retreating from the attack on Rawfolds.

A row of  stone cottages adjoining the Black Horse Inn on the left. 

Dissent

Unlike most of the writers of Luddite fiction, Peel does not attempt to establish a link between Luddism and Dissent.    Peel records the singing of ‘Behold the Saviour of Mankind’ by the first seven Luddites to be executed but simply describes it as ‘the following hymn’ (Peel, 1880, p 148) without attributing its Wesleyan origins.   https://archive.org/details/risingsluddites01peelgoog Peel’s admiration for Charlotte Bronte means that the book’s description of the Rev Hammond Roberson consists of a paragraph mostly based on Charlotte Bronte’s views, though, as Peel admits, ‘she only saw this remarkable man once, ‘ (Peel, 1880, p 50) https://archive.org/details/risingsluddites01peelgoog  As so often in the text the gap between historical objectivity is filled with an appeal to the local reader: ‘Many of our readers will doubtless have a perfect recollection of this eccentric gentleman,’ (Peel, 1880, p 50) https://archive.org/details/risingsluddites01peelgoog

Race/Heartland

Apart from a brief mention of Cobbett’s ‘fine, vigorous Saxon common sense’ (Peel, 1880, p159) https://archive.org/details/risingsluddites01peelgoog the text shows little interest in the theme.   The risings of the Luddites and Chartists are shown to be part of the national difficulties that Free Trade has in coping with the Napoleonic wars and the Industrial Revolution. 

Ecology

The possibility that the unlimited industrialisation encouraged by Free Trade might damage the environment does not occur to Peel.  The closest he comes is in describing the changes to buildings that that have occurred since days of the Luddites.  Chapter VII of the first edition mentions that the original Rawfolds was rebuilt but ‘that erection also now exists no longer having unfortunately been destroyed by fire a short time ago,’ (Peel, 1880, p 42).