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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
Thorough the Fray: A Tale of the Luddite Riot, G. A. Henty, 1885 (‘On Demand’ reprint, 2015)
Geography/Names
The book opens in Marsden and features the attack on Cartwright’s Mill (Rawfolds), but much of the action takes place in the imagined croppers’ village of ‘Varley’, on the outskirts of Marsden. It might be based on the hamlet of Netherley. Mr Cartwright and William Horsfall both appear under their own names.
Netherley; a small village of industrial cottages south-west of Marsden
Genre
Like Dasiy Baines and Scarlea Grange the book is strangely difficult to categorise. The first seven chapters are a school story. Chapters IX –XII appropriate the plot of David Copperfield when a cunning stepfather marries Ned’s weak-willed mother. The name given to the stepfather reinforces the likeness; the suitor is called ‘Mulready’ a name close to that of David’s stepfather ‘Murdstone’. Chapters XIII – XV show the hero, Ned, grow up under suspicion of murdering his hated stepfather , whilst in Chapters XVI- XX Ned becomes a mill-owner and stands alongside the historical Mr Cartwright defending Rawfolds Mill against the Luddites. On the way history has been strangely rearranged. William Horsfall appears under his own name and his killing is accurately described but this precedes the attack on Rawfolds Mill that forms the book’s climax.
At the start of the 19th century education was mostly aimed at the rich through private schools or tutors.
Any public education was carried on by charities or churches. By the end of the century measures were taken to ensure free
basic education for all the population. This primary school on Marsden is built on the site of the Taylor brother's forge.
Enoch and James Taylor designed many of the machines that mechanised the Colne Valley. Frank Peel reports that they took
shelter in Arthur Hirt's fortified Woodbottom Mill during the worse of the Luddite raids.
(Peel, The Risings of the Luddites, Chp XV, p 79)
Conflict /Politics.
Henty’s novel is an anomalous book amidst Henty’s extensive output. In most Henty books there is a clear patriotic vision and an established morality. Henty’s preferred model of society is that of the armed forces. In By Conduct and Courage the hero, Will Gilmore, leaves behind a fishing village and possible careers as a fisherman or smuggler to join Nelson’s navy and rise in the ranks. Quite gratuitously Through the Fray has Luke exposed to a similar temptation; he once fell in with smugglers but refused to adopt their way of life (Chap XVII, p 108-10). Though naval discipline is merciless, it rewards eager sailors like Will and establishes a clear moral system where bravery and increasing skill are reflected by promotion.
Readers might expect a similar system to operate in Mr Hathorn’s school but the book opens with a sarcastic description of the corporal punishment employed by Mr Hathorn: ‘one of the chief qualifications of a schoolmaster was to be able to hit hard and sharp’, (Chp 1, p 1). His cruelty leads to a school strike led by Ned in Chapter IV that culminates in Ned’s wounding of Hathorn: ‘Ned at once hurled the heavy inkstand at him: “You have broken my shoulder, you young scoundrel!” ‘(Ch IV, p 24). In other writers this might have been made analogous to the Luddites’ violent resistance to their masters but Henty takes a different direction. After a trial, Hathorn resigns to be replaced by Porson who establishes a school in which the boys become keen to learn and regard him as a friend. Porson expresses his credo succinctly: ‘I do look to each doing his best according to his ability… I do not believe that knowledge is to be thrashed into boys, or that fear is the best teacher’, (Ch V p 29).
These humane sentiments do not operate outside the world of the school. When Ned becomes a mill owner his first act is to sack half his employees as he sets new machinery to work. His speech is one familiar from the mouths of manufacturers in most of the Luddite novels. His justification is packed into one long, breathless, awkward sentence: ‘I don’t like it, for I have strong sympathies with the men, and although I am sure that in the long run the hands will benefit by the increased trade, it certainly cause [sic] great suffering at present, so if it had been possible I would gladly have let the new machinery stand idle until the feeling against it had passed away; but as I see that the mill has been running at a loss ever since prices fell, it is quite clear that we must use it as once’, (Ch XVII, p 105).
Henty does not explore the difficulties posed by the Napoleonic and American wars that feature in Shirley, Bond Slaves and Inheritance; instead the mill is presented as the focus of duty, the equivalent of Nelson’s campaigns in By Conduct and Courage. The military paradigm is extended into human relations; Henty’s keenness on loyal subalterns is expressed through Luke Marner and Bill Swinton. The latter first grows to admire Ned when Ned accidently breaks his leg in a ‘vair voight’ (Ch I, p 11); it is a strange feature of Henty’s transcription of the Yorkshire accent that he uses conventions more often associated with Birmingham dialect! The subaltern nature of their relationship is revealed in chapter XI when Ned intends to enlist as an officer and Bill says he’ll join up as a private. Ned abandons what has been his father’s plan for him when he perceives his duty is to run the mill: ‘I feel I ought to stay for the sake of money matters’(Ch XVI, p 99). Ned feels he has to keep the mill running to support his mother and siblings. As Marx might expect, inheriting property makes his class allegiance clear; what is not expected is Ned’s depression that allows him to defend his mill by threatening to blow it up when Luddites break in: ‘Now I have only got to fire my pistol into it to blow the mill, and you with it, into the air, and I mean to do it. Of course I shall go too; but some of you with black masks over your faces, who, I suppose, live near here, may know something about me, and may know that my life is not so pleasant a one that I value it in the slightest’, (Ch XVII, p 111).
Ned's mill may have been modeled on small mills like this one in Dewsbury.
It is a strange, supercharged moment that shows the possible dead end of industrial relations and of the self-sacrificing heroism Henty expects his heroes to embody. It is all more charged for being written at a time when suicides were denied Christian burial. The book finds its way out of this impasse through conventional means. The attackers back off and Ned ends up running a model mill: ‘The profits were large, the hands well paid and contented’ (Ch XVII, p 117). In defiance of the economic logic of mechanisation, Ned even gives out ‘a large quantity of work to the men to be performed by the hand looms in their own cottage’, (Ch XVII, p 117). It sounds an absurd solution but it is one that has been adopted by the Indian Government in the wake of Gandhi, reserving certain types of weaving for handlooms (Handlooms ,Reservation of Articles for Production, Act, 1985). As might be expected, this act is under constant pressure from factories and their owners: http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/danger-looms/#sthash.aSvkfJqy.dpuf
Ned is no Gandhi. Despite his model factory, he is targeted by Luddites in a personal attack, which he fights off, though his survival depends on the loyalty and bravery of Bill and Luke. He has had no choice in this fight but when the Luddites march against Cartwright’s Mill Ned rides to warn Cartwright and throws himself into the defence enthusiastically: ‘Ned, regardless of the fire of the Luddites, leaned far out of the window, so as to be able to aim down at the group around the door, and fired’, ( Ch XIX p 127).
As in Shirley, Ned becomes a ‘Captain of Industry’ who has proved himself as valiant as an army captain. His career places him amongst those ‘few’ whom Carlyle idolises: ‘To be a noble Master, among noble Workers, will again be the first ambition with some few; to be a rich Master only the second,’ (Past and Present, Ch 4http://www.online-literature.com/thomas-carlyle/past-and-present/42/ ) Henty, the admirer of the army, reinforces Carlyle’s idea of the inspiration of heroic leadership by removing any hint of reluctance in the soldiers who are involved defending the Cartwright’s Mill. There are no charges brought and no aftermath of flogging.
Henty depicts the Luddites as ideal potential soldiers, who take to drill naturally. They are tough, disaffected men, who come from villages like Varley where it is customary to spend more on drink that food if the doctor is to be believed: ‘your family are starving while you are squandering money in drink, ‘(Ch III.21). He does not resort to the vocabulary of Earl Fitzwilliam who referred to the Luddites as ‘banditti’, making them sound like an exotic, Un-English threat:
I took the liberty of recommending to your Lordship the case of Mr. Cartwright, who three months ago defended his mills with such laudable resolution: it would be a very acceptable thing in this country, if this man was noticed by Government, in the way the letter I put into your Lordship’s hand pointing out, or in any other, that can be found for him [sic.]: he is a man of ability, activity, and would be an useful servant to the public in many situations. His present circumstances are grievous to him: his property the object of daily destruction, his person the butt of assassination. He is anxious to remove from such a situation. What the danger of assassination is your Lordship will readily collect from the readiness with which this abominable banditti fires on every occasion.
https://www.marxists.org/history/england/combination-laws/yorkshire-1812.htm
The intransigence of Jim Swinton is as natural and as local as the loyalty of Bill and by the book’s end each has had his just deserts as the moral hierarchy is re-established. The difference is that Jim has been misled whereas Bill has followed the leadership of Ned. Luddism may be doomed but a loyal work force can rise from its ruins.
Dissent
As remarked above the book shows the independence of the non-hierarchical dissenting church as easily infiltrated by a plausible outsider, Jim Swinton, who can then preach politics to a gullible flock (Ch III). Where Shirley provides strong counterweights to the dissenting tradition in the form of the militant Church of England Reverend Matthewson Helstone, Through the Fray lacks any equivalent. Ned is brought to maturity in Mr Porson’s transformed school by kindness and cricket not Bible and precept. As an adult he considers the prospect of self-inflicted death without any reference to Christianity. Part of the sensation of Wilkie Collin’s No Name is the heroine’s calm contemplation of suicide and her rejection of death according to chance and omen not morality and Christianity but Ned’s choice is treated as being a necessary response to the extremes of conflict. Henty probably wishes readers to see Ned in the tradition of Roman warriors who die on their own swords rather than accept defeat or Horatius holding the bridge against impossible odds. The latter perspective would align Ned with a subject celebrated by Thomas Babbington, Lord Macauly, and the famous ‘last stands’ of British Imperialism, such as General Gordon dying in Khartoum. The latter was a subject Henty tackled in 1892: The Dash For Khartoum: A Tale of the Nile Expedition. In this context Ned becomes a ‘Captain of Industry’ cast in the mould of a Roman general, rather than in the feudal form Carlyle preferred. Ned serves the Empire as faithfully as a mill-owner as
he would as if he’d followed his first choice and joined the army
.
Marsden United Church
A Marsden Dissenting Chapel. The building is more central than one might imagine, nearer the migrated centre of the town than the rebuilt St Bartholomew's.
The text would appear to be filled with doubt and contradiction yet achieves a happy ending through unconsciously comparing the growing pains of Ned with the growing pains of the industrial worker. By the end of the book both Ned and the workers have achieved a painful maturity and are no longer locked in suicidal confrontation but have fallen ‘naturally’ into Henty’s preferred, hierarchical, military paradigm; the leader and the led.
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