[In the following essay, Sale provides background on the Luddite revolt and other events in the workers' movement against machines. He then discusses nineteenth-century responses by British intellectuals and artists to the new industrialization and shows the relevance of Luddism to twenty-first-century life.]

It was about a half hour after midnight on an April Sunday in 1812 that the band of some six score Yorkshiremen finally made their way down the rutted lane that led to a place called Rawfolds Mill, a looming multistory building, protected by a gated wall, housing the hated woolen machines of the hated manufacturer William Cartwright. Ostensibly organized as a military brigade, though bedraggled somewhat now after their hour-long march on a dark and still winter-cold evening, they stood with kerchiefs and coal-blackened faces readying themselves for their attack: in the front several lines of men armed with rudimentary guns and pistols, behind them rows bearing hatchets and the great “Enoch” hammers that blacksmiths used, and to the rear numbers of men with the kind of assorted weapons—mauls, pikes, bludgeons, even stones—an English village would provide.

“Now men, clear the road!”

The order was issued by George Mellor, 24, a wool-cloth finisher—or “cropper,” in Yorkshire parlance—a tall, heavyset man with a short brown beard who worked in the shop of John Woods in Huddersfield, about five miles distant. The croppers in this area, probably five thousand of them at this point, were a proud and independent lot, better paid than average but hurting now with the terrible depression in trade that had taken away work from half of them and the wartime inflation that had put everyday foodstuffs out of the reach of all. They knew better than anyone else the significance of the Cartwright mill that was their target this night: behind that gate, behind the whitewashed stone walls of that mill shining in the half-moon's light, were fifty wool-finishing machines, “shearing frames” run effortlessly by the waterpower of the stream alongside, each one of which could do the work of four or five croppers, the whole assemblage capable of doing several hundred Mellors out of their livelihoods forever. Not only that, but there were at least a half dozen similar mills operating at scattered places in this western section of Yorkshire, some even using the new Watt steam engines for power, and more than a thousand shearing frames at work throughout England since government restrictions against them had been lifted three years before. Behind that gate, too, in his little counting-house at the end of the mill, was the odious Mr. Cartwright, an aloof sort of man in his thirties, with dark eyes in a pale face, a stranger to the county and a teetotaler—“more of a foreigner nor an Englishman,” they said around—who was known to be so adamant in the defense of his new finishing machines that he had slept in his mill every night for the last six weeks.

But the croppers were not the only ones to understand this Rawfords Mill as a menace: in that angry crowd were wool weavers and combers and blacksmiths, too, fearful not just of their own displacement by machine and mill—nearly three hundred textile factories had arisen in Yorkshire in just the last twenty-odd years, eliminating handcrafting from many trades, and who knew how many were to come?—but also of the displacement of the traditional cottage culture they had known for so long. What loomed before them was not merely the factory but a whole factory system as it was then taking shape on both sides of the Pennines, with its long hours and incessant work and harsh supervision that reduced self-respecting artisans, with long traditions of autonomy and status, to dependent wage slaves. What loomed, in fact, was a world in which the machine seemed to be the principal agent of change, overturning what were seen as the customary and proper modes of life and work, erasing old bonds in both household and marketplace, eroding ancient tenets of honest wages, good goods, and just prices, and substituting instead relations built upon power and capital and a morality guided—or so it would appear—by no aim higher than profit.

At Mellor's command, the men armed with hatchets and hammers moved through the ranks and strode up to the wooden outer gate and set to work. Within minutes the bar-lock was broken, the hinges were knocked loose, and the huge doors fell backward “with a fearful crash,” as a local chronicler put it, “like the felling of great trees.” The men poured through the opening, spirits high.

For many of them this would be their first action, long anticipated, as part of the new movement against the obnoxious machines—a movement that had been given its name some months earlier by machine-breaking weavers down in Nottinghamshire who declared themselves “Luddites” and issued their communiqués in the name of a mythical all-purpose leader, “General Ned Ludd.” But they all knew the successes other bands of Luddite workmen had recently had in the area against the hated factories: raiding parties had set on two mills near Leeds, only ten miles away, at the end of March, and just two days ago a crowd of three hundred men or more had wrecked a woolen mill near Wakefield, just a few miles east. There was reason to feel the kind of confident camaraderie that was in that song they had been singing down at the Shear's Inn the other night:

And night by night when all is still
And the moon is hid behind the hill,
We forward march to do our will
                    With hatchet, pike, and gun!
Oh, the cropper lads for me,
The gallant lads for me,
Who with lusty stroke
The shear frames broke,
The cropper lads for me!

Before them the huge mill—the main building four stories tall and sixty feet or more in length, set with rows of large windows all along the side—seemed abandoned but for a watchdog that could now be heard barking somewhere within. The crowd moved forward, and then suddenly, as if on signal, stones and sticks were hurled at the glass, pikes and hatchets attacked the window frames, and with the clatter of glass a huge yell, triumphant and joyous and perhaps a little feral, came up from the men, loud enough to be remembered later by villagers for miles around. Then the gunners approached and let loose a volley of fire through the gaping holes into the darkened mill.

Suddenly an answering volley, accompanied by flashes that lit up the interior, gave awful proof that the factory was not abandoned at all. It was occupied, indeed fortified, by ten armed men—Cartwright himself, four of his workmen, and five soldiers of the Cumberland militia deputed from the local garrison—who were stationed behind an ingenious system the owner had spent some weeks in preparing: the flagstones that formed the second-story floor were attached to pulleys and could be lifted a foot or so to allow a gunman to shoot through onto any attackers while at the same time being generally protected from answering fire. “The assailants,” wrote a correspondent from the Leeds Mercury in the week after the attack, “have much reason to rejoice that they did not succeed in entering the building, for we speak from our own observation when we say, that had they effected an entrance, the death of vast numbers of them from a raking fire which they could neither have returned nor controlled, would have been inevitable.”

Falling back from the windows, many of the men were no doubt as surprised as angered by this defense of the mill, the first time that any serious resistance had been offered to the Luddites in all the weeks of violence since January, and they moved quickly toward the back to find another means of gaining entrance. At the front gates Mellor led a contingent of men trying to batter the factory doors—“Way for Enoch” was the call—but here the wood had been so studded with large-head nails in such a tight pattern that the hatchets could not effectively penetrate to the wood, and after those weapons were turned and blunted the hammer men stepped forward to try their skills. Blow after blow struck the heavy doors with great thundering noise, wielded by men whose daily labors toughened their arms to steeliness, and still the studded planks resisted. Ben Bamforth, six foot two and self-described as “hard as nails,” left an account reconstructed thus:

You could hear the din of my every stroke rolling away into the emptiness of the mill within, and from the great bolt heads that studded the panels the sparks flew fast and thick as I thundered at the door. … With every blow that fell quivering shocks ran up my arm … and still I pounded at the door, and still the stout timbers yielded not a jot.

Meanwhile a knot of men trying to find a less-protected entrance on the other side of the factory discovered their way blocked by the millpond and its dam, which provided treacherous footing in the darkness. Thomas Brook, 32, a wool weaver, lost his footing and fell into the water, and it was many minutes before his comrades could haul him out—minus, however, his hat, which would eventually be found by the constables and traced, by complicated and fortuitous steps, to its owner, leading to his arrest a few months later.

Over the sounds of yelling men and gunfire and hammer blows could be heard the ringing of an alarm bell on the roof, installed by Cartwright so as to alert the cavalry brigade that had been stationed near Rawfolds ever since machine breaking had started in the area at the beginning of the year. “Damn the bell!” Mellor shouted. “Fire at the bell! Shoot the bell!” Just then the bell went silent and a cheer went up, but within minutes its clangor was heard again; what happened was that the rope from the bell down to the men on the second floor had broken, but Cartwright had dispatched two men to the roof to keep it ringing: the cavalry were not far away, they must hear the alarm. “Of all the dismal dins any body ever heard,” said James Brook, a cropper, some days later, “it was the most dismalest.”

Some of the men with muskets and pistols kept firing through the broken windows, but warily now because the defenders' volleys didn't slacken. Only seven men inside were shooting now, two having gone to the roof and one of the soldiers refusing to use his gun “because I might hit one of my brothers,” but still, as Cartwright later boasted, “our Fire was given with much Steadiness and rapidity.” John Walker, 31, a cropper from Huddersfield and a friend of Mellor's, stationed himself beside one of the openings, peering stealthily over the sill and hoping to lift himself inside if he had a chance. Suddenly he was sighted by one of the men inside and a ball was shot through the crown of his hat, leaving him unhurt but angrier still. He raised himself onto the window sill, stuck his pistol through the opening, and fired at the flash from which the shot had come: “I was determined to do it,” he told his mates afterward, “though my hand had been shot off, and hand and pistol had gone into the mill.” Mellor was heard in the background crying, “In with you, lads” and “Damn them, kill them every one,” but still none of the attackers felt inclined to take the chance of going through the windows.

Back at the front door the heavy pounding of the “great Enoch” hammers finally cracked the heavy wood and a hole about the size of a man's head opened up at about shoulder height. “The door is open,” someone yelled, but just then one of the men inside fired through the opening, and John Booth, a young apprentice saddler who was the son of a local clergyman, cried out and pitched forward to the dirt, holding his leg, which had been nearly shattered by the ball that struck him. Another shot was sent through the hole, and Jonathan Dean, 30, a blacksmith then wielding his hammer to try to widen the breach, gave a painful shout and dropped the instrument from his wounded hand.

The men, in confusion now, fell back—their very success at breaching the door proving their undoing—but still another shot was fired through the opportune hole, and Samuel Hartley, 24, a cropper from Halifax who had been let go from this very mill some months before, was hit in his left breast and sent reeling to the ground, vomiting blood. At least three men wounded now, the alarm bell still clanging through the night, the cavalry contingent presumably on its way, the attacking gunmen running out of ammunition after twenty minutes of useless fire, and the garrison inside showing no signs of weakness: “Cease fire!” Mellor called, and the order was passed along the crowd.

It was a somber moment, the first time the Yorkshire Luddites had known failure, and the men backed off sullenly and silently, gradually forming into small groups to make their way home before the troops arrived. Mellor and a few others hung back in the area where Booth and Hartley were writhing in agony in the dust, both bleeding profusely, and debated what to do with their wounded comrades. It was imperative to leave the mill quickly and get to their beds with some speed, since the soldiers and constables would soon be spending the night visiting the homes of suspected workmen to find out who was absent or who showed signs of recent battle; and they had to make their way without confronting any of the constables or local militia in the villages along the way, many of whom must have been aroused by the alarm bell and would be patrolling their territories. It would be foolhardy to try to carry the wounded men in such circumstances, especially as it looked as if they hadn't long to live in any case. Mellor leaned down to the two men and explained that they would have to remain behind—but, he warned, remember the oath you have taken, never to reveal your comrades “to any person or persons under the canopy of heaven.”

When Mellor stood, it was later recalled, there were tears in his eyes. He turned to face the mill, said a few words to his friends about keeping their courage high, and, raising a clenched fist, swore that he would have his revenge on the now doubly hated Cartwright. Then with an oath he fired one last pistol shot at the mill and hastened into the night.

When Cartwright eventually ventured out of the mill a few minutes later, he found the two wounded men and “Traces of Blood … very heavy in different Directions,” he later wrote, and fourteen “large Hammers Hatchets and Mauls” left behind. By this time a number of nearby villagers had gathered at the front of the mill—including the Reverend Hammond Roberson, a fervent Tory and vocal anti-Luddite, with a sword strapped to his thigh—but Cartwright would let no one go to the aid of the dying men until he got from them the names of their associates, an act of particular callousness that set badly with the people around and undoubtedly inflamed the desire for vengeance in the Luddite ranks.

Only when he could get no answers from the men—“For God's sake,” cried one, “shoot me, put me out of my misery!”—and sensed the indignation in the bystanders did he let the two bodies be carried inside and send off a messenger to the doctor's. Both men were then roughly bandaged and, when the detachment of soldiers finally arrived around one-thirty, were taken to the Star Inn in nearby Roberttown. There they were certainly interrogated and perhaps tortured, though apparently without revealing anything; Booth died at about six o'clock in the morning while surgeons tried to amputate his leg, Hartley early the following morning. An unknown number of men who were wounded in the fray were taken care of by friends or family until their wounds were healed so as to forestall suspicion; one, James Haigh, not yet 21, who had gone to a doctor to be treated for a musket ball through the shoulder, was tracked down at a relative's by the authorities over a week later, but the doctor wouldn't talk and Haigh was soon released. Jonathan Dean took himself out of town for two months until his hand healed, though he was arrested and interrogated just after he came back and then also released.

Ignored in the newspaper accounts, and thus forgotten to history, at least two other men who were involved in the raid died that night or shortly afterward. We know of them largely because a local minister, the Reverend Patrick Bronté, saw a group of men he recognized as Luddites go into his church graveyard a few nights later, carrying at least two corpses, which they buried quietly with their own crude ceremony, in the southeast corner. Although this was clearly the act of criminals and the churchman had an obligation to tell the authorities forthwith, he said nothing, watching it all in a silence that he kept—for, as he said later, he would not betray his flock over a Christian burial. This kind-hearted man, who later changed his accent for a dieresis, was the father of three rather famous daughters, one of whom attended and then taught at a school only a few miles away that overlooked the field where the Luddite army had gathered before the Rawfolds raid. Years later, in Shirley, Charlotte Brontë would have this to say about that fateful event:

Certain inventions in machinery were introduced into the staple manufactures of the north, which, greatly reducing the number of hands necessary to be employed, threw thousands out of work, and left them without legitimate means of sustaining life. A bad harvest supervened. Distress reached its climax. Endurance, over-goaded, stretched the hand of fraternity to sedition; the throes of a sort of moral earthquake were felt heaving under the hills of the northern counties. …

As to the sufferers, whose sole inheritance was labour, and who had lost that inheritance—who could not get work, and consequently could not get wages, and consequently could not get bread—they were left to suffer on, perhaps inevitably left; it would not do to stop the progress of invention, to damage science by discouraging its improvements; the war could not be terminated, efficient relief could not be raised; there was no help then, so the unemployed underwent their destiny—ate the bread, and drank the waters of affliction.

Misery generates hate: these sufferers hated the machines which they believed took their bread from them; they hated the buildings which contained those machines; they hated the manufacturers who owned those buildings. In the parish of [Huddersfield] … [William Cartwright] was, in his double character of semi-foreigner and thoroughgoing progressist, the man most abominated.

No Luddite, she, nor sympathizer, but she did have it right: there was a moral earthquake heaving under the Luddite triangle of middle Britain, and it burst forth as hatred, never more anguishingly obvious than in the Rawfolds raid.

Although the Rawfolds raid went quickly into the literature and folklore of the time—“How gloomy and dark is the day when men have to fight for their bread,” went one Yorkshire song—the Luddism of which it was such a striking part might well have become a forgotten phenomenon except that it so clearly expressed a sentiment and represented a perception that stayed very much alive as Britain continued to industrialize through the 19th century and that surfaced in virtually every other society to which the factory system and its industrial culture were subsequently spread. And for nearly two centuries now, Luddism has meant a strain of opposition to the domination of industrial technology and to its values of mechanization, consumption, exploitation, growth, competition, novelty, and progress—a kind of solid, indelible body of beliefs existing subaqueously as it were, refusing to be eroded by the sweeping tides of triumphant modernism. It is a strain of opposition, of naysaying, that has not been dispelled in all these decades by however many elaborate machines or more elaborate visions the technophiles have paraded.

One of the several expressions of this strain, a deep distrust of technology and resistance to its promises, was being gestated even as the Luddite hammers were being swung. Mary Shelley's prescient tale of techno-madness, Frankenstein, published in 1818, was so vivid a message of the dangers of mechanization and the problems of scientific invention—“You are my creator,” the monster tells the scientists at the end, “but I am your master”—that it has survived to today, unforgettable. Basically the same message, more philosophically put, would continue to be expressed as the century went on by men like Thomas Carlyle, William Morris, John Ruskin, G. K. Chesterton, and Hilaire Belloc, and from time to time, in more literary form, by Charles Dickens. One particularly interesting form of this sensibility was the resistance of Western Europe's officer corps, made up for the most part of landed and agricultural aristocrats rather than scions of industrial magnates, to the introduction of any industrial machines that would replace man or horse: “Machines had brought with them industrialisation and the destruction of the traditional social order,” as a modern historian has described the military mind, but “they must not be allowed to undermine the old certainties of the battlefield—the glorious charge and the opportunities for individual heroism.” Thus it was that the machine gun, invented in 1862, was not taken up seriously by any European army until World War I and even then was secondary to the cavalry charge as an offensive weapon.

Another expression of a Luddistic kind, also contemporary with the Luddites, was Romanticism, beginning with Blake and Wordsworth and Byron particularly, who like the machine breakers were repulsed by the Satanic mills and the getting-and-spending of the present and like them were mindful of the ruined paradise of the past. (The identity was so immediate for Byron at least that at one point he was even moved to write, “Down with all kings but King Ludd!”) This Romanticism, and particularly its attachment to an unspoiled, machine-free nature, was echoed across the Atlantic by Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville, among literary lions, and notably by Emerson and Thoreau and their great heir, John Muir. Muir, one feels, would have been a Luddite given half the chance, and there is in his tirades against the developers of the West—“These Temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar”—the taste of the acrid anger found in the Luddite letters.

A more purely industrial expression of this strain, in which sabotage was used or threatened for one laboring cause or another, followed the factory system wherever it spread in Europe and the United States through the century. Weaving machines introduced into southern France during the Bourbon Restoration were greeted with protests, foiled only because the French authorities had studied the British response to Luddism and put them down unceremoniously; in the United States at least a dozen factories were attacked in the 1820s and '30s, most of the unexplained fires at textile mills in New England were said to be of “incendiary origin,” and in several instances machines were destroyed and cloth burned in labor protests; in Silesia and Bavaria artisans in the 1830s and '40s attacked new factories and their machines. In England itself, agricultural laborers protesting the use of threshing machines and the strangulation of their jobs waged what two modern researchers call “a silent, embittered, vengeful campaign of poaching, burning and rural terror” at several points during the 1830-45 period, most notably the “Captain Swing” demonstrations over a score of counties in 1830 when more than four hundred machines were destroyed and over three hundred fires set. Sabotage continued to play a role in industrial disputes down through the century and into the next (as, for example, the Wobblies in 1912 and after) on both sides of the Atlantic, but most of the time it was an adjunct to a strike or a grievance having little or nothing to do with the machine itself, simply a way of demonstrating workers' rage. But there are times, too, particularly in the French guild movement and syndicalism at the end of the century, when machine breaking was more Luddistically seen as a tactic to help bring about some wider social purpose, usually “the revolution.”

As industrialism perfected itself into the 20th century the Luddistic strain could be found most often in the works of a remarkably diverse set of critics and intellectuals, beginning with people like Thorstein Veblen and Max Weber and Oswald Spengler, going on to Martin Heidegger, Aldous Huxley, the Frankfurt School, and the towering Lewis Mumford, and then to Jacques Ellul, Herbert Marcuse, and Paul Goodman, to pick only the most prominent of a quite distinguished set. A notable if problematical offshoot of this set was the group of “Southern Agrarians”—Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Stark Young, and John Crowe Ransom among them—who first announced themselves in 1930 as defenders of the agrarian tradition against “industrial progress, or an incessant extension of industrialization,” and who were quite explicit in questioning the value of new machines (“A fresh labor-saving device introduced into an industry does not emancipate the laborers in that industry so much as it evicts them”), consumption, advertising, and most of “what may be called the American or prevailing way.” The conclusion of the Agrarians' original “Statement of Principles” has a particularly Luddistic ring: “If a community, or a section, or a race, or an age, is groaning under industrialism, and well aware that it is an evil dispensation, it must find the way to throw it off.” (Tate, for one, was specific about the way: “political, active, and, in the nature of the case, violent and revolutionary.”)

In limning these various facets of the long post-Luddite tradition I don't mean, of course, to suggest that there is any rigid uniformity to these people or their antitechnological biases. The concerns and causes and methods vary, but there is to it all, at bottom, a message that is unmistakably Luddistic: beware the technological juggernaut, reckon the terrible costs, understand the worlds being lost in the world being gained, reflect on the price of the machine and its systems on your life, pay attention to the natural world and its increasing destruction, resist the seductive catastrophe of industrialism.

And that strain, that Luddism—or perhaps neo-Luddism, more appropriately—exists today, at the end of the millennium, indeed with more passion and urgency, I think, than at any time in the past two centuries. For it stems from the now incontestable understanding that, as Business Week put it not long ago, “the United States is in the midst of an economic transformation on the order of the Industrial Revolution”—a transformation, like the first one, driven by swift technological and economic change and, like the first one, accompanied by vast social dislocations and environmental destruction. Call it “third-wave” or “postmodern” or “multinational” capitalism, this new order is something paradigmatically different, a high-tech industrialism of ever more complex technologies—computerization, robotics, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and the like—and served by ever more remote institutions, notably the multinational corporation. And this new industrialism is sped along by the ministrations of the developed nation-states, especially the American one that generated the second Industrial Revolution, nurtured it with Cold War weaponry and space adventurism, and is now with the Clinton Administration prepared to launch it onto an “information superhighway” and an “automated battlefield” with unprecedented technological consequences.

The neo-Luddites who challenge the current Industrial Revolution (treated in detail in a later section) are today more numerous than one might assume, pessimists without the power and access of the optimists but still with a not insignificant voice, shelves of books and documents and reports, and increasing numbers of followers—and the lessons of history perhaps on their side. They are to be found on the radical and direct-action side of environmentalism, particularly in the American West; they are on the dissenting edges of academic economics and ecology departments, generally of the no-growth school; they are everywhere in Indian Country throughout the Americas, representing a traditional biocentrism against the anthropocentric norm; they are activists fighting against nuclear power, irradiated food, clear-cutting, animal experiments, toxic wastes, and the killing of whales, among the many aspects of the high-tech onslaught.

They may also number—certainly they speak for—some of those whose experience with modern technology has in one way or another awakened them from what Mumford called “the myth of the machine.” These would include those several million people in all the industrial nations whose jobs have simply been automated out from under them—neat equivalents of the Yorkshire croppers—or have been sent overseas as part of the multinationals' global network, itself built on high-tech communications. They would include the many millions who have suffered from some exposure, officially sanctioned, to pollutants and poisons, medicines and chemicals, and live with the terrible results. They include some whose faith in the technological dream has been shattered by the recent evidence of industrial fragility and error—from Bhopal, Chernobyl, and Love Canal to PCBs, Exxon Valdez, and ozone holes—that is the stuff of daily headlines. And they may include, too, quite a number of those whose experience with high technology in the home or office has left them confused or demeaned, or frustrated by machines too complex to understand, much less to repair, or assaulted and angered by systems that deftly invade their privacy or deny them credit or turn them into ciphers.

Wherever the neo-Luddites may be found, they are attempting to bear witness to the secret little truth that lies at the heart of the modern experience: whatever its presumed benefits, of speed or ease or power or wealth, industrial technology comes at a price, and in the contemporary world that price is ever rising and ever threatening. Indeed, inasmuch as industrialism is inevitably and inherently disregardful of the collective human fate and of the earth from which it extracts all its wealth—these are, after all, in capitalist theory “externalities”—it seems ever more certain to end in paroxysms of economic inequity and social upheaval, if not in the degradation and exhaustion of the biosphere itself.

If so little general thought is given now to this impending catastrophe of the second Industrial Revolution, it is not merely that the illusion of technological progress, embedded in an abiding faith in science of nearly religious intensity, is so powerful, not merely that for some minority of the world's population greater longevity, comfort, and dominance is so seductive. It is largely because as a society we are so ignorant about the past—particularly the past that engendered the first Industrial Revolution, the human and environmental traumas it caused, and the pain, the tragedy, of its decades of immiseration—that we can believe that the future might be untouched with any of that.

In a rare, valuable analysis of the forces at work in this second revolution, historian David Noble has said it this way:

The analogy commonly made between the present transformation and that of the early nineteenth century remains only half complete: the catastrophe has been left out. For a fuller analogy would shake the spirit, not stir it, and give thoughtful people pause: What will happen to the dispossessed? What will the consequences be once our world too has been “turned upside down”?

And, one must add, what will happen to the species and ecosystems destroyed, what will be the consequences if the line of ecological peril is crossed?

This is why the original Luddites, though they occupy but a short historical moment, and so long ago, are important for us to understand today. In their story, as we see it now in modern perspective, we find those two essential elements that may help us to avoid being condemned to repeat a history that we did not understand—or, if repeating it, to become armed and armored with the means of resisting it. First, the catastrophe, the wrenching consequences of being in a world suddenly transformed—degraded, despiriting, destroying—whose awful record might possibly impel this society to start thinking about the consequences of its heedless embrace of the second Industrial Revolution; and second, the resistance to that catastrophe, eventually unsuccessful then but with myriad lessons now, some philosophic, some even strategic, but instructive for those who might wish to disentangle themselves from that embrace before it is too late. Understanding in an intimate way the narrative of the Luddites, we may not only dispel our ignorance of the past, we may find some necessary guidance for the future.

The figures are uncertain, but it seems reasonable to suggest that something like five thousand croppers and apprentices were at work in Yorkshire, mostly in the West Riding¹ district where Cartwright's mill was located, in 1806 and nearly as many in 1812; by 1817 only 763 of them were thought to be fully employed, and by the 1830s the craft was all but dead. Thanks to the shearing frames and similar gig mills, whose numbers increased twentyfold by 1817, and the power engines, particularly steam, the work that in 1800 required twenty-seven croppers to do in 1828 could be done, according to a Parliamentary inquiry, in a factory by three men of modest skill and two children. In Leeds alone, one of the three major woolen centers, the number of Watt engines increased from 20 or so in 1800 to more than 120 in 1825, while the number of croppers dropped from 1,733 in 1814, working at 36 to 40 shillings a week, to less than a hundred by the 1830s, earning 10 to 14 shillings. The displaced men from here and elsewhere, as one observer reported, “have turned themselves to any thing they can get to do, some acting as bailiffs, water-carriers, scavengers, or selling oranges, cakes, tapes and laces, gingerbread, blacking, &c, &c.”

What is not uncertain—for it eventually becomes so pervasive that it forces countless newspaper exposés and government inquiries—is the misery and despoliation that accompanied these shifts. The factory system became notorious for its multiple evils and cruel impositions—“a state of slavery more horrid than … that hellish system—‘Colonial Slavery,’” as one Yorkshireman wrote in 1830—and the factory towns became infamous for their foul, blackened air in which it was said to be difficult to see, much less to breathe, and for the noxious rivers “fitted more for garbage than fishes” and the fields beside them turned sere and brown from industrial pollution. It was in 1814, two years after the Rawfolds raid, that Wordsworth wrote:

Like you I grieve when on the darker side
Of this great change I look: and there behold
Such outrage done to nature as compels
The indignant power to justify herself,
Yea, to avenge her violated rights,
For England's bane.

And:

In full many a region, once like this
The assured domain of calm simplicity
And pensive quiet, an unnatural light
Prepared for never-resting Labour's eyes
Breaks from a many-windowed fabric huge. …
                    Men, maidens, youths,
Mothers and little children, boys and girls,
Enter, and each the wonted task resumes
Within this temple, where is offered up
To Gain, the master idol of the realm,
Perpetual Sacrifice.

“Perpetual sacrifice”: that says it pretty well—the sacrifice of men and women, of their settled lives and cherished environments, of the world that had nurtured them. A darker side, indeed.

Note

1. “West Riding” was a corruption of “West Triding,” the name of an old administrative division of Yorkshire, meaning the western third of the county.