SOURCE: Fox, Nicols. “The Frame Breakers.” In Against the Machine: The Hidden Luddite Tradition in Literature, Art, and Individual Lives, pp. 24-40. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2002.

[In the following essay, Fox discusses the historical context of the Luddite revolt.]

The word Luddite is newly trendy. It finds its way into articles and essays at the elite edge of media consumption and is flung as a stylish insult at holdouts against this or that innovation or technology. It is usually meant as a lighthearted taunt of those who refuse or are unable to keep up with what is commonly referred to as progress. Applied to oneself, it is often a form of denial—as in, “I'm no Luddite,” or, more often, faintly apologetic, as in “I'm no Luddite, but …” (a phrase that goes just before the admission that some technology or innovation is disliked or has been spurned). Although people who use and hear the word have clearly come to understand its general meaning—it connotes a misguided and hopeless attempt to resist technological innovation—it's a fair bet that few know precisely where the term came from.

Those who swore allegiance to Ned Ludd (or King Ludd) earned themselves the name, although precisely who he was remains a mystery. But whatever its origins, between 1811 and 1816, in the five central manufacturing counties of England—a triangle that included parts of Lancashire, Yorkshire, Cheshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, and Leicester—organized groups of men, under the Luddite banner, raised whatever weapons they could muster, from muskets and revolvers to hatchets and blacksmith hammers, and in furious reaction to the installation of new technology that was taking their jobs and disrupting their lives, smashed certain types of mechanical looms.

It was an uprising that frightened the establishment of the day. Government and business leaders in the stately halls of London who were drawing up the blueprints for a new industrialism could envision quite another future for the country: one of efficient mass production of cheaper goods, enhanced trade, and greater profit. The wants and needs of working families in the Midlands played only a small role in that vision. These workers were to be, as perhaps they had begun to suspect, merely cogs in the machinery of the industrial revolution. It was a role they chose to resist.

Here is what the Luddite reaction was not. It was not a mindless gesture of uncontrolled rage at the new. The stockingers, croppers, and shearers had first attempted to ameliorate the effects of the new machines in other, peaceful ways, with failed attempts at negotiating and bargaining. Their attacks were selective; they chose their targets for clearly defined reasons. And they were not simply reacting to the loss of jobs, but to something more: the loss of a way of life. They had good reason to be frustrated and angry.

Nevertheless, the government's suppression of the movement with troops was swift and brutal. The most intense period of the Luddite Rebellion, with its secret meetings and midnight machine-smashing and factory-torching raids, was brief and apparently futile. Yet sympathy for both the workers' plight and the principle behind their actions has endured for nearly two hundred years—in literature and thinking, but also in the popular imagination, as evidenced by the bumper strip seen not long ago that said, simply, “Ned Ludd Lives.”

In 1996, author Kirkpatrick Sale stood before a public forum and performed a similarly iconoclastic, seemingly irrational, and apparently quixotic act: he smashed a computer. It might have been designed to draw attention to his new book, Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution. It was also intended to make the connection between resisting technology then and resisting it now. Sale's computer smashing was a gesture that resonated with historical meaning, harking back to a time when such a challenge to the introduction of a powerful technology had been taken very seriously indeed. But few reporters who covered the smashing had likely read his book or fully appreciated the connections he was trying to make. Reactions in the press tended to see the gesture as amusing and quaintly eccentric. The computer is a device that every major enterprise now depends upon absolutely. The personal computer has, within a generation, moved from clever novelty to a position of indisputable dominance at both work and home. Computer technology is behind everything, and is now too embedded in our society to be questioned lightly. We are wedded to the computer, dependent upon it as if it were a respirator tube, the removal of which now has potentially severe and unpleasant—perhaps life-threatening—consequences. And that is understood if not consciously, then at some level. Abolishing the computer now seems, to the working world, inconceivable, and so with his computer-smashing gesture, Sale became a curiosity—a crank.

But the revolt of that long-ago rebellious English lot, and Sale's sympathetic gesture today, has resonance and meaning still. Technology should not go unquestioned, Sale was saying. It should not be complacently accepted without a thorough evaluation of its potential impact on ordinary lives, on human communities, and on the natural world. At the very least, the consequences of introducing a technology should be thoroughly understood so that trade-offs can be consciously considered. And it may well turn out that from time to time a technology needs to be protested, resisted, or rejected if its effects are found to be unacceptable or its costs too high. That is what Sale was trying to say, and that is what the Luddites did, with an anguished howl that echoes down the corridors of time.

The original rebellion began in the same area of England as the long-vanished Sherwood Forest, that deep and mysterious grove that had served as backdrop and source of the mythical Robin Hood tales. The locally popular tradition, a familiar story repeated generation after generation, gave inspiration and encouragement to the impulse of the region's inhabitants to violate the law for the sake of the common good. The Luddites were fully conscious that they were venturing down a road “trod by an earlier set of courageous troublemakers,” says Sale; they even identified letters as being posted from “Robin Hood's Cave” or “Ned Ludd's office, Sherwood Forest.”¹ They were not true revolutionaries, not born and bred activists, but skilled workingmen—artisans rather than factory workers—who had become the victims of a process that was beginning to be called progress. The industrial revolution was not yet a concept; it was instead a radical and ongoing transformation, a taking-over of essential functions by machines, with all that implies, and it was affecting people's lives. Although many clearly saw the benefits of more efficient production and the appeal of transferring backbreaking work to inanimate gears and wheels, there were others who saw equally clearly that the order of things, an order that was not altogether unpleasant, would be forever changed. The energy and the pace of change allowed about as much tolerance for anyone who stood in the way as the new locomotives that accompanied industrialism would have for a duck on the tracks.

It was a time not unlike our own, when change was coming at a frantic pace; when the scent of cataclysm could be caught in the hiss and grease and grinding gears of impending modernism. Nothing—nothing—would be as it had been, and the rebellion was a desperate cry amid the clanging and crashing of metal on metal that heralded a new age. There seemed to be no precedent for the steam-driven mills and the factories and ironworks that were appearing so rapidly and creating a presence as nothing before them had. It was as if they had sprung fully formed, suddenly and without warning, steaming and blazing forth from some mysterious and godlike source, so powerful did they seem.

Anne Seward, a poet known as the “Swan of Lichfield,” where she spent most of her life, had written earlier, in the late eighteenth century, of the ironworks at Coalbrookdale on the River Severn, a landscape she remembered in her poem of that name for “thy grassy lanes, thy woodwild glens, / Thy knolls and bubbling wells, thy rocks, and streams,” now invaded by a belching monster—a Cyclops, she called it—that could not be ignored. Yet even within this description of a scene of violation there is a certain begrudging acknowledgment of awe at this instrument of utter transformation that could paint hills red and change the very nature of the sky.

… hear, in mingled tones,
Shout their throng'e barge, their pond'rous engines clang
Through thy coy dales; while red the countless fires,
With umber'd flames, flicker on all thy hills,
Dark'ning the Summer's sun with columns large,
Of thick, sulphureous smoke, which spread, like palls,
That screen the dead, upon thy sylvan robe
Of thy aspiring rocks; pollute thy gales,
And stain thy glassy waters.

The second decade of the nineteenth century was also a time of political and economic tension in England. The country was still at war with Napoleon. Trade blockades and embargoes limited the export of fabric and apparel, which in turn hurt the areas of England where these goods were produced. And a series of laws meant to contain and control any sympathetic Jacobin impulses or other subversive ideas created further resentment.

These were turbulent times. It didn't take much, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in England, to bring on a riot. Tom Paine's Common Sense had been printed in America in 1776 to give support for American independence, but it was well known in England. Paine's Rights of Man, written in 1791 and 1792, was a blueprint for an egalitarian society. In it he emphasized that most of the order that prevails in a country is not the result of government but of a complex interdependency and trust, a kind of natural order, that exists among its people. Government had been heavy-handed: “Instead of consolidating the society, it divided it; it deprived it of its natural cohesion.”² And in 1794 and 1795, Paine's Age of Reason, by challenging the authority of the Bible, did for theology what his earlier writings had done for government. Paine seriously undermined any inclination on the part of the people to feel a particular obligation to authority from whatever source, political or religious.

It is hard today to envision how radical these books were. Ordinary individuals felt empowered by Paine's words both to think for themselves and to stand up for rights they'd hardly known they had. Although banned, copies had always been available—a common method of obtaining it was to select a book from a bookseller's cart, then give the vendor twice the price, whereupon he would slip a copy of one of Paine's books into the parcel. Paine's writing had helped crystallize concepts of liberty, representative government, and human rights in the minds of a good portion of the population—even as the ruling class wished him in jail or worse. Even twenty years later, as the new machines began to appear, a perceptible residue of Paineite radicalism remained.

At the same time, grievances against enclosures, press-gangs, bread prices, tolls, excise taxes, and new machinery all could be “reason enough” to take to the streets in protest. “The British people were noted throughout Europe for their turbulence, and the people of London astonished foreign visitors by their lack of deference,” notes the historian E. P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class.³ Some of these uprisings were organized by outsiders and were deliberate attempts to rouse the mob to create political pressure for reform, but others were spontaneous direct actions by frustrated individuals. Of this latter type, bread and food riots were most common, and the protests, sometimes culminating in the looting of shops, were “legitimized,” says Thompson, “by the assumptions of an older moral economy, which taught the immorality of any unfair method of forcing up the price of provisions by profiteering upon the necessities of the people.”⁴ Workers expected that wages set and agreed upon would be sufficient to cover basic necessities—this was only right and just, part of the unwritten contract between master and worker—and the idea that prices would rise and fall according to supply and demand, a bedrock assumption of a developing market economy, was not a concept that had yet taken hold in the minds of ordinary working folk. Any sudden increase in prices was thus a reason to riot.

But whatever the cause of the unrest, the government was nevertheless relentless in its attempt to control and isolate expressions of disaffection whenever and wherever they arose. Not every effort demanded soldiers, however. Individuals or groups could be tarnished by mere accusations of treasonous conspiracy or by exaggerating the threat of insurrection with wild allegations—some generated by infiltrators from within the dissident movements themselves. “In a sense,” says Thompson, “the government needed conspirators to justify the continuation of the repressive legislation which prevented nation-wide popular organization.”⁵

It was in this atmosphere that the Luddite Rebellion had its beginnings. The government's oppressive surveillance and infiltration led to such increases in secrecy within the dissident groups that it was sometimes difficult for them to operate at all. Suspicion ran riot; many were suspected of double-dealing. Thus there are no personal reminiscences, no periodicals, no meeting minutes—unfortunately for us. With government spies everywhere, looking for evidence, watching the post, the risk was simply too great and remained so. When Luddism became a hanging offense, secrets were kept for forty years or more. To have announced oneself a Luddite, even after the rebellion had ended, would certainly have attracted unwanted attention from the law. Thus the stories, the songs, the memories of the rebellion were not committed to paper but “were handed down as a secret tradition,” Thompson tells us, sung or told to grandchildren.⁶ What is known of the actual rebellion, therefore, is mainly from secondary sources or from its opposition or from the occasional anonymous letter to the newspaper claiming (and likely) to be from the followers of Ned Ludd.

And who was this King Ludd? There is no definitive answer but any number of competing ideas. Various individuals in the uprising seemed to have used the name as a pseudonym, applying “General” or “King” in front of it with ironic humor. In 1811, the Nottingham Review had itself offered an explanation, saying that a reluctant weaving apprentice named Ned Ludd had been beaten for refusing to work and, in retaliation, had taken a hammer and smashed his knitting machine. He was given credit, thereafter, for any smashed machinery: “Ned Ludd must have done it,” was probably said with a wink and a nudge. This story has variations, and there are other explanations besides: attempts to link Ludd to a real King Lud reputed to be fierce in battle, or even to an early King Ludeca, about whom little is known but whose kingdom of Mercia was in the Midlands region. There is also a Cumbrian phrase using the world lud to mean heap. None of these explanations seems entirely satisfactory. Perhaps all are true in the way meanings and associations have of blending. But Luddite, with its onomatopoetic resonance, seems a good name for a machine smasher, in any case.

Those who organized the Luddite Rebellion were for the most part among the aristocracy of the weaving industry: men who were called croppers and shearers and those who operated the knitting frames. The first two classes, highly skilled artisans, were facing the inevitable introduction of two machines—the gig mill and the shearing frame—that could essentially eliminate the need for their work. No one supposed that these machines could do the job as well—but they could do it. And inevitably the decision would be made that the higher quality cloth produced by the craftsmen was simply not worth paying for if an acceptable substitute could be produced by mechanical means at far less cost.

It was not as if, at the first sign of the new machines, the croppers and shearers simply took to the streets. They had attempted to negotiate compromises with the factory owners over a long period. They had proposed a more gradual introduction of the machines, with alternative work found for the displaced men. A tax per yard was proposed that could raise money for a fund to help those made redundant who were trying to find work. The workers had raised between ten thousand and twelve thousand pounds—an astonishing amount for the times and coming from people of such modest means. This was used to hire solicitors to put their case before Parliament and to represent them before the committees charged with regulating the industry. It was to no avail. The factory owners, their hand strengthened by new laws restricting worker “combination” or unionization and collective bargaining (which was seen as another form of seditious activity), forced the issue, pressing their advantage. Thompson describes the farce that they and their representatives met with when they presented their case to the newly formed committee appointed to inquire into the woolen trade:

It would be a sad understatement to say that the men's witnesses before the 1806 Committee met with a frosty reception. They and their counsel were browbeaten and threatened by the advocates of laissez faire and the anti-Jacobin tribunes of order. Petitions were seen as evidence of conspiracy. Witnesses whom the croppers had sent to London and maintained at such expense were interrogated like criminals. … It was held to be an outrageous offence that they had collected money from outside their own ranks and had been in contact with the woolen workers of the west. They were forced to reveal the names of their fellow officers. Their books were seized. Their accounts were scrutinized. The Committee dropped all pretence of judicial impartiality, and constituted itself into an investigative tribunal.⁷

The very effort and efficiency the men had put into presenting their case was used against them. Clearly the ability to organize to that degree and to that level of efficiency made them dangerous to the factory owners and the government. Pitt's Two Acts, which had suspended habeas corpus and banned seditious meetings, had expired in 1795, then been reinstated for another year. Any form of organized activity among groups remained illegal, although meetings could be called. Oaths and secret societies were illegal as well. The workers were squeezed on the one side by economics and on the other by an oppressive government. The middle was an uncomfortable place to be. To the government, the group of weavers—although they had taken pains to operate in the open and, they thought, within the law—represented a potential force that could be called into action. In response, the smart thing was instead to operate quietly and out of sight. One more petition was presented and rejected. In 1809 all the protective laws, weak as they had been, were repealed, and with that, hopes were dashed. It was clear that there would be nothing to stop the gig mill or the shearing frame, or the employment of children and unskilled workers in the jobs—now in factories—that these men had once held.⁸

The cloth workers now understood precisely what they were up against. It was little wonder that the idea of violent recourse began to form out of this frustration. But it was not an entirely new idea. There was, in fact, a long tradition of machine-breaking, although usually the rationale had been to express resentment at some unresolved grievance rather than to direct anger against the machines themselves. As Thompson points out, it had included not only the destruction of looms and materials but the filling of pits, the damaging of pit-head gear, even the burning of houses of unpopular employers. Now the focus changed.

In the end, the charge was first led not by the woolen workers, who had carried their grievances to London, but by the framework knitters, or stockingers. And it was not just a reaction to the machines. The Luddite effort grew out of events that were transforming and challenging individual lives, certainly. But the rebellion is better understood as an armed resistance against the force these men saw threatening their collective way of life; a force that, in their own words, was “hurtful to commonality.” As historian Malcolm Thomis has said, “If workmen disliked certain machines, it was because of the use to which they were being put, not because they were machines or because they were new,”⁹ an observation that puts the machines in a larger context.

These men had worked with machines before. But their trade had been a cottage industry, or at least local and modest. Many of the stockingers worked by themselves or in small village workshops—aligned with the small masters, as they were called, with only three or four looms, in control of their time and requiring, perhaps, the help of a child. Their raw materials had often come from nearby. Their lives during previous years of prosperity, have been described as pleasant, their houses and small gardens well tended, the families well dressed, their sitting rooms pleasantly furnished.

But conditions were changing rapidly. It was not so much a particular machine that raised the stockingers' ire but new patterns of labor forced upon them by unscrupulous middle men and the least principled hosiers who were substituting poor quality work, which could be sold more cheaply and so drove out the good. The men felt underpaid and ill-used. Cut-ups, or stockings sown together from knitted material woven on a wide loom, were being substituted for the fine seamless stockings that had once been the standard. But cheap stockings could be made efficiently and sold cheaply, and the less discerning customer hardly knew the difference or didn't care. So the frames weren't attacked because they were new, but because they produced inferior goods that were undercutting those the stockingers produced. And just like the croppers, they felt that every law that had protected them was being ignored or repealed, and every attempt to redress the matter peacefully was being challenged.

In addition to the new machines, the centralization of work would become a matter of concern as well, clearly adding to the difficulty of the workers' situation. Call it the mindless application of the rule of efficiency demanded by the new machines, for they required a constant source of power. And so the factories first rose, five and six stories of brick, along the streams in the valleys. Then, when steam provided the power, they could be grouped in what would become larger centers of production near transportation. Because the new plants and machines were costly, they needed to be run continuously, and labor had to be found for that perpetual work, lit in the long winter evenings by the flicker of gaslight. But the new machines were easier to operate. Less strength and less skill were required. Each machine could do the work of six or seven men. Women and children could keep many of them going, although under brutal conditions and with lower wages. Family life was being destroyed. Skilled craftsmen were reduced to selling cheap goods on the street or accepting support from wives and children who labored within a pitiless system.

Economic circumstances contributed to the frustrations of the cloth workers. It had been a bad summer, first cold enough in June of 1811 to kill young plants with a heavy frost. Then it had turned hot and dry. It was the third year in a row of bad harvests, and to add to the troubles, much of the food produced went to feed the soldiers fighting—endlessly, it seemed—Napoleon, now in Portugal. To make matters worse, laws prevented the export of cotton stockings and handkerchiefs, and they were accumulating in the warehouses. Also, the fickle dictates of fashion had changed, requiring that knee-breeches and stockings be replaced with long trousers, thus reducing demand further. Work was thus scarce to begin with; then, to top it off, the owners of the new machines could employ a woman and a child to do what six men had done—and for less pay. The consequences: a week's wages could no longer—in the face of rising food prices—begin to feed a family properly. Oatmeal cooked in water, boiled potatoes: there was little else for the working poor. Desperation was in the air. There were other causes of woe, but the machines were identifiable symbols of what had gone wrong. The workers' once moderately comfortable lives seemed a vanishing dream without possibility of being recreated short of drastic action.

It is hard now to know what happened on those dark nights, in the huddled clandestine meetings in the hollows or the woods, but it is known that the first “frame-breaking” took place in the village of Burwell, not far from Nottingham. A band of men with blackened faces, assigned numbers instead of names, mustered, shouldered their weapons, and set off for the weaving shop of a man named Hollingsworth. They broke in and destroyed a half-dozen of what were probably lace-making machines. A few nights later they returned to finish the job, but Hollingsworth and his men were waiting. A young man, John Westley, was shot and killed trying to get in through a shutter, and—incensed that their “justifiable” violence would be met with “unjustifiable” violence—the workers broke into the factory and house and, after destroying furniture (the family and workers had slipped out the back), set the buildings alight.

As uncontrolled as these attacks appear, it is important to note that they were not entirely random. When frames began to be smashed, a very selective process was employed, says Thompson. The Luddites destroyed only those that produced inferior goods. Those on which stockings were properly made were left intact.

In the weeks that followed, there were other attacks on shops where the mechanical frames had been installed—as well as attacks on frames that were being transported out of the district for safe storage. A few days later, a thousand armed men marched into Sutton and broke between thirty and seventy frames. The factory owners felt besieged. The local magistrates called for help in restoring order from a militia unit quartered nearby. But sympathy for the weavers was growing. When Westley's body was carried through the town of Arnold later that same week, it was accompanied by a crowd of nearly a thousand defiant men, says Sale.¹⁰ The infamous Riot Act was then read, threatening the arrest of anyone who did not disperse at once. It was too late to calm this crowd. They dispersed, but only to regroup. Anger and frustration now ran deep in the population, and justifications in the form of anonymous letters and flyers making the Luddite case began to appear in the newspapers or nailed to boards. Perhaps it was now, at this intense moment, with supporters around them, that this Luddite song was composed and sung:

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!
O, the cropper lads for me,
The gallant lads for me,
Who with lusty stroke
The shear frames broke,
The cropper lads for me!(11)

The emotions generated would be hard to contain. Within months the uprising had spread to Yorkshire and Lancashire, and the stakes were raised with raids on factories, burglaries, and arson. But the government had mounted a response as well, and it was equally determined to stop the violence and stamp out the insurrection with a resolute ferocity.

It was in Yorkshire that the raids seemed most organized. One in particular, against the hated William Cartwright, is widely recalled. Cartwright was a prominent mill owner in Yorkshire, successful but not well loved. One of the new breed of mill owner, his factory at Rawfolds housed fifty shearing frames running smoothly and endlessly using water power from the nearby stream. The raid was led by George Mellor, a cropper (a finisher of wool), but not just weavers were involved. Among the men were blacksmiths and other workers who understood what the machines had in store for them. The machines would, for one thing, eliminate any illusion of control they had over their lives.

The raid was well organized, but Cartwright was prepared that night. He was waiting with four workmen and five men from a nearby militia. When the Luddites broke windows and began firing into the building, his men fired back. The raiders tried to batter down the reinforced door, but they failed, and Cartwright began ringing a bell to alert military reinforcements stationed nearby. The firing continued, and three of the raiders were wounded, two badly. As the troops arrived and the Luddites retreated, Mellor himself told the wounded—with tears in his eyes, said observers—that they must be left behind but must never reveal the names of their comrades.

Cartwright found the wounded men and interrogated them before getting medical help, until he sensed the growing anger from bystanders. After minimal care and more interrogation, the men died without revealing names. The less severely wounded, who had been helped from the scene by their comrades, were cared for outside the district or in secret until they were healed, a sign of the widespread sympathy and support the rebellion had in the district. Two others apparently died later and were buried in secret by the Reverend Patrick Brontë, father of Charlotte Brontë, who would later write in Shirley:

Certain inventions in machinery were introduced into the staple manufacturers 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.¹²

Sale denies that Brontë had Luddite sympathies, but it is mysterious that anyone without them could write, as she does next: “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.”¹³

In the early months of 1812, in the Midland triangle of Luddite activity, there was a new sense of unease. The frame-breaking continued, and fear of becoming entangled in the ongoing violence kept those who were not involved at home behind closed doors and shuttered windows. Now the attacks were openly described as an insurrection. Troops were dispatched, between three and four thousand of them. More frequent arrests were made, rewards were offered, spies were paid, townspeople were interviewed and reinterviewed by magistrates, and by February a bill had been introduced calling for the death penalty for those destroying or injuring frames. In March, the bill was passed, and machine-breaking became a capital crime.

In the two years the frame breakers were active, the damage they inflicted amounted to more than £100,000, an amount that factory owners and government officials considered a serious threat to the economic order of the countryside. The threat was not simply to order, however, but “in ways not always articulated, to industrial progress itself.” Says Sale:

They were … rebels against the future that was being assigned to them by the new political economy then taking hold in Britain, in which it was argued that those who controlled capital were able to do almost anything they wished, encouraged and protected by government and king, without much in the way of laws or ethics or customs to restrain them.¹⁴

And this future was in the interests of the industrialists and the British government. From their perspective, it was a revolt that needed to be put down quickly, smartly, and permanently. The government felt it necessary to demonstrate that quality, still valued today, of being willing to establish the appropriate climate for business by whatever means at hand. And if that meant repressing and controlling an unruly labor force, that was what must be done. There was no attempt to alleviate the social disruption the machines created, which governments today might consider a wise idea. Instead, London eventually quartered as many as 14,400 troops in an area of about 2,100 square miles with a population of a million or so. To illustrate how forcible a response this was, Sale notes that had you been in the area at the time, one of every seventy people you saw would have been a soldier. And that was not the limit of the response. The voluntary militia was called in as well—numbering probably 20,000 in the area. The magistrates, constables, and agents were enlisted in the cause. The Luddites were infiltrated. Informers were paid. Even though little evidence could be pried from the close-knit and sympathetic communities from which the rebels came, the Luddite effort had little chance against such measures. Individuals were arrested and tried. After the first trials, eight were hanged, seventeen transported, thirteen imprisoned, and twenty acquitted. The trials would continue, with similar results. In January of 1813, fourteen more were hanged. There were sporadic episodes of machine-smashing in the next few years, but as Sale puts it, “The neck of Luddism was broken” on the gallows of York Castle on that dark January Saturday.¹⁵ The cost of quashing the rebellion has been calculated by various historians at around £1.5 million, but what was at stake was far more important to Great Britain in the eyes of the government and industrialists: it was, in a word, the industrial revolution.

The rebellion, then, was not merely against the new machines but against something even larger and more ominous. What these workers were seeing, says Sale, was “their ordered society of craft and custom and community begin to give way.”¹⁶ In its place was a new system that would change the previous ways, not simply of making goods but of marketing them. A new order was to be imposed that would reshape both the physical and cultural landscape, disturbing every aspect of lives that had been lived in a way that had seen little real change for hundreds of years. Industrialization would change it all, and seldom for the better—at least not from the perspective of these men and their families. They had been proud and independent artisans; they would become little more than servants—if they could secure new jobs. In truth, they were battling the idea of laissez faire: the theory that wages, prices, and supply could best find an appropriate balance without government playing a role, a system that took no account of the individual cost of radical change. The needs of the workers and their families had not been factored into the equation except as the impersonal force called demand. Or as David Noble puts it, “they were struggling against the efforts of capital to restructure social relations and the patterns of production at their expense using technology as a vehicle.¹⁷

The process was turning proud men into paupers; the sense of having lost social status was acute; and constitutional rights—for it seemed they had none. At the same time, they had virtually the full support of their communities; public opinion was on their side. “The large employers, and the factory system generally, stirred up profound hostility among small masters,” says Thompson. When the first steam mill had been built in Bradford in 1797, it had been to the “accompaniment of menacing and hooting crowds,” he says.¹⁸

It is easy to forget how evil a reputation the new cotton mills had acquired. They were centres of exploitation, monstrous prisons in which children were confined, centres of immorality and of industrial conflict; above all, they reduced the industrial artisan to “a dependant State.” A way of life was at stake for the community, and, hence, we must see the croppers' opposition to particular machines as being very much more than a particular group of skilled workers defending their own livelihood. These machines symbolized the encroachment of the factory system.¹⁹

This intense dislike of the factory system was not limited to the workers. For some manufacturers it became a moral issue. One sold a prosperous business rather than use machinery that he felt to be “a means of oppression on the part of the rich and of corresponding degradation and misery to the poor.”²⁰ There was sympathy among the public for the plight of the cloth workers that lent sanction to the activities of the Luddites. There were few indeed who liked the factory system, who supported the use of the machines, or who felt no compassion for the misplaced workers or regret for the losses incurred as both manufacturing and community were transformed. Says Thompson:

What was at issue was the “freedom” of the capitalist to destroy the customs of the trade, whether by new machinery, by the factory-system, or by unrestricted competition, beating-down wages, undercutting his rivals, and undermining standards of craftsmanship. We are so accustomed to the notion that it was both inevitable and “progressive” that trade should have been freed in the early 19th century from “restrictive practices”, that it requires an effort of imagination to understand that the “free” factory owner or large hosier, or cotton-manufacturer, who built his fortune by these means, was regarded not only with jealousy but as a man engaging in immoral and illegal practices. … They could see no “natural law” by which one man, or a few men, could engage in practices which brought manifest injury to their fellows.²¹

Despite the widespread local support, the Luddite Rebellion was a failure. The machines, except in a few isolated instances, remained. New ones appeared. Owners were able to hold down wages. More factories were built, and economic conditions improved only erratically. Although Sale points out that historians have juggled the figures to make the effects of the industrial revolution look less painful to contemporary students of labor, the life of the workers in the English Midlands remained miserable.²² And one cause of that misery was the blackness of the soot-filled air from the coal-fired, engine-driven machinery, a nasty blackness that permeated homes and coated everything it touched. Along with it came the fouling of the rivers with industrial waste and untreated sewage. Truly, it would seem from the perspective of the inhabitants of a miserable hole on some backstreet of Manchester, the world had ended.

“Luddism at its core,” says Sale, “was a heterogeneous howl of protest and defiance, but once that cry was heard in the land and the only response of officialdom and merchantry was indifference, indignation or inhibition, it hardly knew what to do, how to continue, where to move.”²³ If their howl could not be heard over the roar of the machines, what was left to do? The hearts of the Luddites and their sympathizers had been broken as effectively as the necks of the hanged. The way that people worked would be forever transformed by the machine, which required tending, knew no morning or night, and demanded a division of labor in the industrial setting that separated the worker from the product. Handwork—individual, creative, satisfying—was on the way out except as an exercise of determined principle.

That might have been the end of it. And yet, the name sticks. The Luddites and their rebellion against the machine cannot, it seems, be forgotten. We find meaning and relevance in that protest still, a tantalizing glimpse of possibility, an echo of thoughts each of us has surely had at one time or another as we struggle to adapt to some balky piece of demanding technology. Differences of class and time dissolve as we detect a commonality with these protestors.

What is not as clear from the standard histories is that the concerns of the Luddites were not limited to a handful of rough workmen roused to violence. Nor did those concerns end with the hangings. The Luddites had supporters, some of them well placed, such as Lord Byron. The Luddites had sympathizers, some of them respected thinkers and writers and artists of the day, such as William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley; individuals who knew that something other than jobs was at stake in the relentless pressure of industrialization. There were those—such as Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Charles Dickens, Mary Shelley, and William Morris—who saw that the machine had the potential to damage the very essence of what it means to be human in all those ways that humanness is expressed. And there were those who understood clearly, as did Henry David Thoreau, that the damage could well extend beyond humans, affecting our relationship with the world around us in ways that were likely to be undesirable, coming between humans and the natural world, destroying pride in work, dehumanizing daily activities, reorienting allegiances, and reshaping lives.

Although it has roots far back in history, there is, in fact, a consistent thread of thinking about humans and technology that begins around the time of the Luddite Rebellion and continues without a break up to the present. Resistance to the domination of the machine has branched into the arts, nature, agriculture, labor, politics, and spirituality. Follow those connections, and a continuing tradition of thought and art and action begins to emerge. And with it comes the revelation that those who are concerned about technology are not alone; have never been alone.

Notes

1. Sale, Kirkpatrick, Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and their War on the Industrial Revolution (Reading, Mass.: Addison Wesley, 1995), 3.

2. Paine, Thomas, “Rights of Man,” Collected Writings, ed. Eric Foner (New York: Library of America, 1995), 554.

3. Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Random House, 1966), 62.

4. Ibid., 63.

5. Ibid., 485.

6. Ibid., 495.

7. Ibid., 528.

8. Ibid., 529.

9. Quoted in Thomis, Malcolm L., The Luddites: Machine Breaking in Regency England (New York: Schocken Books, 1972), 50.

10. Sale, Rebels against the Future, 73.

11. Quoted in Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, p. 559.

12. Brontë, Charlotte, Shirley (London: Penguin Books, 1985) 62.

13. Ibid.

14. Sale, Rebels against the Future, 5.

15. Sale, Rebels against the Future, 190.

16. Sale, Rebels against the Future, 3.

17. Noble, David, Progress Without People: In Defense of Luddism (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1994) 4.

18. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 548.

19. Ibid.

20. Quoted in Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 548-549.

21. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 549.

22. Sale, Rebels Against the Future, 201-202.

23. Sale, Rebels Against the Future, 191.