Machine Breaking and the Plight of the Luddite: The Weekly George

In February 1812, amidst the harsh economical climate of the Napoleonic Wars, the British Parliament proposed that machine-breaking should become a capital offence. Despite a passionate speech by Lord Byron in the House of Lords opposing the act, Parliament passed the Frame Breaking Act enabling the death sentence to be passed on those convicted of machine breaking. The Government dispatched twelve thousand troops away from the war and into the areas where the machine breaking Luddites were active and the saying went that there were as many British soldiers flighting their own kind in England than there were in Spain fighting the troops of Napoleon. Although the Luddites were never well organised, they were considered a serious threat by the government of the day, which was haunted by the spectre of a popular uprising ie The French Revolution.

A year earlier in the winter of 1811 the first threatening letters from General Ludd, a mystical character from workers’ folklore, and the Army of Redressers** were sent to mill owners in Nottingham. The technologies of the Industrial Revolution were putting skilled textile tradesman out of work in the north of England, and taking their place were new stocking frames, cloth finishing machines, power looms and cheap, unapprenticed labour to operate them.

Skilled workers, now being offered unskilled wages or having been made redundant altogether, began breaking into mills at night to destroy the machines . They were known as the Luddites. WithIn a three-week period over two hundred stocking frames were destroyed. In March, 1811, several attacks were taking place every night and the Nottingham authorities had to enroll four hundred special constables to protect the factories. Over the next year Luddism spread from Nottinghamshire to Yorkshire, Lancashire, Leicestershire and Derbyshire. In Yorkshire, croppers, a small and highly skilled group of cloth finishers, turned their anger on the new shearing frame that they feared would put them out of work. In February and March, 1812, factories were attacked by Luddites in Huddersfield, Halifax, Wakefield and Leeds. In 1819 Manchester journalist John Edward Taylor reported that agents provocateurs had been infiltrating Luddite meetings and, if not encouraging the attacks, they were certainly taking no action to prevent them.

By the summer of 1812 wheat prices had soared, the Luddites numbers had grown into the thousands and their losses came to more than just their livelihoods. Throughout the preceeding months many Luddites had been executed or transported to Australia once convicted of machine breaking, and many were often killed by guards or the military during machine breaking raids and food riots. After a mass conviction of Luddites in York in the summer of 1812 resulting in executions and transportations, Luddism abruptly began to peter out, and by 1816 the now sporadic attacks on machinery, and mill and factory owners, had disappeared altogether. The Industrial Revolution roared onwards and the Luddites were unfairly stamped by history as fearers of progress and technology.

Factory Children George Walker 1814
From the book The Costume of Yorkshire, illustrated by a series of forty engravings, being fac-similes of original drawings. With descriptions in English and French. (published 1814)

On the attack on Burton’s Mill in Middleton from the Leeds Mercury in April, 1812:

• A body of men, consisting of from one to two hundred, some of them armed with muskets with fixed bayonets, and others with colliers’ picks, who marched into the village in procession, and joined the rioters. At the head of the armed banditti a man of straw was carried, representing the renowned General Ludd whose standard bearer waved a sort of red flag.

From the Manchester Gazette May 1812:

• On Monday afternoon a large body, not less than 2,000, commenced an attack, on the discharge of a pistol, which appeared to have been the signal; vollies of stones were thrown, and the windows smashed to atoms; the internal part of the building being guarded, a musket was discharged in the hope of intimidating and dispersing the assailants. In a very short time the effects were too shockingly seen in the death of three, and it is said, about ten wounded.

Lord Byron’s speech in the House of Lords February 27th 1812

• During the short time I recently passed in Nottingham, not twelve hours elapsed without some fresh act of violence; and on that day I left the the county I was informed that forty Frames had been broken the preceding evening, as usual, without resistance and without detection.Such was the state of that county, and such I have reason to believe it to be at this moment. But whilst these outrages must be admitted to exist to an alarming extent, it cannot be denied that they have arisen from circumstances of the most unparalleled distress: the perseverance of these miserable men in their proceedings, tends to prove that nothing but absolute want could have driven a large, and once honest and industrious, body of the people, into the commission of excesses so hazardous to themselves, their families, and the community.They were not ashamed to beg, but there was none to relieve them: their own means of subsistence were cut off, all other employment preoccupied; and their excesses, however to be deplored and condemned, can hardly be subject to surprise.As the sword is the worst argument than can be used, so should it be the last. In this instance it has been the first; but providentially as yet only in the scabbard. The present measure will, indeed, pluck it from the sheath; yet had proper meetings been held in the earlier stages of these riots, had the grievances of these men and their masters (for they also had their grievances) been fairly weighed and justly examined, I do think that means might have been devised to restore these workmen to their avocations, and tranquillity to the country

** The destruction of stocking frames by misguided or unbalanced mill workers had been occuring occasionally, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, since 1710. When slow witted mill worker Ned Ludd broke into an Anstey, Leceistershire mill and smashed two frames in 1779, Ludd’s image was appropriated into proletariat folklore and reinvented as a mythical king, captian or general, a mysterious, dark and romantic figure of worker championship.

Cloth Dressers George Walker 1814
From the book The Costume of Yorkshire, illustrated by a series of forty engravings, being fac-similes of original drawings. With descriptions in English and French. (published 1814)

Jane Austen and Crabbe by E.E. Duncan-Jones

“Dr Chapman has shown that Jane Austen often preferred to use or adapt proper names from other writers. An instance of this which, I believe, has not previously been noted, is that of the heroine of Mansfield Park. In The Parish Register, Part II (1807), Jane Austen’s favourite poet Crabbe had written:

Sir Edward is an amorous knight
And maidens chaste and lovely shun his sight;
His bailiff’s daughter suited much his taste,
For Fanny Price was lovely and was chaste”

- Authored by E.E. Duncan-Jones in Jane Austen and Crabbe, The Review of English Studies © 1954 Oxford University Press

The Poetical Works of the Rev. George Crabbe 1754-1832 online at Google Books

Georgian Image Bookmarking

I’ve finally got around to smartening up my image bookmarking page with correct image titles and details. Every image is now labeled properly and if you click on an image to enlarge it, there is now a link to the area of Old Grey Pony or Georgian Resources that features or discusses the image, if relevant.

Georgian Image Bookmarking

New to the G.I.B.

“Adonis”, King George III’s Favourite Charger
circa 1820
James Ward
Private Collection

The Weekly George: Diodati

Inspired by Robert Gordon’s poem Diodati, 1816, I’ve started a brand new series for The Weekly George:

The Diodati Stories and Their Authors: Part One: Lord Byron

George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron of Rochdale
22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824

George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron
Richard Westall
1813
Nation Portrait Gallery London

Infamously characterized by Lady Caroline Lamb as the ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ titular anti-hero in her 1816 novel Glenarvon , Angl0-Scottish poet and satirist George Gordon, sixth baron Byron, was born on 27th January 1788 to an English aristocrat father and a Scottish aristocrat mother. He was the son of the profligate “mad Jack” Captain Byron and following the captain’s death he was raised in Aberdeen by his mother. Byron was educated at Harrow and Cambridge, and having inherited his barony, he took his seat in the House of Lords in 1809. Byron would become a leading figure of the Romantic movement and one of the most famous Georgians, a personage whose full tilt life fascinated his contemporaries. Among his best-known works are the narrative poems Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan.

His first published work Hours of Idleness (1807) was the subject of a severe notice in The Edinburgh Review (January 1807) provoking the riposte of Byron’s satiric British Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809). The final stage of his education as an aristocrat was the Grand Tour which Byron undertook (1809-11) in the company of his friend John Cam Hobhouse. The Napoleonic wars prevented the usual culmination of the tour in Italy, and Byron traveled through Portugal, Spain, Gibraltar and Malta to the more exotic regions of Albania and the Grecian provinces of the Ottoman Empire.

In 1812 when Byron published the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage ( 1812-1818 )he became an adored character of London society; he spoke in the House of Lords effectively on liberal themes and was hugely popular, a veritable Georgian celebrity. But fervent talk of his manifold loves affairs and rumors of homosexual liaisons (though such liaisons were certainly not unheard of at Cambridge), of incest and of his cruelty to his wife during his short lived marriage to Anne Isabella Milbanke in 1815, abounded. During her pregnancy he tormented her and Lady Byron’s request for a separation, following the birth of their daughter, affirmed public belief in the old stories of Byron’s supposed incest with his half sister Augusta Leigh . Though his poetry was more popular than ever, he was socially ostracized. He chose to exile himself from England.

The famous summer of 1816 at the Villa Diodoti now came to pass. Through Claire Claremont, who had recently become Byron’s mistress and hoped to remain so, Byron acquired the friendship of her step sister Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her future husband Percy Bysshe Shelley. With his personal physician John Polidori living with him Bryon rented the Villa Diodoti on the shores of Lake Geneva and invited the Shelly party to be his guests. Byron and Shelley became instant soul mates, inspirational to and influential on each other, Mary was intellectual and free spirited and Claire was ready to do anything for the great poet.

The weather went from being beautiful and radiant to melodramatically tempestuous and on the night of June 16th he group read aloud a collection of German ghost stories, The Fantasmagoriana. This inspired Byron to challenge the group to write a ghost story. Shelley wrote a forgettable story, Byron wrote a story fragment, and based on that fragment Polidori began the The Vampyre, the first modern vampire tale, in which the main man Lord Ruthven, is modeled on Byron. Mary was at first uninspired but a few days later she had her ‘waking nightmare’ that would give birth to Dr Frankenstein and his Creature and the philosophic Gothic of Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus.

The party became less festive as Byron tired of Claire (he had tired of her already before she arrived) just as she revealed that she was pregnant by him. Polidori was increasingly overwhelmed by romanticism and causing trouble in taverns and brawls, and Byron began to feel that Shelley had too much emotional power over himself. The party soon broke up and Byron, after traveling again with John Cam Hobhouse, would spend almost the rest of his life in Italy. His existance was excessive, debauched and unhealthy. After a few years in Italy he met and fell in love with the Countess Teresa Guicciolo and he then became involved with the revolutionary politics that made him truly happy. He won the friendship of Teresa’s father and brother who initiated him into the secret revolutionary society of the Carbonari. In Ravenna he was brought into closer touch with the life of the Italian people than he had ever been. He gave arms to the Carbonari and alms to the poor. It was one of the happiest and most productive periods of his life and Byron produced some of his greatest poetry during this time, as well as being much involved with Leigh and John Hunt’s new periodical The Liberal, which being printed in Italy could not be censored by the British government, nor could the participants be jailed for publishing politically or socially liberal material, as they could and had been in England.

When the Carbonari was put on ice, domesticity with Teresa did not suit and after five years with her he left Italy to meet his destiny in Greece. The London Greek Committee had signed Byron on to act as its agent in aiding the Greek war for independence from the Turks and all of his legendary enthusiasm, energy, and imagination were now at the service of the Greek army. The cause suffered setbacks and Byron had reclaimed his school boy homoeroticism in Greece and had entered into an emotionally straining friendship with the youth Louksa Chalandritsanos, whom he addressed in his final poems. Never stable, his emotional and physical being deteriorated rapidly during a period of ill health. After a series of violent fevers and fits he was repeatedly and ill-advisably bled, which led to a coma, and Lord Byron died in Greece on April 19 1824. Deeply mourned by the Greeks, his body was embalmed and the heart was removed and buried in Missolonghi.

Allegra Byron, his daughter by Claire Claremont died in childhood at the convent where Byron had placed her. Elizabeth Medora Leigh, the daughter of his half sister Augusta Leigh believed by many to be his, led a troubled life and was often supported by Byron’s former wife Anne Isabella Millbank. Their legitimate daughter, Ada Lovelace, also supported Elizabeth believing her to be either her half sister or her cousin, until Elizabeth’s death in France, aged 35. Ada, a mathematician, became very well know in society, in the arts and in mathematical circles, and she collaborated with Charles Babbage on the analytical engine, a predecessor to modern computers. Ada Lovelace was also bled to death by her physician at age 36 while receiving treatment for cancer.

The Poetical Works of Lord Byron is available to read online or download in PDF format from Google Books.

Four Georges

My research blog Georgian Resources has made the move over to WordPress too.

Four Georges at WordPress

Georgian Image Booking at Flickr

Accident and Coincidence in Persuasion. Part Two.

It is during the significant turning point of Persuasion’s storyline, the visit to Lyme, that the accidents of Uppercross come to a head, and where the strands of the web holding Wentworth close to Louisa Musgrove and away from Anne shift and snap in their course. The visit to Lyme heralds the closing of the country setting and the opening of the Bath one, and the change from country accidents to town coincidences.

The climax of the bond between Louisa and Wentworth, a frenzy of school-girlish admiration on her side and careless enjoyment on his, comes in the form of Persuasion’s most significant accident, Louisa’s near tragic fall on the Cobb at Lyme. The intimacy between Wentworth and Louise is child like and during their walks around Uppercross ‘he had had to jump her from the stiles’ as ‘the sensation was delightful to her’. From the steps on the Cobb Louisa insists Wentworth catches her, which he does, but a second, too precipitous jump leaves her seriously injured, concussed, unconscious for a period and bedridden during a long convalescence at Lyme. Louisa’s accident puts crucial developments into motion, realizations and reactions that pull Wentworth away from her and towards Anne:

…he had seen everything to exalt in his estimation the woman he had lost; and there begun to deplore the pride, the folly, the madness of resentment, which had kept him from trying to regain her when thrown in his way

Louisa’s obstinacy in jumping despite warnings of danger and Anne’s quick thinking and sensible reactions to the emergency, his feelings of guilt and responsibility and the group’s assuming there to be agreement between himself and Louisa force Wentworth to analyze his actions of the past few weeks, and to acknowledge his obligation to Louisa even while he confronts the reality that he is still very much in love with Anne, but honor bound to Louisa.

But as Louisa recovers she begins to fall in love with, and to be loved by, Captain Benwick. Benwick’s fiancé had died the previous summer while he was at sea, an accidental chance that left Benwick broken hearted and in need of healing himself. And though he could not be at the sickbed of Fanny Harville, he could be by Louisa Musgrove’s. The quiet, nervous girl that Louisa emerges as is the patient that Benwick can nurse, and the bookish, intelligent and kind Captain is exactly the man to now capture her heart. The news of their engagement frees Wentworth of any obligation and propels him to Bath in search of Anne, her love and her hand. But in Bath he also finds a man the narrative had introduced ever so teasingly, by coincidence of course, at Lyme: Anne’s estranged cousin Mr Elliot.

To be continued.

Extra Long Weekly George

Emma, Lady Hamilton
c. 1765 - 1815

Study of Emma Hart as Circe
circa 1782-85
George Romney
Tate Gallery, London

One of the most scandalous relationships of Georgian England was the devoted alliance between Emma, Lady Hamilton and the hero of the nation, Horatio Nelson. Like any public and unconventional woman, an inordinate amount has been written about Lady Hamilton, much of it unflattering and most of it untrue. The daughter of a Blacksmith, Emma, born Amy Lyon in Cheshire circa 1761-5, at the age of sixteen or seventeen was a most ravishingly beautiful girl who had become the full time mistress of the Hon. Charles Greville in London after having been very lately abandoned pregnant by her former lover Sir Harry Fetherstonehaugh. Before her entry into the demi-monde Lyon worked as nursemaid in two or three private houses. Greville set her and her widowed mother up in their own home and Amy Lyon thereafter went by the more upwardly mobile name of Mrs Emma Hart. Her daughter Emma Carew was brought up by her grandmother in Wales.

During the five years she lived with Greville, Emma sat more than 100 times for the painter George Romney. Though a majority of these sittings were by Romney’s obsessive desire, many of them were commissioned by Greville and it was the cost of these portraits that helped contribute to the massive personal debts that forced Greville to give Emma up in 1786 in search of a wealthy bride. Greville sent her to Naples to be the guest of his uncle Sir William Hamilton, leading vulcanologist and British Envoy to Naples and a widower, with the expressed plan of following her shortly. In reality Greville intended to remain in England and marry an heiress, and that the fascinating, charismatic presence and angelic, Grecian beauty of Emma would prevent the already fond Sir William from remarrying elsewhere and thereby disinheriting him. After months of waiting faithfully for Greville, the reality of her situation dawned on her and Emma became instead Sir William’s mistress, whom she admired and grew to love, and as such she was educated and ‘finished’, the benefits of elocution, foreign language and singing lessons added to her natural graces, and in 1791 he married her, much to the chagrin no doubt of Charles Greville.

As Lady Hamilton Emma was literally the toast of Naples society. She was a favourite at the Neapolitan court of Kind Ferdinand IV and the close friend and confident of the Queen, Maria Carolina (sister of Marie Antoinette of France). In Naples she developed her Attitudes, a repetoire of tableaux vivant poses representing classical characters from Ancient Greek and
Roman history, that became famous and much admired in Europe by many, including writer Johann Wolfgang Goethe and composer Joseph Hadyn, other artists and academics and many of the members of parliament, of royal families and of aristocracies within Sir William’s vast and varied ambassadorial and scientific circles.

Illustration:
Emma Hamilton as the Goddess of Health (Vestina)
circa 1786-90
Robert Cosway
The National Maritime Museum London

Although Emma was very beautiful, it was the way she could embody a character as an ideal and her eye for the visually artistic, the skills of a good model and a muse, that made her prized by many painters as a subject, including Vigée le Brun, Marie Antoinette’s friend and principal portrait artist. The Neoclassicism of the Enlightenment and the European Republican admiration for Ancient Greece and Rome were the driving forces behind the radical change of dress in the Georgian period and the simple, classical, Grecian costumes of Lady Hamilton’s Attitudes were hugely influential on the Directoire and Empire styles of women’s dress in Europe and Britain. Lady Hamilton was certainly not clever, she could be very critical and she had a healthy appetite for admiration, and for wine but she was also good company, warm, loyal, an excellent wife to Sir William and a widely respected society hostess.

Emma first met Admiral Nelson briefly in August 1793 when his ship The Agamemnon docked in the Bay of Naples but it was not until he returned after five years of war in 1798 that their unique relationship was solidified. The bond between Sir William, Emma and Nelson was complicated and highly nuanced. A frail, injured and battle-weary Nelson was nursed back to health and joyfulness by an attentive Emma. First as his nursemaid, with the skills and patience she’d learned in her pre-courtesan career and then as his mistress, Emma nurtured and worshiped Nelson who was, at the same time, treated as a son and friend by Sir William. For the next 18 months, Nelson, who was childless but married to a wife in England, lived in a ménage-à-trois with the Hamiltons while his ships were moored in the bay of Naples.

In 1800 the Hamiltons and Nelson returned to England, where society was far less forgiving and where Nelson, his estranged wife and family were adored and Emma was despised and ridiculed in the press. Nelson did spend some time with Fanny, Lady Nelson at first but eventually gave her up entirely and, between naval engagements, he was most often a guest in Sir William’s house in London and openly continued his affair with Emma. The affair was an outrageous scandal, sympathy and solidarity for the abandoned and blameless Lady Nelson was intense and Emma, though the wife of the highly respected Neapolitan ambassador, was denied presentation at court and duly shunned by good society. But she was believed to have become a friend of the Prince Regent, naturally. In 1801 while in the late stages of pregnancy, she still went abroad in London, defying the accepted practice of gentlewomen to not socialize at large once they had began to show, and to remain confined entirely to their homes in late pregnancy. She was consequently lampooned in the press as hugely obese and, despite her education, charm and grace, as vulgar and irredeemably working class.

Their daughter Horatia was born in 1801. Sir William, quite elderly by this time, died in London in 1803 and Nelson purchased a house for Emma at Merton but he himself was assigned to the HMS Victory and would not return to England for two years. Their second child Emma was born not long after his departure and died early of chicken pox. Upon his return , he and Emma lived happily for a few short months as husband and wife at Merton before he was recalled to the war. Horatio Nelson was killed in action at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. In his will, Nelson entrusted Emma’s care to the nation, as his estate must fall to his brother, but this was ignored by George III and his government. With her working class roots, her questionable past and her penchant for self-display Emma Hamilton was an embarrassment. Struggling to keep up Merton as a monument to England’s beloved Nelson, she swiftly burned through all she had within three years and after borrowing money she couldn’t repay, she spent a year with Horatia in King’s Bench debtor’s prison, where the Prince Regent dined with her on occasion. She then left England permanently for France. Emma had always been a drinker and she died destitute of alcoholism ten years later in Calais in 1815. Emma Carew is believed to have died without issue, abroad or in Wales not long after her mother. Horatia Nelson was taken in by Nelson’s mother’s relations and later married the Reverend Phillip Ward at the age of 21. They were apparently very happy and had ten children together, eight of who survived to adulthood and whose descents still live in Norfolk.

I sometimes wonder if the very public and well publicized scandal of Emma and Nelson had an impact on the way Austen chose to portray the navy, sexual misconduct and sexual misconduct within in the navy in Mansfield Park.

Emma Hart, later Lady Hamilton in a White Turban
1791
George Romney
The Hunting Library, San Marino, California

Books on Tape Techie Time: iTunesU Podcasts

The Greatest Podcast of All Time.

iTunesU features a brand new selection of free podcasts created and published by universities for their students and the Lit2Go (love the name) cast created by the University of South Florida is phenomenal and includes, among many others, a fantastic reading of Sense and Sensibility in the Group 9 collection and Northanger Abbey in the Group 12 collection. I don’t know who the narrator is but his voice and his style of reading are excellent and it’s very refreshing to listen to an Austen novel read by a male narrator for a change, and who is much more talented at reading than some of the actors narrating purchasable titles.

Lit2Go is very exciting and features many classics, too many to mention here but a quick look reveals several Georgian and Austen related works, including:

The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole
The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Castles of Athlin and Dublayne by Ann Radcliffe
Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley

There are so many more and a quick special mention to the Brontë sisters, Sir Aurthur Conan Doyle, F.Scott Fitzgerald, Lewis Carroll and Virginia Woolf, as well as poetry and traditional readings and also another collection En Espaňol. Nice one, University of South Florida. If you do not have iTunes already, you may download it free of charge on the Apple website.

The Weekly George

Scientists: Joseph Priestley 1733 - 1804

Joseph Priestley
circa 1801
Rembrandt Peale
The Trout Gallery Dickinson College, PA

A native of West Yorkshire, Joseph Priestley was a natural philosopher, chemist, educator and Dissenting clergyman, and he is credited with the discovery of the existence of oxygen. A clergyman-chemist, Priestley called the gas he discovered, “dephlogisticated air.” It was French physicist Antoine Lavoisier, a great admirer of Priestley’s, who named it oxygen. Priestley, a close friend of Benjamin Franklin, experimented with electricity before turning his attention to chemistry in the early 1770s. His other discoveries include hydrochloric acid, nitrous oxide (laughing gas) and sulfur dioxide, and he invented soda water.

Priestley’s contributions to education were as important as those to science. He was the first British educator to insist on the value of modern history as a subject and that a thorough understanding of history was necessary not only to worldly success but also to spiritual growth. Priestley was innovative in the teaching and description of English grammar, particularly his efforts to disassociate it from Latin grammar, and the founder of the first liberal arts curriculum. He communicated with Thomas Jefferson regarding the proper organization of a university and when Jefferson founded the University of Virginia, it was Priestley’s curricular principles that dominated the school. No wonder it’s so awesome.

Priestley helped found the Unitarian church and was a supporter of the French Revolution, and due to his nonconformist views, in 1791 a mob destroyed his house and laboratory in Birmingham. This episode and subsequent troubles made him decide to emigrate to the United States, where he died in 1804 in Pennsylvania. His house on Priestley Avenue, Northumberland PA, with the first scientific laboratory in America, may still be visited