In the following essay, Fox illustrates how the Romantic poets protested against industrialization while sympathizing with Luddites and other workers displaced by emerging technology.
In the following excerpt, Thomis discusses the social and political context of the Luddite Rebellion and attempts to define exactly who the Luddites were and what they sought to achieve. He also examines inconsistencies in depictions of Luddism in writings from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In the following excerpt, Bailey describes the industrial unrest that took place in several regions in the early nineteenth century and examines the responses to the troubles by manufacturers, the government, newspapers, writers, and the workers themselves.
In the following excerpt, Vicinus explores the response of weavers to the mechanization of their trade as described in popular working-class broadside literature, which the critic says protested against the factory system and insisted on the rights and personal dignity of the individual.
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.
In the following excerpt, Darvall considers why so little attention was given to the Luddite Rebellion and other similar worker uprisings, noting that while those of the middle and lower classes sympathized with the rebels, few upper-class people—Lord Byron being a notable exception—criticized the government's response to the revolt.
In the following excerpt, Zlotnick examines how Charlotte Brontë's novel Shirley represents history, noting the author's ambivalent treatment of the Luddites. The critic asserts that the reaction to industrial capitalism by female writers was complex and very different from that of nineteenth-century male writers.
