ABSTRACT
It all sounds a little too familiar. As the collection of quotations above demonstrates,1 the association of the Luddites with the Romantic poets has become a cliché. It’s common now to compare the weavers and croppers with authors such as William Blake, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and Mary Shelley — all of whom were writing their best-known literary works at around the same time the Luddites were writing threatening letters and breaking machinery. It comes as no surprise that laborers and poets of the same country in the same era should have certain things in common. These shared historical contexts are important and continue to be worth exploring, and there is no hard dividing line between hammer and poem when it comes to making (and studying) culture. The whole point of the previous chapter was to show that the Luddites acted symbolically and culturally (as well as materially and politically) when they invented Ned Ludd, wrote letters, composed ballads, and swung Great Enoch sledgehammers. But looking at shared historical contexts for different kinds of cultural representations is not the same as simply equating one with the other, Luddites and Romantics, as do many citations of Luddism. Where does this equation come from? Is there anything truly Romantic (in the poetic sense) about the Luddites?
