ABSTRACT
Westwood is dark, inscrutable, and cruel. (Incredibly, he even enters the factory “sneeringly,” according to one stage direction.) After he installs new steam looms, the workers rebel, chanting, “Destruction to steam machinery!” and “Now, to the work — to the work! Break, crack, and split into ten thousand pieces these engines of your disgrace, your poverty, your ruin! Now!” Then they burn down the factory — a gloomy and sublime setting that recalls the castles in gothic plays and novels (and anticipates the setting of Ernst Toller’s 1923 play The Machine Wreckers). To audiences of 1832, Luddism itself was already seen as a melodrama or a romance, the Luddites of twenty years before as the characters in a popular novel or play. In the play, they are Robin Hoodlike Romantic desperados, worker-antiheroes. They face a difficult choice of morally ambiguous action in response to unbearable tyranny. In the end, their acting on their passions in response to tyranny brings about the violent climax.
