"The Hell that Bigots Frame"Queen Mab, Luddism, and the Rhetoric of Working-Class Revolution

An unusual proclamation passed by the English Parliament on 20 March 1812 produced a few meaningful addenda to the 1788 statute protecting stocking frames, machines, and engines in the knitting houses from acts of sabotage. The supplementary language now considered such crimes worthy of capital punishment and further compelled witnesses (by threat of criminal misdemeanor) to inform and testify against saboteurs.¹ The government enacted, by threat of death, a statute protecting machines from human beings. This law directs readers of the movement to focus on some core relationships within the conflict, all of which depend entirely on that central aesthetic symbol, the stocking frame—a metonymic industrial machine associated with such incursive capitalist praxes as gouging wages and substituting skilled labor for unskilled. Conversely, the Luddites rejected these machines as complicit in their desperate poverty. This sentiment resonates in the introductory poem (known by its first line, "And did those feet in ancient time") to William Blake's Milton, in which he asks, "And was Jerusalem builded here, / Among these dark Satanic Mills."²

Dogmatic rhetoric pervades both the statute and Blake's poetry, widening the divergent sociocultural boundary of the Luddite uprisings. On the one hand, as Kirkpatrick Sale argues, the revolutionaries signified to authorities "not merely a threat to order . . . but, in some way . . . to industrial progress itself."³ On the other, Luddite sympathizers, such as Lord Byron, gave parliamentary speeches in "very violent sentences with a sort of modest impudence . . . loud and fluent enough, perhaps a little theatrical."⁴ Written a few days before the so-called Frame-Breaking Act of 1812, Byron's self-reflexive narrative underscores the vitriol these disturbances engendered in his rapidly industrializing England, although the dominant opinion in Parliament necessarily reproved the Luddites. Caught philosophically in the middle of this conflict, Percy Shelley witnessed a growing and innovative working-class revolution, the potential danger of which England had never experienced. During this period, he also attempted to revive his spirits by moving back to the more idyllic conditions in Keswick.

Shelley certainly was no Luddite, but Richard Holmes writes, "In the December of 1811, a steady politicizing of Shelley's views was going on at Keswick"—geographically distant from the Midland uprisings, mind—"reflecting the developments in the nation at large." Holmes describes the transformative nature of this stint of Shelley's at Keswick:

Yet even in this pastoral Rousseauesque dream, the note of political discontent crept in. Shelley was planning a poem [which would become Queen Mab], a long one, which would be "by anticipation a picture of the manners simplicity and delights of a perfect state of society." . . . Coming from Shelley, at this early stage, it inevitably lacked any definitive objectives in reform terms; yet the depth, the fury and the social disillusionment of the criticism is unmistakably cast in the language of the Luddite period.

Shelley's initial reaction to global and local revolutions coincided with his move to Dublin with his first wife, Harriet Westbrook. Considering his utopian idealism, Shelley's primary responses to the Mexican War of Independence (beginning 1810) mirrored Byron's parliamentary speeches. Animated by these uprisings and those in England, he wrote "To the Republicans of North America," in which he, for the first time, "used one of his favourite images, the erupting volcano."⁵ He includes in his lyrics at this time a violent aesthetic tendency:

Blood may fertilize the treeOf new bursting Liberty Let the guiltiness then beOn the slaves that ruin wreakOn the unnatural tyrant-bloodSlow to peace and swift to blood.⁶

The aesthetics of blood and explosions saturate a developing anticipation of local revolution. As the greater universal ideas of rebellion and insurgency move closer to home, Shelley incorporates a more thoughtful, even conciliatory rhetoric. Peter Linebaugh traces the lineage of industrialism's harshest critics in England:

from Blake's satanic mills to the Luddite's damnation of the prime minister and home secretary, from Shakespeare's porter to Milton's demons, from Shelley's hell of war to De...