between 1811 and 1814, the actual Luddites rebelled against the wealthy industrialists and their powerful political friends who, at the time of the land enclosures, were obliterating the cottage economies which afforded the common people a familial, purposeful and pleasant life. By then the steam engine – what Carlyle called ‘Stygian forges with their fire-throats and never-resting sledge-hammers’ – was enabling one man to do the work it would have taken two or three hundred men to do only a decade earlier. This effectively reduced a once proud and independent class of skilled craftspeople who
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