The Conversation Canada
📰 The Conversation (academic)
Aug 5, 2026
· 7 min read
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Who were the Luddites? Their legacy ripples through politics, cultural commentary and literature
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MCGILL UNIVERSITY●
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Key figures
When the English cartoonist Charles Williams depicted a veterinarian and a blacksmith violently attacking dandies on bicycles for undermining traditional horse-drawn transportation in 1819, the blacksmith’s smashing with a mallet was a clear reference to the spasm of machine-wrecking earlier in the decade.
It sent in 12,000 troops to quell the riots, and members of Parliament voted overwhelmingly to make frame-breaking a hanging offence.
The ruling classes managed to restore order, despite sporadic outbreaks until 1816, punctuating their clampdown with exemplary hangings and sentences of transportation to Australia.
His 1813 poem Queen Mab, a paean to a utopian future, combined an attack on the state, organized religion and the soul-destroying capitalism of the new machine age.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, wife of Percy and daughter of feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, was also inspired by Luddism in her writing of the 1818 novel Frankenstein.
Quoted verbatim from the article — not summarised.
B.I.A.S. ANALYSIS
CENTER
Signal breakdown
Heuristic (v1/v3)
-0.20 · CENTER-LEFT
ML v2 (DistilBERT)
0.331 · RIGHT
Ensemble
0.166 · CENTER
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· The Conversation (academic)
Rolling outlet bias
CENTER LEFT
avg -0.286
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Excerpt from The Conversation Canada
Image from ‘Through the Fray: a tale of the Luddite Riots, etc.,’ by George Alfred Henty, published in 1897. (British Library/Flickr)
Who were the Luddites? Their legacy ripples through politics, cultural commentary and literature
Published: August 5, 2026 9.52am EDT
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