All relevant to today: there was a major cost of living crisis in the years leading up to Luddism, wages simply didn’t keep up. The Napoleanic War had seriously disrupted exports to Europe. There was a speculative bubble of people with means buying and renting out frames.
@Janetgunter oh I'd love to find out more about this? Im somewhat familiar with the luddites and why they broke the frames but I wasn't aware that they were modifying them and also wasn't aware of the wage stagnation.
@michaelcoyote The pamphlet is available here https://ndlhs.wordpress.com, sadly no e-version. Source on modding, Stanley D Chapman’s introduction to “History of the Framework Knitters” republished in 1970. Also frustrating I couldn’t find an e-version.
@michaelcoyote Dear Google comes to the “rescue” - this is the original text from the British Library without Chapman’s analysis https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Civil_Political_and_Mechanical_Histo.html?id=tJ991VMez9cC&redir_esc=y
@michaelcoyote No problem. Henson is a really interesting figure himself, discussed at length in the pamphlet
@Janetgunter Thank you!