Luddite Songs

songs of participants in the Luddite movement in Great Britain in the early 19th century; an integral part of the English poetry of the masses in the era of the industrial revolution.

Small numbers of the songs have been preserved (sometimes in fragments) in worker families of the northern counties of Great Britain and in the judicial accounts of those years. They were closely connected to the songs of the English workers’ unions of the 18th and early 19th centuries. Filled with the rage of the working people, the Luddite songs dealt with concrete facts of the history of the Luddite movement; later on, they were sung by the workers in the era of Chartism. The songs were echoed distinctively in the works of Byron, Shelley, and J. Montgomery.