As he admits himself, Kevin Binfield's book Writings of the Luddites is not a history book. Rather, it is an attempt to save the Luddites from the condescension of posterity by allowing them to speak for themselves. In this edited volume, Binfield has amassed a large variety of “Luddite” screeds produced between 1811 and 1817. They range from anonymous threatening letters to manifestoes of political purpose to letters of apology by condemned prisoners. Some were unearthed among the Home Office papers; others were found moldering in local record offices or private hands. As rescue missions go, Binfield's is successful, in that his Luddites no longer seem to be vandals or strictly to adhere to an antitechnology ideology.

Who were the Luddites? Binfield argues that Luddism was a diverse movement, encompassing Manchester cotton workers as well as Yorkshire croppers and Midlands silk stockingers. Machine breaking was nothing new, and as any reader of E. P. Thompson's work knows, the writing of anonymous letters was a venerable strategy, long predating Luddism. According to Binfield, what was new about the Luddites was not the way in which they took their “Enochs,” or sledgehammers, to the cropping frames but, rather, their inspired public relations tactics. They used the eponym “Ned Lud,” or “General Lud,” to stand for the whole mentality that generated their discontent.

In the Midlands, the framework knitters, organized into a corporate body by their 1663 Company Charter, turned to Luddism, Binfield asserts, as part of a two-pronged strategy to protect the mores of “the Trade.” On the one hand, the knitters engaged in legal writing, signing their real names to documents calling for public meetings with the main employers in their field. None of these documents mentions Luddism or Lud. Rather, in these well-spelled and well-reasoned letters, the silk-stocking knitters advanced a theory of competition that foreshadowed Friedrich Engels's in his 1844 Condition of the English Working Class. They called not for the destruction of knitting frames, but for an adjustment of wages, to reflect the coarser work that they had to do on finer-gauge frames. They also objected to the use of half-trained apprentices, who were knitting large pieces of cloth on frames intended for pantaloons and then cutting them and sewing them into shoddy stockings. In their appeal to justice and tradition through the community at large, these stockingers resembled the eighteenth-century poor who called for adjustments to the price of bread.

In the same section in which Binfield produces these eloquent models of constitutionalist calls for redress, he reprints popular songs and threatening letters, produced at the same time in the same region, that used the specter of “Ned Lud” and bloodshed. Sometimes these were intended to frighten employers into following the silk stockingers’ monetary demands; at other times, they seem directed at hunger and general distress: “Sir, We want som bal Cartrig and Sun Harms, You may expect us very soon” (152). Binfield is able to produce little evidence that the writers of the constitutionalist tracts and those of the ill-spelled and grammatically incorrect threatening letters were the same people. Both types of rhetoric occurred in response to the same distress, but are they both “Luddism?”

The picture is complicated further when Binfield moves his focus to Manchester and the surrounding cotton towns. Manchester cotton weavers sent petitions to local government figures, using a wide variety of strategies, including implied threats directed at third parties. Was this Luddism? There was little if any machine breaking, and few of the letters mentioned Lud or Luddism. Binfield attempts to finesse the picture for Manchester by noting that without a history of corporatism, the cotton weavers were much less united than the Nottingham stockingers. He argues that the few references to Lud that do exist from Manchester show that Lud's name was being used as a metonym, to try to bring men together and unite them, rather than an eponym for a flourishing mode of thought.

Only in Yorkshire is Luddism clearly drawn. There, the rhetoric of the Luddites was accompanied by specific actions that had been promised in the threatening letters. The wool cloth dressers, those wielders of the forty-pound shears who were able to make or ruin a piece of cloth with their skill, were emboldened by a history of successful protection of their trade. In their letters, which combined revolutionary rhetoric with sophisticated understandings of local politics, they blamed the magistracy as well as the wool manufacturers for reconfiguring political economy in ways that left the worker out. When the letters failed, they broke frames, fired mills, and killed employers.

Binfield has undoubtedly performed a wonderful public service to historians by editing this collection and thus making more working-class writing available. Each letter in this collection is lightly edited, with explanatory (although sometimes insufficient) notes, and preserves a good sense of the original spelling and punctuation. The letters from convicted Luddites in the condemned cells to their angry wives reveal much about gender dynamics as well as radical politics! Others show the Luddites to have had an ironic sensibility about the fact that their own burning and pillaging was illegal, but the British army's pillaging of Washington, DC, in the War of 1812 was sanctioned. But the question—“What is Luddism?’—is murkier now than it was before Binfield began his project.

As his introductory chapter—more annotated bibliography than historiographical essay—shows, Binfield never settles on a satisfactory definition of Luddism. Abstracting words from actions enables him to label as “Luddite” a variety of responses to industrial distress, including constitutionalist rhetoric, petitioning, and witty folk songs, some of which do not mention Lud or Luddism at all. In fact, many of these activities are continuous in the early nineteenth century (although Binfield arbitrarily ends his collection at 1817). Thus, to lump them all together and call them Luddite is to blur the very real difference between Luddites and Jacobins or, later, between Luddites and Chartists. The difference was the Luddites’ willingness to act in violent ways. The Luddite letters that mean one thing on the printed page, meant something entirely different to contemporaries by the light of a burning mill. Binfield's collection of Luddite words will be valuable source material, but the action of situating these words in context remains for historians to perform.