Is it OK to be anachronistic?

[Eric Rosenbloom]

Jeremy Osner wrote:
> 
> Michael Baum wrote:
> > Well, yes, and no. It seems to me that it depends on how you parse Mr.
> > Pynchon's original sentence. Specifically, the referent of "this". I
> > originally read it to mean that the willful destruction of stocking
> > frames had been going on since 1710, not the popular references to Ned
> > Lud. The most immediate antecedent to the "this had been going on"
> > phrase is the "whenever a stocking-frame was sabotaged" phrase, which
> > lends support to that reading.
> 
> This reading seems most natural to me as well.

Can anyone find another source for the 1710 date? I can't. It's not even
in the Encyclopedia Britannica that Pynchon cites.

Yours,
Eric R

P.S. A nice quote: "all Machinery hurtful to Commonality" -- That's what
the Luddites opposed, according to a March 1812 letter to a
manufacturer. The industrialization of a "cottage" industry had
destroyed their communities. As the demand for stockings changed with
the fashions, their communal lives were replaced by a factory system
that traded in desperate workers.



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