Throp-Sloth

[rosenlake at mac.com]

I wrote:
> Is there some dream of pre-industrial village life, like in the poems of
> John Clare, by which Our Hero judges his progress or lack of it? From
> his asylum despairing "Till the Light that hath brought the Towers low
> Find the last poor Pret'rite one . . ." ?

The Encyclopedia Brittanica sez "The industrial revolution has not had
exactly the same conseuences in all countries. ... Germany ... has still
a large peasant population. In England the old peasant type of life, in
which agriculture and village crafts were combined, has vanished ... ."

Also, "Before the textile industries passed into the factory, spinning
and weaving were done either in the workers' homes or in the house of a
small master. Spinning was woman's work and weaving man's work. In the
mill, spinning was mainly men's work and weaving women's work, but both
weavers and spinner depended on the help of children. The early mills
had difficulty in getting labour, for they were built on streams in
districts where there was little population. ... The use of steam-power
had made it possible to put up factories in or near towns ... ."

And, it is interesting to note, "This expansion of the industry
involved, of course, a great increase in the demand for raw cotton. ...
In 1793 Eli Whitney invented a saw-gin which enabled this cotton [short
stapled cotton that was difficult to separate from the seeds] to be
cleansed, and from that time the United States became the chief source
of supply. This invention led incidentally to a great extension of
slavery in the southern States ... ."

One might also add here that today nearly half of all pesticide and
herbicide chemicals used in the U.S.A. is for cotton growing. And that
hemp is a much more practical alternative but would also cut into the
petrochemical industry (as well as logging), so it is an illegal crop
here. (George Washington grew hemp; Pynchon has him smoking it, too, in
Mason & Dixon.)

The Luddites of 1812 were fighting what took us to the world described
in Gravity's Rainbow. Did Slothrop escape that world to some dream of a
German peasant village that he had read about in some Encyclopedia . . .
or saw in some Nazi propaganda film?

Yours,
Eric R