M&D - Chapter 21 - The Golden Valley and Mills

[Jerome Park]

This is a flashback / imagined dialogue between Mason and Mason the Elder.
  In the prior chapter (the narrative present) Mason tells us that he is
34, and we know he was born in 1728, so the present is around 1762 and the
imagined dialogue set earlier, before Mason takes the position at
Greenwich. In 1756, Bradley, offered Mason the position of assistant (or
"labourer") at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, with a salary of £26.

Pynchon is up to his hip boots in the confluence and bifurcation of
religious/political/economic-labor tributaries flowing though the watershed
here, in the Golden Valley,  circa 1750.

I'm not reading this passage as a commentary on exploited workers. The idea
is not there then and the emphasis is on the incredible growth of industry
and the wealth it produces at the expense of Nature and at the cost to Our
Redemption.  So I'm agreeing with Mark here, and want to add that the
passage is an allusion to William Pynchon's book of 1650. The one hundred
years between, the publication in London, of WP's book,  and the context,
 here, the Golden Valley circa 1750, is what Pynchon has packed int this
passage. The English working class is not yet made (E.P. Thompson), but
Dissent, a misleading term, is flowing in the Valley.

On Sun, Apr 12, 2015 at 7:43 AM, Elisabeth Romberg <eromberg at mac.com> wrote:

> p. 207
> «…that the Flow of Water through Nature (…) might be re-shap’d to drive a
> Row of Looms, each working thousands of Yarns in strictest
> right-angularity, (…) nor that every stage of the ‘Morphosis, would have
> it’s equivalent in Pounds, Shillings and Pence."
>
>
> Stroud is the capital of the south western Cotswolds and located at the
> divergence of the five Golden Valleys (Chalford, Painswick, Nailsworth,
> Slad and Cam), so named after the monetary wealth created in the processing
> of wool from the plentiful supply of power from the River Frome. During the
> heyday of the wool trade the river powered 150 mills, turning Stroud into
> the centre of the local cloth industry.
>
>
> Is this first paragraph about the inhumanity of the working conditions at
> the mills?
> To the benefit of the few?
>
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