I recently added this post, Unfair Competition. It is taken from The Life and Adventures of a Cat, published in 1760 by an anonymous author. Despite the title, this is not a children’s tale but a social satire on eighteenth-century England, in which the career of Tom is an excuse for the author to comment on events and figures of the day.
In this extract, Tom begins by discoursing on mousetraps, which he regards as a threat to his livelihood and an insult to his species. We hear then that he was so outraged by these infernal machines that he gathered sixty of his feline friends and took drastic action against one manufacturer of them.
Just seven years earlier, in 1753, weavers had trashed the Bury home of inventor John Kay, who had patented the flying shuttle some twenty years before. Like Tom, the hand-weavers feared for their livelihood, because Kay’s weaving machines were so productive that yarn was in short supply, and the price was going up. It was a problem that would not be resolved until James Hargreaves’s ‘spinning jenny’ mechanised the spinning of yarn in 1764. The merits of machines and their impact on workers and the economy would continue to be hotly debated for another century.