Household words, No. 26, September 21, 1850

The Steam Plough

When the first experiments were being made with the Hay-making Machine, now commonly used in some parts of the country, it happened that Shelley, Mrs. Shelley, and Peacock, the author of “Crotchet Castle,” “Headlong Hall,” and other works of pungent erudition, were walking through a field where this strange-looking machine was in operation. Instead of the pleasant sight of the rustic men and women with their forks and rakes—a scene so full of indelible associations, from childhood upwards—they saw this quaint monster rolling round the field over the long swathes of hay, its rotatory forks, or rather fingers on wheels, flinging up the hay on all sides as it went spinning onwards. Meditating on the effect, if successful, this would, some day, have on the vast numbers of poor people in England, to say nothing of the summer invasions of Irish—whose sole dependence for the year is the money they make in the English hay-season—Shelley and the others walked onwards, and left the field. Presently they met a clownish fellow, who was looking intently at the whirling and whisking performance of the round-about machine in the hay-field. Shelley, having no objection to find, in the then adjusted state of society with regard to the labouring classes, that this machine was a failure, said to the clown, in a sort of half contemptuous tone—“Now, tell me,—does that thing answer at all?” The fellow looked Shelley full in the face—“It answers a deuced deal too well,” said he; “I wish it was working in the inside of him that made it!”