Product Description

You must read this book and let your heart be broken-New York Times Book Review

"One of the earliest recognitions in American literature of the existence of the very poor."-Michele Murray, National Observer

Suggested for course use in:
19th-century U.S. literature
Working-class studies

Rebecca Harding Davis (1831-1910) published 12 books and many serialized novels, stories, and essays.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #281344 in Books
• Published on: 1993-01-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 248 pages

Review
"Stop a moment. I am going to be honest. This is what I want you to do. I want you to hide your disgust, take no heed to your clean clothes, and come right down with me - here, into the thickest of the fog and mud and foul effluvia. I want you to hear a story." Life in the Iron Mills shocked the Atlantic Monthly readership when it was published in 1861. It tells the story of Hugh Wolfe, a desperately poor worker in the iron mills, and his cousin Deb, who steals money so that Hugh might have a chance to become an artist. The anonymous narrator of the story is merciless, intent upon showing her readers life at the bottom, complete with drunkenness, rotten food, and slimy hovels. Hugh Wolfe's life is a daily as well as archetypal tragedy, grabbing at the hearts and stomachs of its readers, and Rebecca Harding Davis captures his life in prose that combines outrage, spirituality, and nightmare. Again and again, she demands compassion and action; the solution she sees lies not only in working-class leadership but in businessmen coming to see their workers as human beings with hearts and souls. It is a courageous, hypnotic story; appropriately enough, its republication in 1972, the first of the Feminist Press rediscovered classics series, helped mobilize a movement toward the reprinting of neglected works by American women. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. -- From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Erica Bauermeister

About the Author
REBECCA HARDING DAVIS (1831 - 1910) published 12 books and many serialized novels, stories, and essays. TILLIE OLSEN is the award-winning author of Tell Me a Riddle and Silences.

Customer Reviews

vivid tale of 1860's Welsh ironworkers in WVA mills
I read Life in the Iron Mills for a graduate English course on social-class-imagery in 18th & 19th cen Transatlantic (British and American) literature with Elisabeth Ceppi at Portland State. Ceppi asked us to read closely for the rhetoric of class attributes. There was much class-identifying-imagery to observe in Harding-Davis' 1860's rendering of the lives of impoverished Welsh miners transported into late-slave-era iron foundries of the American North. Mid-19th-cen feminist literature of this social-reform type is deeply informed by Protestant missionary enthusiasm to transform everyone into clean-living bourgeois church-goers. Thus Harding-Davis uses powerful polarities of dirt for workers, clean for bouregoisie, etc. It's so blunt and obvious that she could be accused of writing soap-opera ... as many of her mid-1800's female-writer colleagues were accused, sometimes justly. However her scenes of poverty, disease, and death in the mills are so heart-wrenching that her motives are clearly pure. Now that Tillie Olsen has rescued Harding-Davis' wonderful writing from obscurity, she is good to read for knowledge of American feminist writing history, for understanding of American class polarities in the ante-bellum era, and also for a true, scary story of life with the great unwashed.

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