Life in the Iron Mills
3.5/5
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About this ebook
This shocking depiction of the lives of impoverished Welsh miners in the American North was one of the first novels to expose the brutal realities facing the nation’s poor. Rebecca Harding Davis casts an unflinching gaze into the lives of the destitute, drunk, and desperate in a work that was controversial for its honesty, but popular for its adept storytelling.
The story follows Hugh Wolfe, a proud and educated yet desperately poor laborer in an iron mill, and his cousin Deborah, who breaks the law for a chance at a better life for Hugh. If they keep the ill-gotten money, the pair could transcend their hardship, and Hugh could become the talented artist he was born to be; however, keeping the money would mean sacrificing the morals they’ve so stridently adhered to all their lives.
First published in 1861, Life in the Iron Mills became notorious for its merciless descriptions of underclass suffering. As relevant today as it was in the nineteenth century, this is a classic, hypnotic tragedy.
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Rebecca Harding Davis
Rebecca Harding Davis (1831–1910) was an American author and journalist widely recognized as a pioneer of American realism. She is best remembered for Life in the Iron Mills.
Read more from Rebecca Harding Davis
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Reviews for Life in the Iron Mills
26 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I had to read this for my American Literature class, and it's probably my favorite book I've ever been assigned. Powerful and poignant the entire way through. I loved everything from the heartbreaking story to the way Davis wrote. It's now one of my all-time favorite books.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5If anything, this story shows the tragic consequences of Marxist thinking, although that probably wasn't the author's intention!
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This short story/novella illustrates the poverty and desperation of iron mill workers in the first half of the 19th century. Its author, Rebecca Harding Davis, sets her story at about the time of her birth. However, she lived in Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia) during her formative years and was likely familiar enough with its iron mills to describe it accurately. Biblical allusions abound, and Davis seems to expect her readers to be familiar with scripture.The korl statue sculpted by Hugh Wolfe symbolizes the hunger of the poor iron workers for an escape from the hell-like conditions of an iron mill. (The description of the statue made me think of Donatello’s Mary Magdalene.) The name “Wolfe” also evokes the idea of hunger.I picked this up in order to learn more about the iron industry, since I recently discovered that a branch of my family owned a large iron mill from roughly the mid-18th to the mid-19th century. (My branch of this family were farmers.) I listened to a LibriVox recording, and while their volunteer readers are often amateurs, this one’s reader has many professional audiobook recordings to her credit.
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Life in the Iron Mills - Rebecca Harding Davis
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Life in the Iron Mills
Rebecca Harding Davis
"Is this the end?
O Life, as futile, then, as frail!
What hope of answer or redress?"
A cloudy day: do you know what that is in a town of iron-works? The sky sank down before dawn, muddy, flat, immovable. The air is thick, clammy with the breath of crowded human beings. It stifles me. I open the window, and, looking out, can scarcely see through the rain the grocer’s shop opposite, where a crowd of drunken Irishmen are puffing Lynchburg tobacco in their pipes. I can detect the scent through all the foul smells ranging loose in the air.
The idiosyncrasy of this town is smoke. It rolls sullenly in slow folds from the great chimneys of the iron-foundries, and settles down in black, slimy pools on the muddy streets. Smoke on the wharves, smoke on the dingy boats, on the yellow river,—clinging in a coating of greasy soot to the house-front, the two faded poplars, the faces of the passers-by. The long train of mules, dragging masses of pig-iron through the narrow street, have a foul vapor hanging to their reeking sides. Here, inside, is a little broken figure of an angel pointing upward from the mantel-shelf; but even its wings are covered with smoke, clotted and black. Smoke everywhere! A dirty canary chirps desolately in a cage beside me. Its dream of green fields and sunshine is a very old dream,—almost worn out, I think.
From the back-window I can see a narrow brick-yard sloping down to the river-side, strewed with rain-butts and tubs. The river, dull and tawny-colored, (la belle riviére!) drags itself sluggishly along, tired of the heavy weight of boats and coal-barges. What wonder? When I was a child, I used to fancy a look of weary, dumb appeal upon the face of the negro-like river slavishly bearing its burden day after day. Something of the same idle notion comes to me to-day, when from the street-window I look on the slow stream of human life creeping past, night and morning, to the great mills. Masses of men, with dull, besotted faces bent to the ground, sharpened here and there by pain or cunning; skin and muscle and flesh begrimed with smoke and ashes; stooping all night over boiling caldrons of metal, laired by day in dens of drunkenness and infamy; breathing from infancy to death an air saturated with fog and grease and soot, vileness for soul and body. What do you make of a case like that, amateur psychologist? You call it an altogether serious thing to be alive: to these men it is a drunken jest, a joke,—horrible to angels perhaps, to them commonplace enough. My fancy about the river was an idle one: it is no type of such a life. What if it be stagnant and slimy here? It knows that beyond there waits for it odorous sunlight, quaint old gardens, dusky with soft, green foliage of apple-trees, and flushing crimson with roses,—air, and fields, and mountains. The future of the Welsh puddler passing just now is not so pleasant. To be stowed away, after his grimy work is done, in a hole in the muddy graveyard, and after that, not air, nor green fields, nor curious roses.
Can you see how foggy the day is? As I stand here, idly tapping the windowpane, and looking out through the rain at the dirty back-yard and the coal boats below, fragments of an old story float up before me,—a story of this house into which I happened to come to-day. You may think it a tiresome story enough, as foggy as the day, sharpened by no sudden flashes of pain or pleasure.— I know: only the outline of a dull life, that long since, with thousands of dull lives like its own, was vainly lived and lost: thousands