Life in the Iron Mills. Rebecca Harding Davis
change had been planted but were yet to flower, and the Second Industrial Revolution was still around nine years away. Nine years was also the typical age for a child to be sent to work in the mills. In 1830s Wheeling, West Virginia, where Davis’s tale is set, it was common to see children walking by on their way to work in the mornings, their small faces smeared with dirt and drawn thin with malnutrition. Subjecting children to backbreaking labor meant that many died young, and the ones who did survive grew up weak, sickly, and hopeless. And the cycle continued, over and over, as generations of workers were born to suffer and left to die when they lost their usefulness to the factory overlords. As far as the bosses were concerned, labor was abundant and low value. So what if a few little girls lost their arms in the looms, or a couple of little boys were burned to a crisp in the iron works? Humanity was cheap.
In the story, our two main characters, Welsh immigrants Hugh and Deb, were born into a world lit only by fire, their only birthright the same desperate, grinding poverty that had sent their forebears coughing into an early grave. At nineteen, Hugh is already halfway to his own. Men of his time and his profession could only expect to live to thirty-seven if they were lucky, and Hugh was not born a lucky man. Instead, he labors, day after day, night after night, in the heat-blasted belly of the iron works, shoveling pig iron until he can barely lift his scrawny arms. His disabled cousin, Deb, pines after him, but knows he will never love her; she is not beautiful, or clever, or much of anything at all. Her time in the cotton mills has left her body frail and bowed, and any shred of identity that may have blossomed was instead whisked away long ago by the endlessly spinning spools of thread. As much as it hurts, dreaming of Hugh is her only escape from the painful drudgery of her life. But Hugh, a sensitive soul who is mocked by his fellow workers for his shred of education and perceived lack of manliness, is driven by something else—something deep and hungry that threatens to burst from his breast like a wild beast if he tries to ignore its pull. Hugh’s dream is to become someone, to leave the furnace behind. In lieu of giving away too many details, I will instead leave you with a question posed by a heartless rich man the reader meets later on in the story: “What are taste, reason, to creatures who must live such lives as that?”
What are they, indeed? What are roses to a worker whose only thought is bread? What are dreams to someone who barely has time to sleep? These questions and many others lurk at the heart of this iconic proletarian narrative, daring the reader to chew them over like the slabs of rancid salt pork that Deb wraps up for Hugh’s supper. In a time when automation and artificial intelligence have become flash points in the broader conversation around the future of work, it’s useful to go back and consider how long that perspective has been percolating in the minds (and theoretical checkbooks) of the corporate oligarchs and petty bourgeoisie, who would ultimately benefit from removing humanity from the entire equation. The pompous mill owner’s son, Kirby, says, “If I had the making of men, these men who do the lowest part of the world’s work should be machines—nothing more—hands.” Now swap in Kirby for a modern-day CEO, and the furnace-tenders for fast-food workers, retail workers, warehouse workers, or autoworkers—current professions that are under threat of being automated away by those who are motivated solely by profits, and see no value in the flesh and blood working the machinery. Everything old is new again, including the tension between the workers who make and the bosses who take. How many more Hughs are out there now, working dangerous, soul-sucking jobs instead of following their passions? How many more will have to suffer before this wretched capitalist system finally breaks down and sets us all free?
Despite its sociopolitical currents, feminist themes, and status as a muckraking classic, “Life in the Iron Mills” is no polemic. Instead, Davis gives her readers an unprecedented glimpse into the souls of working folks at a time when no one else with any platform cared enough to bother. She sifted through the ashes of capitalist carnage to illuminate these workers’ rich emotional lives, deep desires, and implacable survival instincts, their solidarity with fellow workers, and their burning hunger for something better. Thanks to her efforts, Hugh and Deb and the millions of real-life workers who lived and died in circumstances just like the ones she set to paper here will live on in proletarian memory as martyrs to the cause of working-class liberation, the unnamed victims of a cruel system that we owe it to them to dismantle.
As Tillie Olsen, who plucked the story out of obscurity in the 1970s and added a biographical sketch of Davis to later expanded versions (like the one you hold in your hands), reminds us, “This was written when almost everywhere the air was pure; and these lives, brought here for the first time into literature, unknown, invisible.”
Now, finally, as the world burns around us and the working class has risen up in unprecedented waves, they are invisible no more.
KIM KELLY
February 2020
LIFE IN THE IRON MILLS
OR THE KORL WOMAN
You are about to give the life of your reading to a forgotten American classic, Rebecca Harding’s Life in the Iron Mills, reprinted here after 124 years from the April 1861 Atlantic Monthly.
Without precedent or predecessor, it recorded what no one else recorded; alone in its epoch and for decades to come, saw the significance, the presage, in scorned or unseen native materials—and wrought them into art.
Written in secret and in isolation by a thirty-year-old unmarried woman who lived far from literary circles of any kind, it won instant fame—to sleep in ever deepening neglect to our time.
Remember, as you begin to read of the sullen, clinging industrial smoke, the air thick, clammy with the breath of crowded human beings: this was written when almost everywhere the air was pure; and these lives, brought here for the first time into literature, unknown, invisible.
TILLIE OLSEN
1985
“Is this the end?
O Life, as futile, then, as frail!
What hope of answer of 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 brickyard sloping down to the river-side, strewed with rainbutts and tubs. The river, dull and tawny-colored, (la belle rivière!) 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