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Rebecca Harding Davis (1831–1910)

Author of Life in the Iron Mills and Other Stories

24+ Works 546 Members 9 Reviews

About the Author

Rebecca Harding Davis shocked readers with the grim realism of her stories, which appeared during a time when sentimental romances were popular. Her first published story, "Life in the Iron Mills," appeared anonymously in the Atlantic Monthly in 1861. The daughter of a prosperous businessman, show more Rebecca Harding grew up in Wheeling (then in Virginia) on the Ohio River. There she observed the industrial ironworkers' misery and struggle for existence and witnessed the harsh treatment of slaves, which she described in her first novel, Margaret Howth: A Story of Today (1862). She warned her son, writer and journalist Richard Harding Davis, against doing "hack work for money." (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Works by Rebecca Harding Davis

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Birthdate
1831-06-24
Date of death
1910-09-29
Gender
female
Nationality
USA
Country (for map)
USA
Birthplace
Washington, Pennsylvania, USA
Place of death
Mt. Kisco, New York, USA
Places of residence
Wheeling, West Virginia, USA
Education
Washington Female Seminary
Occupations
Author
Journalist
essayist
social reformer
novelist
autobiographer
Relationships
Harding Davis, Richard (son)
Short biography
Rebecca Blaine Harding observed many of the subjects and themes of her writings during her upbringing in Wheeling, West Virginia as it changed into a factory town. She worked for a while as a reporter for the Wheeling Intelligencer and married lawyer and journalist Lemuel Clark Davis in 1863. The couple had three children. In her work as a journalist and author, Rebecca Harding Davis broke new literary ground as an American Realist. She hoped to improve the everyday lives and working conditions of industrial workers, women, African-Americans, Native Americans, and immigrants. She moved in prominent American literary circles that included Nathaniel Hawthorne. She published more than 500 works in her lifetime, including her autobiography "Bits of Gossip" (1904). Rebecca Harding Davis's anonymously published novella "Life in the Iron Mills," which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1861, became the first work published by The Feminist Press in 1972 as part of its series of rediscovered feminist literary classics.

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A novella, even a short story, but in its way a complete description of the life of two people trying to live lives in a time and place that does not care for them.
 
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mykl-s | 2 other reviews | Jun 30, 2023 |
This 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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cbl_tn | 1 other review | May 15, 2022 |
I RECEIVED MY DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

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.

Choosing to bring her story to us via a first-person introductory passage was a stroke of genius by Author Harding Davis. At first, I felt very nervous because the idea of first-person present-tense narration for a whole novella's length isn't, um, too terribly appealing to me; but we get into the action when she has the narrator say that the people he's going to talk about lived there thirty years ago and....

Well! All is on track, then! Stand down, adrenal gland.

But mere lines later, my mind hit another conceptual pothole:
She did not drink, this woman,—her face told that, too,—nothing stronger than ale. Perhaps the weak, flaccid wretch had some stimulant in her pale life to keep her up,—some love or hope, it might be, or urgent need. When that stimulant was gone, she would take to whiskey. Man cannot live by work alone.

Wow! That's not even a little bit judgey, is it. (And "nothing stronger than ale" must resound oddly in the modern Puritanical no-booze no-sex no-fun ear! The paeans to the clean air and the purity of this bygone world make me itch. The entire world drank some sort of beer or wine because drinking water could kill you via cholera and/or diphtheria and/or typhoid fever.) Kim Kelly (author of [Top Ten Words Women Hate] which is short and to the point besides having a great title), in her Foreword to this second Feminist Press edition, says of the author:
Rebecca Harding Davis was born into a life of relative ease and had next to nothing in common with the workers in her story, and yet she writes about them and the proletarian struggle with such compassion and depth of insight that it's hard to believe she was merely watching from the window.

I must decline to co-sign, Kim Kelly. To my elderly man-ears, this story sounds like the Abolition era's standard christian social-reform literature à la [Uncle Tom's Cabin]. Built into its very real sympathy is the distancing judgmental mind-set inescapable by a woman of Author Harding Davis's background. She isn't all about the judgments, it is true, because her point is to bring into sharp relief the inequitable, really iniquitous, world that has done this to Deb, the character described here. But baked into the clay is that vocabulary of blame and othering inescapable in 1861's world-view.

The capitalist mouthpiece character is a piece of work. He's called Kirby, but really could've been called Carnegie or Rockefeller. His anthem:
"I do not think. I wash my hands of all social problems,—slavery, caste, white or black. My duty to my operatives has a narrow limit,—the pay-hour on Saturday night. Outside of that, if they cut korl, or cut each other's throats, (the more popular amusement of the two,) I am not responsible."

In that unlovely speech, addressed to one Mitchell, the dilettante character of no special moral fiber but a deep and abiding aesthetic sensibility, one hears echoes of "I don't see race" and its ilk, doesn't one. Mitchell is moved to say in riposte, "Money has spoken!"

Kirby and Mitchell are discussing the existence of one of the mill-hands, Hugh Wolfe. He is a true Other, a man out of place in his place of residence. He has had a modicum of schooling; he is aesthetically aware of the world around him; therefore he is the subject of the other mill-hands' bullying. He has created a statue of great aesthetic interest to Mitchell, a carved woman whose anatomy Mitchell criticizes for being not starved-looking when Hugh tells him the korl sculpture is meant to be hungry. In a passage that felt to me more than a little codedly homoerotic, Wolfe, Kirby, and Mitchell pass around the idea of bodies on display (half-naked men abounding in the smelting-furnace heat, summer or winter) being essentially lower-class unless they are Art.

Mitchell ends his part of the conversation with a "cool, musical laugh." ::eyebrow:: Then Author Harding Davis delivers this about him:
Bright and deep and cold as Arctic air, the soul of the man lay tranquil beneath. He looked at the furnace-tender as he had looked at a rare mosaic in the morning; only the man was the more amusing study of the two.

The hairpins are dropping...nay, flying! And then she has him speak Scripture, "De profundis clamavi" no less!, at which juncture he is compared to the Devil. Now I do not know Author Harding Davis's other works, but these are Uranian markers in nineteenth-century gay parlance. Mitchell, and to a lesser degree Kirby, are assessing Hugh Wolfe as a sex object. And he's right there with 'em.

Think not? Thus Hugh of Mitchell, so recently departed and he fears and expects not to return:
Then flashed before his vivid poetic sense the man who had left him,—the pure face, the delicate, sinewy limbs, in harmony with all he knew of beauty or truth. In his cloudy fancy he had pictured a Something like this. He had found it in this Mitchell, even when he idly scoffed at {Hugh's} pain: a Man all-knowing, all-seeing, crowned by Nature, reigning,—the keen glance of his eye falling like a sceptre on other men.

And the rest of the story might as well have been A Tragic Gay Romance. I'm fine with that, and don't feel the need to chisel away my impression of what Author Harding Davis did because it might not be what she intended (note use of conditional).

If you've paid me the slightest attention at all, you'll know that the anti-capitalist message of the story is so in tune with my own thoughts about a properly run world that this really needs no belaboring. I was absolutely sure I'd enjoy this story when I read this:
Everything old is new again, including the tension between the workers who make and the bosses who take. How many more Hughs are there 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?

I don't know, Kim Kelly. But the short answer is "not soon enough."
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richardderus | 2 other reviews | Mar 28, 2021 |
Life in the Iron Mills is considered to be the first American realist fiction, depicting iron workers' lives, presumably near Wheeling, VA/WV, where Davis lived until her marriage. Published in 1861, it looks at an uneducated Welsh immigrant, Wolfe, desperately poor, who spends his limited free time between shifts sculpting out of mill by-products. Though his potential is recognized by a potential investor, nothing will happen with his talent. His potential is wasted because of his inability to get schooling, a mentor, or any kind of job that will permit him more time and materials. This was Davis' first published work, in The Atlantic.

This is a theme in Davis' 3 stories: the other two both feature women who, because of marriage and family, are unable to realize their potential and dreams in the artistic world. She may well have felt this way about her own life. Single and an established writer when she did marry in her early 30s, she then spent years cranking out stories to help support her family. She was unable to take the time to write the serious novel she had planned. These three stories all felt quite choppy to me, and the endings unsatisfying--but the endings I would like would probably not have been publishable at the time she was writing.

In addition to writing the first realist American fiction, Davis also wrote the first story about special interests controlling government; and another about a family who commits a sane relative into an asylum. She was very well known during her time writing, appearing in Atlantic, Peterson's, and many other publications. After her death in 1910 she dropped off the map, and has been rediscovered in the last few decades. This volume is from Feminist Press.
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Dreesie | 2 other reviews | Nov 5, 2019 |

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