Life in the Iron Mills

The 1861 novella Life in the Iron Mills was the first American story to depict realistically the factory mill worker. It's about a Welsh pig iron worker in Wheeling, West Virgina who has little chance of escaping the fate of the working class - a short, brutal life. By showing the factory workers with sympathy and respect, Rebecca Harding Davis set out to reform social problems and popular misconceptions. She counters the notion, common at the time (and not uncommon today) that poverty is a genetic or even a personal failing, rather than a social one. She was one of the first in a long line of American authors who used realism (Theodore Dreiser), naturalism (Frank Norris) and later modernism (John Steinbeck) to describe the plight of show more the working class for the purpose of informing the reading public, the bourgeois, about the problems of the proletariat; indeed by the 1930s there was a whole genre of literature that sometimes goes by the name "proletariat literature". This is where it began.

Read via LibriVox, narrated by Elizabeth Klett, whose Welsh accent during dialogue is remarkable. show less

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.

This edition has a version that has been "translated" into modern English, as well as the original in an appendix. It also has a scholarly essay.