Life in the Iron Mills

Life in the Iron Mills is a short story by Rebecca Harding Davis set in the factory world of nineteenth century Wheeling, Virginia, now Wheeling, West Virginia. It was her first published work, and it appeared anonymously in April 1861 in the Atlantic Monthly where it caused a literary sensation with its powerful naturalism that anticipated the work of Theodore Dreiser and Emile Zola. The story is emphatically on the side of the exploited industrial workers, who are presented as physically stunted and mentally dulled but fully human and capable of tragedy. The story’s protagonist stirs molten metal in a vast foundry beside the Ohio River. On his breaks he makes statues from a waste product of iron smelting. One of his pieces, a statue of a woman, is noticed by some bourgeois visitors who discuss the work condescendingly and awaken Hugh’s sense of natural rights. They raise his hopes but offer no concrete help, and Hugh makes a series of bad decisions that lead to tragedy. Meanwhile, the statue is kept by the narrator as a reminder of Hugh, his aspirations, and his achievements. Life in the Iron Mills was reprinted in the early 1970's with a famous introduction by Tillie Olsen and has continued to be an important text for those who study labor and women’s issues.

Sources

Olsen, Tillie [1] “A Biographical Interpretation.” In Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills. New York: The Feminist Press, 1972.

The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present, Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements, Isobel Grundy, editors. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990.