This week on StoryWeb: Rebecca Harding Davis’s short story “Life in the Iron Mills.”

In honor of Labor Day, StoryWeb focuses this week on a groundbreaking piece of American fiction that brought to national attention the plight of industrial workers. Rebecca Harding Davis’s 1861 short story, “Life in the Iron Mills,” is one of the first pieces of literature written about what is now West Virginia. The story takes place near Wheeling, in the state’s northern panhandle, a region that actually has more in common with nearby Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, than with the coal mines of West Virginia.

Nevertheless, “Life in the Iron Mills” is a hard, gritty story of industrialization in what we might call the greater Appalachian region. The story brings to mind Thomas Hobbes’s observation that life is “nasty, brutish, and short” – as well as Charles Dickens’s 1854 novel of industrialization, Hard Times.

The story’s characters – Hugh Wolfe and his cousin, Deborah Wolfe, both of whom are Welsh immigrants – are not as vividly drawn as, say, Harriette Simpson Arnow’s heroine, Gertie Nevels, in The Dollmaker. Wolfe and Deborah are not characters we come to know deeply. But their situation is riveting and compelling. We feel – as Davis intended us to feel – outrage at the way the mill owners chew up and spit out their workers.

For my money, it is the story’s opening that stands out. The town is so gritty, so dingy, so smoky that even a caged canary is gray, rather than yellow. The unnamed narrator says as the story opens:

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.

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.

Davis’s story is one of the earliest examples of the “local color movement” in which writers from regions across the United States focused on the dialect, mannerisms, and customs of particular locales. Most of the local color writers – such as Sarah Orne Jewett and Kate Chopin – featured “slice-of-life” sketches. But Davis, importantly, uses what would become stock-in-trade local color techniques to expose the brutality of the mill system. For this reason, she is considered one of the early pioneers of social realist fiction and proletariat fiction.

Davis can also be linked to another American writer who exposed the dehumanizing effects of the industrial revolution. In his 1853 short story, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Herman Melville looks at the toll mind-numbing, soulless, bureaucratic work can have on the clerks, lawyers, and paper-pushers of Wall Street. At first glance, Bartleby, the scrivener (or human copy machine) and Huge Wolfe, the iron mill worker, may seem to have nothing in common. But read together, read against each other, read in tandem, it becomes clear that these two stories were written in nearly the same moment in time. Hugh Wolfe dies from the ravages of his life in the iron mills, and Bartleby dies as a nearly forgotten pawn in the legal machine that keeps the industrial system going.

Ready to read Davis’s story yourself? Read it in the archives of the Atlantic Monthly, where it was originally published to much acclaim. If you want to go further in your exploration of Davis’s work, be sure to check out A Rebecca Harding Davis Reader. You may also want to read Sharon M. Harris’s book, Rebecca Harding Davis and American Realism.

For links to all these resources, visit thestoryweb.com/davis. Listen now as I read the opening paragraphs from Rebecca Harding Davis’s story “Life in the Iron Mills.”

 

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 riviere!) 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 coalboats 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 of them, massed, vile, slimy lives, like those of the torpid lizards in yonder stagnant water-butt.—Lost? There is a curious point for you to settle, my friend, who study psychology in a lazy, dilettante way. Stop a moment. I am going to be honest. This is what I want you to do. I want you to hide your disgust, take no heed to your clean clothes, and come right down with me,—here, into the thickest of the fog and mud and foul effluvia. I want you to hear this story. There is a secret down here, in this nightmare fog, that has lain dumb for centuries: I want to make it a real thing to you. You, Egoist, or Pantheist, or Arminian, busy in making straight paths for your feet on the hills, do not see it clearly,—this terrible question which men here have gone mad and died trying to answer. I dare not put this secret into words. I told you it was dumb. These men, going by with drunken faces and brains full of unawakened power, do not ask it of Society or of God. Their lives ask it; their deaths ask it. There is no reply. I will tell you plainly that I have a great hope; and I bring it to you to be tested. It is this: that this terrible dumb question is its own reply; that it is not the sentence of death we think it, but, from the very extremity of its darkness, the most solemn prophecy which the world has known of the Hope to come. I dare make my meaning no clearer, but will only tell my story. It will, perhaps, seem to you as foul and dark as this thick vapor about us, and as pregnant with death; but if your eyes are free as mine are to look deeper, no perfume-tinted dawn will be so fair with promise of the day that shall surely come.