Life in the Iron-Mills, an introduction

It's time to read our next text for the Closely Reading book club!

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Welcome to a crash course on Working Class Literature

Over the next five weeks, we’ll read two texts by largely forgotten women authors who reside at the heart of academic and literary questions about a genre called “working class literature.” Though, as we’ll come to find out, this genre has long bedeviled scholars.

You see: the idea of literature written by, written for, and written about the working class provokes all kinds of gnarled questions.

• What is the “working class,” anyway?

• Where does art come from?

• Who makes art? Who makes literature? (What classes do they belong to?)

• Do certain classes of people have a right to certain kinds of art and aesthetics?

• Who produces working class literature? Who should be producing it? Who has time and money to invest in producing it?

• Who reads it? Why do they read it? How do they access it?

• What messages does working class literature convey? Does it have specific themes it takes up?

• How does literacy—especially among disenfranchised or (intentionally) uneducated populations—fit into a definition of readership within the working class?

• How do the histories of narratives by enslaved people, as well as songs and oral traditions shared by enslaved people, inspire or link up with other kinds of literature for working people?

• How has the idea of a “working class” evolved in certain societies over time? Do we still having working class literature today?

We’ll explore some of these questions, as well as the others you bring to the experience, as we read “Life in the Iron-Mills” by Rebecca Harding Davis this week — and as we continue to explore similar themes and ideas in Yonnondio by Tillie Olsen in the weeks to come.

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Life in the Iron-Mills by Rebecca Harding Davis

Among the more provocative questions posed to me during my PhD in English was this: is there really such thing as “working class literature”? If so: what is it? How is it different from other genres? What are its characteristics, tropes, and themes? If not: what makes such a literary distinction unnecessary?

“Shared communally as songs and hymns, working-class art sought to address class consciousness through living, shareable products in which artist and audience were one and the same.”
—Amanda Arnold (link below)

Life in the Iron-Mills by Rebecca Harding Davis takes up these questions with provocation in its first sentence:

“A cloudy day: Do you know what that is in a town of iron-works?”

From the original 1861 printing in The Atlantic Monthly

From the jump, this is not a story for someone who lives and works within a “town of iron-works,” precisely because the question must be asked. Rebecca Harding Davis uses her own position—as an upper class woman, without knowledge or experience in the waste-filled, polluted landscapes of the working class—to ask her audience of leisure readers if they’ve ever stopped to consider what life is like for the working class.

Notice the language of this opening paragraph. Closely read it!

There is sinking. There is mud. We are stuck in place; a stagnation haunts the air—which is “thick” and “clammy.”
It is crowded and stifling. The narrator can scarcely breathe or see across the way.

There are drunk men; there is the smoke of pollution—from the town as well as from tobacco pipes.

It stinks.

It is a deeply unpleasant setting.

This story pings on our senses; it stuns us and suffocates it.

The story takes us into the town of Wheeling to observe the relentless toils and labors of a man named Hugh, who works in a factory full of refuse and waste—and begins to form artworks from the waste matter of his labor. Eventually, he fashions a “crude figure,” from the korl, the name given to the particular kind of waste generated by his work in a coal factory. Hugh makes a small statue, in other words. A work of art the narrator calls a “korl woman.”

The Korl Woman — the original title of Davis’s story — then becomes an emblem of Hugh’s humanity, his aesthetic desires, and his dreams of elevating himself out of the drudgery of life in the Industrial Revolution to join higher ranks of society where wealth, health, and happiness are not a dream but a lived reality.

But my close reading friends: do no kid yourselves. There will be no happy ending, and Hugh’s dreams are not to be realized.

Davis’s short story will not let you rest in easy assumptions about the working class; nor will she let you off the hook as a reader with hopes for Hugh and the pulling up of his bootstraps. She will guide you—sometimes with shocking force—into imagining the realities of a life you may have very little familiarity with. And she does so with purpose.

What that purpose is, and why she takes the moral stance she does by the end of the story, will be up for us to discuss later this week—when you’ve had a chance to read the story in full.

So, now it’s time to read

Whether you’ve tracked down a hard-copy to read this week, or you want to read online, I hope this introduction has given you some food-for-thought to focus your experience.

You’re about to read a tragically forgotten piece of late-nineteenth century American literature. It may feel strange — notice when it does, and mark it down. Take vigorous notes. Try not to hold Davis to the standards of the writing we expect today; and give yourself grace if you run up against unfamiliar terms. Use a dictionary or Google to help you dig into definitions or phrases you don’t recognize.

Iron Mill in The Hague by Vincent van Gogh, 1882

This story changed everything for me

When I read this story during a graduate course on The Literature of the Labor Class in America, during my PhD at Purdue University, I was deeply moved by the narrative choices that Davis makes.

As a student who was highly interested in texts about the upper classes in the early twentieth century—like Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence—I found that reading Davis helped me broaden my understanding of thematic stakes, narrative positioning, and the schema of class structures within stories in brand new ways.

I still feel deep gratitude for having read this text when I did.

It made me a better reader of “class” as a theme in literature, in general. It helped me read Wharton in new ways. And it gave me a burst of needed energy to explore the archives of the late-nineteenth century more deeply—a gift that has never stopped giving.

I hope you’ll find things to love in it, as well.

If you were part of our Pride and Prejudice read-a-long, you’re in for a big treat here — keep your attention on our narrator and bring the same energy of trying to unravel her peculiar stance (and her relationship to the characters in the story) as you did with Austen’s curious narrator.

The Iron Foundry by Peder Severin Krøyer, 1885

Further readings

I recommend reading the story first; then diving into some of these additional resources to round-out your understanding. If you’re someone who loves a little bit of homework, or a bit of project to take to your local coffee shop, consider these essays an invitation to go deeper with Davis.

• Listen to an audio recording of the story via Libravox

• Life in the Iron-Mills by Rebecca Harding Davis | PDF of the original publication in The Atlantic Monthly | via The Atlantic (you must have a subscription to The Atlantic to access this PDF view)

• The Forgotten History of American Working-Class Literature by Amanda Arnold | via LitHub

• Life in the Iron Mills as Fiction of the “Close-Outsider Witness” by Lily Meyer | via JSTOR Daily

There’s more to come soon —

This weekend, I’ll be sharing a summary of the story, a few points of analysis, and a bit more historical context about the story. This will set us up to start Yonnondio and to understand how Tillie Olsen was inspired by Rebecca Harding Davis — and how “Life in the Iron-Mills” became a critical cultural touchstone for so many twentieth century writers.

‘Til then, happy reading!