SOURCE: “Literary Contexts of ‘Life in the Iron Mills’,” in American Literature, Vol. XLIX, No. 1, March, 1977, pp. 70-85.

In the following essay, Hesford examines “Life in the Iron Mills” in the literary contexts of the achievement of Hawthorne, the tradition of the social novel, and the religious bias of mid-nineteenth-century American literature.

Rebecca Harding Davis's “Life in the Iron Mills,” published in the April, 1861 Atlantic Monthly, is the first notable work of fiction to concern itself with the life of the factory worker in an industrial American town.¹ In literary histories, the story is usually treated, if treated at all, as a forerunner or early example of American literary realism.² That it should receive such treatment is natural. Davis takes pains to initiate us into the knowledge of hitherto little acknowledged social realities; she seems a pioneer exploring a territory which, by the end of the nineteenth century...