SOURCE: Doriani, Beth Maclay. “New England Calvinism and the Problem of the Poor in Rebecca Harding Davis's ‘Life in the Iron Mills.’” In Literary Calvinism and Nineteenth-Century American Women Authors, edited by Michael Schuldiner, pp. 179-224. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Doriani argues that Davis's story of the immigrant poor took its readers beyond the widespread opinion that the poor were responsible for their own poverty to what Davis considered a more Christian worldview.

In 1857, a group representing New England's cultural elite founded what would become the nation's most prestigious magazine of its day: the Atlantic Monthly. With a cast of editors, publishers, and contributors more interested in the propagation of ethical, aesthetic, and intellectual values than in showing Christian kindness to the poor, the Atlantic of the 1850s and 60s hardly seems the place for the publication, four years later, of the grimly...