The life of the Lowell factory-girls has full record in the little magazine called the “Lowell Offering,” published by them for many years.  Lucy Larcom has also lately given her “Recollections,” one of the most valuable and characteristic pictures of the life from year to year, and it tallies with the summary made by Dickens in his “American Notes.”  Beginning as a child of eleven, whose business was simply to change bobbins, she received a wage of one dollar a week, with one dollar and a quarter for board, the allowance made by most of the corporations while the system of boarding-houses in connection with the factories lasted.  The oldest corporation, known as the Merrimack, introduced this system, and for many years retained oversight of all in its employ.  With increasing competition and the increase of the foreign element, alteration of methods began, and Lowell lost its characteristic features.

In the beginning the conditions of factory labor for New England at the point where work was initiated, were, as compared with those of England, almost idyllic.  The Lowell workers came from New England farms, many of them for the sake of being near libraries and schools, and thus securing larger opportunities for self-culture.

The agricultural class then outranked merchants and mechanics.  There were no class distinctions, and the workers shared in the best social life of Lowell.  The factory was an episode rather than a career; and the buildings themselves were kept as clean as the nature of the work admitted, growing plants filling the windows; and the swift-flowing Merrimac turning the wheels.

In 1841 the girls had to their credit in the savings-banks established by the corporations over one hundred thousand dollars; and many of them shared their earnings with brothers who sought a college education, or lifted the mortgages on the home farms.  At the International Council of Women, held in Washington in 1888, Mrs. H.H.  Robinson, after telling how she entered the Lowell Mills as a “doffer,” when a child, gave a brilliant description of the intellectual life and interests of the workers.  She remained in the mill till married, and said:  “I consider the Lowell Mills as my alma mater, and am as proud of them as most girls of the colleges in which they have been educated.”

With the growth of the factory system under very different conditions from that of Lowell, there were as different results.  Factories had risen, at every available point in New England, all of them thronged by women and girls.  But great cities were still unknown; and the first census, that for 1790, showed that hardly four per cent of the people were in them.  The tide set toward the factory towns as strongly as it now does toward the cities, though factory labor for the most part was of almost incredible severity.  The length of a day’s labor varied from twelve to fifteen hours, the mills of New England running generally thirteen hours a day the year round.