Haley Larsen, in another read-along, is encouraging us to get to grips with US working-class literature (and to tussle with the issue of what this actually is).

Together, we read Life in the Iron-Mills (1861), by Rebecca Harding Davis (1831-1910), as a preliminary to the 1974 example we're tackling next (Yonnondio by Tillie Olsen, 1912-2007).

By her initial description, Davis makes it clear that she's writing from a position outside not inside the class she is describing, and her story is aimed at others similarly situated. She describes a hellish kind of environment (muddy, slimy, reeking, smoke-filled...) and its doomed denizens (dull, weary, dumb, besotted), and shows us very clearly how a worker toiling in the hell-hole of the iron-works will not be able to break out of his surroundings even if he possesses some kind of artistic talent that would stand him in good stead in other circumstances.


Dramas like these might have played out anywhere in the rapidly industrializing world of the 1800s. This is Belper, Derbyshire, 2020

The particular talented man we're focusing on is Hugh Wolfe. He makes beautiful figures out of korl (this, we're told, is "the refuse from the ore after the pig-metal is run", and The Korl Woman is the book's alternative title).

Most of the time Wolfe just soldiers on: Doing his job; doing his carving; living with his father and Deborah, his cousin (who loves him, but has litte hope of a relationship because she is disabled); and carrying a modest little torch for Janey, an Irish labourer. But one night he is confronted with a group of visitors to the mill, clearly from a different class. Wolfe is made to feel all the disadvantage of the comparison, seeing himself "more and more like a dumb, hopeless animal".

The men find one of Wolfe's korl figures, and are impressed. One of them asks him what the figure expresses. She's hungry, says Wolfe. Not hungry for food, but hungry for something to "make her live". Another of the men thinks he sees that: "Look at that woman's face!" he admonishes his companion, "It asks questions of God, and says, 'I have a right to know,' Good God, how hungry it is!"

Although some of them recognize Wolfe's gift, none of them has any clue how it can release him from his current life. One shrugs off the question. Not his responsibility, he says. Another purports to be encouraging: "'Do you know, boy, you have it in you to be a great sculptor, a great man? do you understand?' (talking down to the capacity of his hearer: it is a way people have with children, and men like Wolfe) -- 'to live a better, stronger life than I, or Mr Kirby here? A man may make himself anything he chooses. God has given you stronger powers than many men, -- me, for instance... Make yourself what you will. It is your right.'" Wolfe readily concedes it is. But when he asks for help to realize that right, the answer is no. The man has no money, he says (obviously not true). And even if he had, "Why should one be raised, when myriads are left?"


No way into the grand house...

For Wolfe, this is a seminal encounter, revealing his own abjection, and the gulf that separates him from men like these. He feels a sense of self-loathing. He had in the past felt a desire to be a leader; he had also cherished the wish to escape. But now he just longs for life, justice... Once home, he looks down at Janey, and feels he is giving up a hope he might have had.

Deborah, meanwhile, hearing the conversation, and thinking that money will solve all her beloved Hugh's problems, has stolen some from one of the men. She thinks it is Wolfe's right to keep it. He, too, wonders why he should not have the right to live as other more fortunate people do. He thinks of the good he could do with the money... Thinks how God made money, and looks on him kindly...

Wolfe is caught with the money, and sentenced to 19 years' hard labour in a penitentiary. The jailer admits it's a harsh sentence, meant to be exemplary as "these mill-hands are gettin' onbearable".

The prisoner ends up killing himself. Deborah gets three years for being an accomplice. But some Quakers take her in, and give her the chance to begin again, up on the hills. Which she does.

The narrator now possesses the korl figure that Wolfe carved. Thirty years have passed since these events, but the description of the town and the procession of workers with which the story begins suggests that little has changed. The figure has its own message: "Its pale, vague lips seem to tremble with a terrible question. 'Is this the End?' they say, -- 'nothing beyond? no more?' Why, you tell me you have seen that look in the eyes of dumb brutes, -- horses dying under the lash. I know... While the room is yet steeped in heavy shadow, a cool, gray light suddenly touches its head like a blessing hand, and its groping arm points through the broken cloud to the far East, where, in the flickering, nebulous crimson, God has set the promise of the Dawn."



***

The story sparked an interesting discussion in the book group about the extent to which working-class literature can come from non-working-class people...

I was torn between respecting the way Davis tries to open her readers' eyes to the plight of mill workers, and wondering if she wasn't somehow taking away from their agency by speaking for them. I found this article by William L. Watson quite interesting. He points out that Davis was actually writing at a time of considerable industrial ferment (the Great New England Strike etc). As I noted, she implies in her opening that little has changed over the last 30 years. But other sources from that era, says Watson, indicate that workers have come to possess a lot more "culture" and political clout than Davis suggests. He maintains: "Harding reveals what, historically, was done TO workers and suggests what could be done FOR them, moral education and social uplift. But she cannot reveal what workers, historically, did WITH what was done to them." She doesn't, in other words, say much about workers' strengths, possibly because she doesn't want to paint a picture that's too disturbing for her middle-class readers.

Whichever way we view these issues, the story certainly had a potent effect. It was championed by Tillie Olsen, who -- says Lily Meyer -- was searching for literary advocates for labour, and wanted "to make Life in the Iron-Mills qualify as working-class fiction, not just a bourgeois plea on behalf of the downtrodden laborer". Davis's work might be flawed, and demonstrably a product of its time. "Yet it still has the power to create new witnesses. The story of Davis and Olsen demonstrates precisely this phenomenon. Life in the Iron-Mills does not qualify as close-outsider witness to 19th-century mill workers’ conditions, and yet, because of its impact on Olsen, it has created space in the American literary canon for fiction that bears true witness to labor. It is thus possible to trace a line from Davis through Olsen to, for instance, the account of exploitative nail-salon work in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019), which is informed by the years Vuong’s mother spent as a nail technician... Olsen was a receptive beholder of Life in the Iron-Mills. She took from it a career’s worth of political and literary inspiration. More than 150 years after its first publication, the novella’s lapses in working-class solidarity matter, but not nearly as much as the intellectual tradition of close-outsider witness to which it belongs."



***

Among these "witnesses", we can also count Davis's near contemporary, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844-1911). In 1868, a short story called The Tenth of January appeared in The Atlantic Monthly. The first of her writings to achieve literary recognition, it was inspired by the real-world collapse of Pemberton Mill in 1860 (and the resultant loss of life), and by the publication the following year of Davis's Life in the Iron-Mills. Phelps pays tribute to Davis in a 1867 story called At Bay, for writing as though "she thought nobody was too poor, or too uneducated or too worn-out with washing days, and all the things that do not sound a bit grand in books, to be written about".

In The Tenth of January we again have a character who is disabled. She's Asenath, victim of her late mother's abuse. And she lives in the town of Lawrence, 40 per cent of whose inhabitants are "prisoners of factories". We're talking about textile mills here, but the descriptions recall Davis's: It's a place where sand gets everywhere; it's damp and desolate, noisy and smelly. It's a place where locomotives shriek and shadows skulk, and stairs, wheels, and looms go on endlessly.

Asenath is in love with Dick, a lad from the country who boards with her father. But there's also Del. She's pretty; he likes her; but he feels pledged to Asenath. This is a terrible position for the young woman to be in. She hates that he feels sorry for her, and even starts to think about killing herself. She resolves to formally renounce his pledge. But she can't bring herself to do it.

The decision is taken out of her hands when the mill collapses. Scores are killed instantly; hundreds, including Asenath, are buried in the ruins. Fire breaks out, and the unit working in her area can rescue only one more. Del is the last. Del is the last. She looks back, embarrassed to be leaving disabled Sene. But Sene sees this as the way out of her dilemma: "Go, Del, and tell him I sent you with my dear love, and that it's all right." There's another effort at rescue, but it's beaten back. Her father tries, desperately, to free her. But to no avail. The girls die singing hymns.

According to Privett, this is again among the first stories to attempt a realistic depiction of a working-class setting in America. And again, the author is very much writing from a middle-class standpoint. Concern, but also an inherent sense of superiority, are apparent in the writing. And there's not much in the way of hope: "In her novels about social change for the laboring class, Phelps argues for the transformation of the American economic system, a system that creates a cycle of poverty. As illustrated in an earlier work, Life in the Iron-Mills by Rebecca Harding Davis, it was nearly impossible for a member of the laboring class, no matter how well-intentioned, to rise above the poverty level... Like Davis, Phelps was unable to imagine an escape for most lower-class people, probably because she saw that it was unrealistic to believe that everyone would be able to receive the kind of educational and cultural opportunities she believed were necessary for true reform."

So this has been very interesting, and I'm looking forward to Olsen, and a more recent depiction of the struggles of the workers.