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FOREWORD

“A cloudy day; do you know what that is in a town of iron-works?” asks Rebecca Harding Davis in the very first line of her groundbreaking short story “Life in the Iron Mills.” Nearly two hundred years after she penned those words, one can still picture how that day must have looked and felt, with the black industrial smoke hanging heavily in the air, ash staining every surface it touches, gray lines carved into the haggard faces of passersby. It must have been hard to breathe, even in younger cities upon whose poisoned earth farmland and forests had once stood. There are places like that now too, cursed with the legacy of humanity’s ravenous thirst: vast manufacturing cities in China where everyone wears masks to breathe; polluted air creeping across heavy industry sites in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh; deforestation fumes choking Cameroon; wildfires in Australia and on the US West Coast, strangling whole towns.

The white-hot wave of industrialization and urbanization that swept the globe in the eighteenth century revolutionized the way that human beings worked, lived, consumed, and died, permanently altered how society functioned, and unwittingly set the stage for the ravages of late capitalism as well as the current climate crisis. Before the Industrial Revolution, agriculture was the primary industry; pollution was minimal, and most people lived in rural areas and worked outdoors. After the great change, laborers flooded into cities in search of work. They found work, all right—but as Davis illustrates, these workers all too often ended up paying a heavy price for it.

In this time, class divisions were redrawn like battle lines, with wealthy capitalists and industrialists indulging their whims for gorgeous mansions while poor- and working-class people were squeezed into rickety boardinghouses, stinking tenements, and dank cellars. When new immigrants came in hopes of building better lives for themselves and their families, they were swept up into the labor pool by greedy bosses who saw a chance to extract as much value from their bodies as possible. It was a miserable time to be alive without the benefit of also being rich. Whether they were native-born or came from elsewhere, a nineteenth-century factory worker’s living conditions were utterly grim: diseases ran rampant, sewage pooled in the streets, and people of all ages starved—physically, intellectually, and spiritually. Wage slavery was a death sentence. Some workers paid the cost of urban living with their blood, sweat, and tears, and managed to carve out something resembling a decent existence; others struggled, living hand to mouth, their bodies and spirits broken as soon as they could walk. An unfathomable number paid with their lives.

And for a very long time, their stories were left untold. In a time before public school was both free and compulsory (a feat the United States did not achieve until the 1920s), most members of the laboring class were illiterate, and many immigrant workers were without a firm grasp on the English language. But more importantly—and shamefully—their day-to-day lives were left undocumented and unexamined because almost nobody in the middle and upper classes was listening to what the faceless masses had to say. Those who enjoyed higher social and economic privilege knew that those workers they saw trudging through the streets to and from the mills were doomed to lives that were poor, nasty, brutish, and short, but—then as now—didn’t necessarily see it as their problem. This is part of what makes “Life in the Iron Mills” and its smoke-smudged take on literary realism so extraordinary. Rebecca Harding Davis was born into a life of relative ease and had next to nothing in common with the workers in her story, and yet she writes about them and the proletarian struggle with such compassion and depth of insight that it’s hard to believe she was merely watching from the window.

Davis’s story was released more than four decades before another great documentarian of working-class exploitation, Upton Sinclair, ever set foot in a slaughterhouse, and well before the United States had any real labor laws to speak of. When the thirty-year-old Davis sat down to write this story, the Civil War was still in its infancy, the seeds of climate change had been planted but were yet to flower, and the Second Industrial Revolution was still around nine years away. Nine years was also the typical age for a child to be sent to work in the mills. In 1830s Wheeling, West Virginia, where Davis’s tale is set, it was common to see children walking by on their way to work in the mornings, their small faces smeared with dirt and drawn thin with malnutrition. Subjecting children to backbreaking labor meant that many died young, and the ones who did survive grew up weak, sickly, and hopeless. And the cycle continued, over and over, as generations of workers were born to suffer and left to die when they lost their usefulness to the factory overlords. As far as the bosses were concerned, labor was abundant and low value. So what if a few little girls lost their arms in the looms, or a couple of little boys were burned to a crisp in the iron works? Humanity was cheap.

In the story, our two main characters, Welsh immigrants Hugh and Deb, were born into a world lit only by fire, their only birthright the same desperate, grinding poverty that had sent their forebears coughing into an early grave. At nineteen, Hugh is already halfway to his own. Men of his time and his profession could only expect to live to thirty-seven if they were lucky, and Hugh was not born a lucky man. Instead, he labors, day after day, night after night, in the heat-blasted belly of the iron works, shoveling pig iron until he can barely lift his scrawny arms. His disabled cousin, Deb, pines after him, but knows he will never love her; she is not beautiful, or clever, or much of anything at all. Her time in the cotton mills has left her body frail and bowed, and any shred of identity that may have blossomed was instead whisked away long ago by the endlessly spinning spools of thread. As much as it hurts, dreaming of Hugh is her only escape from the painful drudgery of her life. But Hugh, a sensitive soul who is mocked by his fellow workers for his shred of education and perceived lack of manliness, is driven by something else—something deep and hungry that threatens to burst from his breast like a wild beast if he tries to ignore its pull. Hugh’s dream is to become someone, to leave the furnace behind. In lieu of giving away too many details, I will instead leave you with a question posed by a heartless rich man the reader meets later on in the story: “What are taste, reason, to creatures who must live such lives as that?”

What are they, indeed? What are roses to a worker whose only thought is bread? What are dreams to someone who barely has time to sleep? These questions and many others lurk at the heart of this iconic proletarian narrative, daring the reader to chew them over like the slabs of rancid salt pork that Deb wraps up for Hugh’s supper. In a time when automation and artificial intelligence have become flash points in the broader conversation around the future of work, it’s useful to go back and consider how long that perspective has been percolating in the minds (and theoretical checkbooks) of the corporate oligarchs and petty bourgeoisie, who would ultimately benefit from removing humanity from the entire equation. The pompous mill owner’s son, Kirby, says, “If I had the making of men, these men who do the lowest part of the world’s work should be machines—nothing more—hands.” Now swap in Kirby for a modern-day CEO, and the furnace-tenders for fast-food workers, retail workers, warehouse workers, or autoworkers—current professions that are under threat of being automated away by those who are motivated solely by profits, and see no value in the flesh and blood working the machinery. Everything old is new again, including the tension between the workers who make and the bosses who take. How many more Hughs are out there now, working dangerous, soul-sucking jobs instead of following their passions? How many more will have to suffer before this wretched capitalist system finally breaks down and sets us all free?

Despite its sociopolitical currents, feminist themes, and status as a muckraking classic, “Life in the Iron Mills” is no polemic. Instead, Davis gives her readers an unprecedented glimpse into the souls of working folks at a time when no one else with any platform cared enough to bother. She sifted through the ashes of capitalist carnage to illuminate these workers’ rich emotional lives, deep desires, and implacable survival instincts, their solidarity with fellow workers, and their burning hunger for something better. Thanks to her efforts, Hugh and Deb and the millions of real-life workers who lived and died in circumstances just like the ones she set to paper here will live on in proletarian memory as martyrs to the cause of working-class liberation, the unnamed victims of a cruel system that we owe it to them to dismantle.

As Tillie Olsen, who plucked the story out of obscurity in the 1970s and added a biographical sketch of Davis to later expanded versions (like the one you hold in your hands), reminds us, “This was written when almost everywhere the air was pure; and these lives, brought here for the first time into literature, unknown, invisible.”

Now, finally, as the world burns around us and the working class has risen up in unprecedented waves, they are invisible no more.

KIM KELLY

February 2020