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 realistic portrayal of the immigrant underclass in Rebecca Harding Davis's “Life in the Iron Mills.” After all, these “Yankee humanists” (as one scholar calls them) who sustained the Atlantic presumed “that in higher cultures the primary purpose of life itself, as of education, was not social prestige, entertainment, sensual experience, power, or even promoting social welfare but specifically the development of intellect and moral character in the individual” (Sedgwick 7, my italics).¹ Developing character in their readers—not necessarily solving social problems—remained central among the editorial goals. T. W. Higginson, a frequent contributor to the Atlantic, exemplifies this concern when he suggests in “A Plea for Culture” (Jan. 1867) that Americans need to develop a moral vision that only a study of high culture—art, literature, the life of the mind—could supply (Sedgwick 107). Under the leadership of James Russell Lowell, the magazine's first editor and the one seated when Davis' piece was accepted and published, the Atlantic thus represented a cultural elite who pursued the transmission of their own cultural, humanistic values. They spoke for the New England cultural tradition (itself derived from the Puritanism of an earlier age), as Ellery Sedgwick suggests, and they spoke to those readers who continued to value the New England legacy. With a clear intellectual and cultural identity, the Atlantic could be found on any parlor table of those who represented (or sought to be identified with) polite civilization and high-minded culture. This seems hardly the magazine to publish a story about the immigrant poor. Or does it?

Despite the seeming anomaly of its placement, “Life in the Iron Mills” immediately caught its American readers' attention—and earned Davis both fifty dollars upon its acceptance (a large amount of money in 1861) and an invitation from the publisher himself to submit more.² The piece was novel both for its subject matter—the tragic realities of the immigrant poor,³ the cynicism of factory owners, the brutality of working class life—and (as Tillie Olsen suggests) for its form, which could be regarded as story, parable, or article (Olsen 86). Despite the Atlantic's growing reputation for publishing fiction by women and in realistic modes, Davis submitted the work anonymously. She was an unknown author at the time, while the magazine was known for its distinguished literary list (no doubt the main reason that the Ticknor and Fields firm was interested in purchasing it in 1861). Yet despite her newness to literary circles and her lack of name-recognition and prestige, Fields saw in Davis' work the promise of literary appeal. In fact, as we know from hindsight, James T. Fields was far more certain of the merit of Davis' work than critics and publishers would be in the ensuing decades. Virtually disappearing from literary history in most of the twentieth century, the text finally resurfaced in 1972, through the labor of Tillie Olsen and the Feminist Press.⁴

Of course there are a number of important reasons why the story failed to capture scholars' attention until the 1970s: twentieth-century critics' difficulty in placing the story firmly into a romantic or a realistic tradition, especially until the rediscovery of other women's works (which shed light on some of Davis' techniques);⁵ the nationalistic fervor and xenophobic suspicions of early twentieth-century Americans; and possibly the strange mix of melodrama, verging on sentimentality, and naturalism. Its place now secure in the canon of American literature, the story is now drawing attention from a second wave of scholars, those critics exploring such promising areas as narratology, rhetorical relationships between narrator and reader, and gendered patterns of narrative interventions.⁶ But one of the most problematic issues that persists for readers is the ending of the story, with its shift towards a religious solution.

The focus on the Quaker woman and her kindness, described in the rhetoric of the romance, can seem glib after the compellingly realistic picture of working-class life and the profound struggles of Hugh and Deb. From another perspective, the story goes on too long: the natural place for a conclusion is the end of the jail scene and Hugh's suicide. The entry of the Quaker woman begins what seems like a long postscript to the story. All in all, the religious solution to the problems raised in the story seems to fall short. Many critics, even when they have found other merits to the story, have either dismissed the ending or have tried to excuse it as Davis' revision of literary genres. Coppelia Kahn, for example, calls the “probably Christian answer” of the conclusion “the sole weakness of the book” (117), while Josephine Donovan asserts that Davis shows her proneness to the “weakening indulgence” of “romantic hyperbole”—a euphemism, perhaps, for what could seem to be mere sentimentality (33).⁷ Sharon M. Harris, faced with the “presupposing language of passive Christianity [in] the conclusion,” as she calls the rhetorical shift, argues for a strictly ironic reading of the ending and thus attempts to redeem the story for the realistic tradition (“Rebecca Harding Davis” 19). Perhaps more honestly than any critic heretofore, Walter Hesford simply throws up his hands: “The reader may finish ‘Life in the Iron-Mills' without knowing exactly the revelation, the answer Davis intends to offer” (73-74).

I want to argue, however, that the method of Sedgwick, William Charvat, and others who attempt to reconstruct publishing histories and the triangle formed between literary work, publisher, and reader, can do much to suggest ways to approach the unusual ending of “Life in the Iron Mills.” When we consider the story against its historical and sociological contexts—the plight of the immigrant worker, urban poverty, and the attitudes that many of its original readers held towards the immigrant poor—as well as the religious beliefs of both the author and the audience, we will find that the story's ending not only made perfect sense to its first readers (Lowell and Fields included) but in fact was part of its appeal to publisher and audience. Those readers, removed more than a century from us, observed poverty and immigration through a lens far different from that of ourselves, who live after the rise of the welfare state, the civil rights movement, two world wars, and Viet Nam. The beliefs of the original audience about poverty, unlike those of many scholarly readers today, stem from a particular Christian, broadly Calvinist vision deriving from the New England Puritan legacy. Rather than fault her story for a quaint religious ending and a facile moral about Christian kindness, I want to argue that the first readers, publisher and editor included, enjoyed the story precisely for the reason that many readers today are disturbed by it: the bothersome nature of the ending. Jarring them in ways differently than it jars us, the ending captured its first readers' attention because it operates parabolically, as a nineteenth-century rewrite of the Parable of the Good Samaritan. It could do so because the figure of the Quaker woman served as an important rhetorical and psychological link between Davis and her audience, operating effectively within the clearly defined context formed by the religious and social beliefs of the author and her audience.

Davis' parabolic Good Samaritan, the Quaker, is the one who can incite readers to virtuous action—the opposite of Melville's Bartleby, for example, who constitutes a “dead letter” to the narrator-lawyer in the 1855 “Bartleby the Scrivener.” In contrast, Davis' Quaker functions in ways that connect her to the figure of Little Eva in Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin: unlike Bartleby, Eva converts not only Miss Ophelia to a change in attitude and action but also the millions of readers who, upon completing the novel, were enlivened towards abolitionism. As in the case of Stowe, Davis works within a broadly Calvinist tradition that engendered an optimism and certainty about the power of words to tell the truth and move people to action—in contrast to, for example, the practice of writers such as Hawthorne and Melville, who offer tightlipped narrators embedded in tales of ambiguity, fragmentation, and resistance towards telling the whole truth. Like Stowe, Davis (we will see) also challenges the narrow insularity and cultural smugness of the New England Calvinist legacy, as Stowe does in her The Minister's Wooing and the later “Oldtown Folks” stories—all of which appeared in the Atlantic. As Jane Tompkins has shown for Stowe, an awareness of Davis' own cultural and religious backgrounds and the ways her text functions within specific literary, cultural, and religious contexts can do much to illuminate aspects that otherwise seem problematic: in Davis' case, the ending, if not also the form, of “Life in the Iron Mills.”

Like her future Atlantic readers, Davis grew up in a highbrow family, the sort that the Atlantic editors of the 1860s would target. Her father was a successful businessman who, as Olsen describes, apparently detested the less refined aspects of life, including the world of commerce. Davis grew up watching her father read sophisticated literature in the evenings; his favorite writer was Shakespeare (Olsen 70). Typical of her class, at the age of fourteen, Davis was sent to a three-year female seminary south of Pittsburgh to be “finished” (Olsen 71-72). The period of her schooling marked the beginning of a significant shift away from the elitist values of her own family. While a student, Davis met physician Francis LeMoyne, who would come to have a major influence on Davis. LeMoyne was a radical reformer, abolitionist, and agnostic “diametrically opposed to the precepts and assumptions of [Davis'] own upbringing” (Olsen 73).

By the time she wrote “Life in the Iron Mills,” Davis had rejected many of the religious beliefs that she had once held in common with her future readers, “reject[ing] organized worship at an early age,” as Sharon M. Harris describes, along with many traditional Christian beliefs (Rebecca Harding Davis 49). But Davis did not reject Christianity completely. In fact, she came to affirm, in Harris' words, “a loving and merciful God” (Harris 49). Christian benevolence, duty, and sympathy were important to both Davis and the Atlantic readers. Both she and her class would support the idea of Christian philanthropy, which was an important social phenomenon in the mid-nineteenth century. But Davis would go farther than most in her audience in her rejection of a passive Christianity: with more passion than they, she “insisted that one has to work for salvation, and that work requires a concern for others as for oneself” (Harris, Rebecca Harding Davis 49). The Calvinistic tenet of sola fide—grace by faith alone—too often seemed to become an excuse for complacency among economically privileged Christians. Merely contributing to charities and Christian philanthropic endeavors could never be enough for Davis.

This belief in an active faith led Davis, for example, to denounce the blind adherence of Emerson's disciples to that philosophy which championed self-reliance and even, as Davis seemed to see it, their self-worship:

They had revolted from Puritanism, not to enter any other live church, but to fall into a dull disgust, a nausea with all religion. To them came this new prophet with his discovery of the God within themselves. They hailed it with acclamation. The new dialect of the Transcendentalist was easily learned. They talked it as correctly as the Chinaman does his pigeon English.

(Bits of Gossip 46)

As she suggests here, Davis wants a “live” faith, not a self-congratulatory or over-intellectualized one. Her commitment to a vigorous Christianity is so strong that she continues the religious theme begun in “Life” in her next piece, Margret Howth (1862). There, she challenges her readers (again, the first ones were those of the Atlantic Monthly) to consider working and under-class individuals as the recipients of concrete acts of generosity by more privileged people.⁸ The story ends with the middle-class characters learning that individual acts of selflessness are superior to abstract social theories or Fichtean attempts at self-development. Davis' narrator champions virtue grounded in Christ rather than a triumph of philosophy or economics: “The voice of the meek Nazarene, which we have deafened down as ill-timed, unfit to teach the watchword of the hour, renews the quiet promise of its coming in simple, humble things” (4). The foundation for salvation was a Christian virtue more like that advocated by Jonathan Edwards in The Nature of True Virtue—a radical caritas that required the engagement of the whole person.

I do not want to suggest that Davis had ever read Jonathan Edwards; there is no evidence to indicate that she had. Nonetheless, the idea of a radical virtue was certainly accessible to her in her rejection of many of the mainline Christian beliefs, including the Calvinistic view of virtue that was developing in her own century à la Carnegie and others—the view that emphasized a work ethic, and, at best, a distanced concern for the oppressed. Melville's narrator in “Bartleby the Scrivener” himself seems to wrestle with “the nature of true virtue” in a capitalistic society (the subtitle of the piece is “A Story of Wall-Street”) and even alludes to Edwards in his story (37). That the issue surfaces in Melville's story, which was published eight years earlier than “Life,” is illustrative of the fact that midcentury Americans were considering ethical and moral questions in the context of business and capitalism.

And Edwards was alive and well at midcentury. In fact, the subject dubbed “Edwards on the will” by theological debaters was the focus of animated discussions among Congregational and Presbyterian seminary professors at the time that Davis was writing (Conforti 109). The nature of virtue and of sin, and the role that the will played in these as described by Edwards in Freedom of the Will (1754), The Nature of True Virtue (1755), and Original Sin (1758), were hotly debated and remained the focus of the discussion, with Freedom of the Will “regularly reprinted past the middle of the nineteenth century” (Conforti 109). Edwards A. Park of Andover, who published, lectured, and preached (Emily Dickinson, for one, heard him preach in her locale), was “recognized as the most important authority on Edwards” and “became the lightning rod at midcentury” in the debate (Conforti 109-110). As Joseph A. Conforti suggests, Park quite accurately captured Edwards' emphasis in describing virtue as “vigorous and sensible exercises of the inclination and will,” as opposed to being merely a passive taste or disposition distinct from the will—for which Park's opponents argued in this “exercise versus taste” controversy (Park, New England Theology 200; qtd. Conforti 130). Park identified the first of “three radical principles” of Edwards' theology as the idea that all sin “consists in choice”; it is voluntary, not determined or ordained by God (Park, New England Theology 175; “Unity amid Diversities” 605; qtd. Conforti 121). Likewise, he developed the idea that virtue also is voluntary—and strenuous. It is an exercise of the heart and will, not merely a disposition to do good. The key term in the debate, “exercise,” Conforti points out, “resonated with the discourse of activism, voluntarism, and moral energy that pervaded nineteenth-century evangelical culture” (131).

Park represented Edwards well to theologically-minded Americans of the nineteenth century, yet he and his contemporaries seemed more interested in reconciling God's sovereignty and human responsibility than in emphasizing the purity and radical nature of the caritas that Edwards had described. Davis's work recalls this earlier tradition. In The Nature of True Virtue, Edwards had advanced the idea that Christian love requires active “benevolence to being in general” (Edwards 122), that true benevolence “seek[s] the good of every being” rather than being motivated by the beauty of the object or a desire for gratitude (McDermott 102). This, in part, seems to be Melville's interest in “Bartleby,” in which the author tests how far his narrator will go in expressing benevolence to the opaque Bartleby. Davis's focus is similar, as she attempts to jar readers to benevolent action. And she goes one step farther than Melville in choosing an under-class person as the recipient of caritas. As Gerald R. McDermott describes the Edwardsian view of virtue, “true virtue is ‘publick’ [Edwards' word], united with others,” while “private affection is rooted in the self”; “[t]he one is embracing and expansive, the other grasping and self-reducing” (103). It is both the moral vigor and the moral purity of true virtue, as Davis understood the concept, that she explores in “Life in the Iron Mills” and challenges her readers to pursue.

Although there is no reason to believe that Davis had the Atlantic Monthly specifically in mind when she began writing “Life in the Iron Mills,”⁹ she certainly identified with those readers enough to find in the Atlantic a public platform from which she could address her middle- and upper-middleclass contemporaries. The white, educated, Protestant Americans, so typified by the readers and publishers of the Atlantic, formed the audience she knew best, representative as they were of the circles in which she had grown up. Their social vision and attitudes towards the poor derived from a New England Calvinism that, for all of the theological liberalism of these nineteenth-century readers, was still associated with a social and political conservatism when it came to addressing the needs of the poor. The political appeal of the Atlantic would be, as Lowell had announced in its first issue, “that moral element which transcends all persons and parties” (qtd. Sedgwick 61). But this “moral element” seemed to be blind to the contingencies of class and ethnicity. The Atlantic readers, if not the editorial board itself (which may or may not have been more socially progressive), were more influenced in their assumptions about the poor by an easy Calvinism (one that lacked the vigor of Edwards') than by any progressive political views. An intellectualized, individualistic faith emphasizing an assurance of salvation increasingly emerged as a comfortable, distanced complacency when confronted with the social problem of poverty.

Calling readers to put their faith into action, Davis issues her most pointed challenge through the “terrible question” raised several times throughout the narrative. When her korl woman asks, “What shall we do to be saved?,” Davis means the question, I would argue, in both the physical and spiritual sense, because for her the two are inseparable. It would take a Quaker woman—not a genteel intellectual, not a liberal Presbyterian or a Unitarian—but a figure positioned outside the mainstream of American Christianity, to personify an adequate response to the question of both economic and spiritual poverty. The korl woman's question is provocative because it also functions ironically, nettling astute readers to consider their own stake in salvation. “There is no reply” to the question, says the narrator in introducing the story, because, I want to argue, the desired response is emotional and spiritual, rather than rhetorical.

I will tell you plainly that I have a great hope; and I bring it to you to be tested. It is this: that this terrible dumb question is its own reply; that it is not the sentence of death we think it, but, from the very extremity of its darkness, the most solemn prophecy which the world has known of the Hope to come. I dare make my meaning no clearer, but will only tell my story.

(14)

This “hope” that the speaker brings to the Atlantic readers—a hope that seems to be transformed, in the next sentence, into the spiritual “Hope” of Christ in his eschatological return—can only be the anticipation of social action (which Davis saw as tied to salvation) on the part of the economically privileged Christians whom the story might reach. For the most part, of course, the Atlantic readers would have felt fairly certain about their own salvation—as educated, mainline Christians of a nondogmatic cast, they no doubt saw themselves as decent, good people who showed their benevolence and sympathy through their support of philanthropic efforts. But the terrible question refers not only to a problem of Hugh and Deborah but of the entire privileged class. If this class fails to act, not only is the spiritual life of people like Hugh and Deb at stake, but the eternal destiny of the privileged is also jeopardized. Their failure to perform the selfless deeds associated with an active, vital faith would undermine the very salvation they assumed they possessed.

In particular, the attitude of the audience of the Atlantic Monthly is exemplified most accurately in the character of Dr. May. Well-intentioned yet condescending, he asks Hugh, “Do you know, boy, you have it in you to be … a great man … to live a better, stronger life than I … ? A man may make himself anything he chooses” (37). Implicitly he suggests that Hugh is responsible for his condition, including his own poverty. May goes so far as to say, “Make yourself what you will. It is your right” (37). Like so many men and women of goodwill in mid-century America, May believes that moral uplift is the most important factor in alleviating poverty. Or so the theory goes. A result of personal morality, not social conditions, the poverty of people like Hugh ought not to exist in America. Yet May, characteristic of his class, refuses to give Hugh even a little money. Perhaps May's fear of the unknown—the immigrant worker who is distanced from the physician in class, ethnicity, and even language—also prevents May from involvement.

Dr. May, sympathetic, interested, benevolent like so many of Davis' readers, wants to alleviate Hugh's suffering, but cannot bring himself to try. He is strangely reminiscent of the narrator of “Bartleby,” who himself wrestles with the demands of virtue—is virtue the simple benevolence of an Adam Smith philosophy, in which benevolence has a social and personal advantage? Or is it the radical caritas of Jonathan Edwards, whom Bartleby's employer himself specifically cites in his narration? Dr. May's name even signifies subverted possibilities: Dr. May “may” help, but doesn't. He cannot muster the radical virtue that Edwards calls for (in the text surely the one alluded to in “Bartleby the Scrivener,” The Nature of True Virtue [37]). The farthest May goes—probably representative of Atlantic readers when they encounter the dragging masses of the poor—is, after his incident with Hugh, to pray, “night and morning, … that power might be given these degraded souls to rise” (39). The narrator's disgust for May is apparent when we read that, despite May's rebuff of Mitchell's theory that the poor should help themselves, May secretly adopted Mitchell's theory and “glowed at heart” with self-satisfaction at his own daily prayers for the poor, “recognizing an accomplished duty” (39).

May, familiar enough with the Bible to recognize Mitchell's quotations from Scripture, seems to realize that more is required of him than simply prayer to God and kind words to the poor. When Hugh Wolfe quietly asks the doctor for help, May suddenly turns to Mitchell and retorts, “You know, Mitchell, I have not the means. You know, if I had, it is in my heart to take this boy and educate him for”—at which point Mitchell interrupts (37). What prevents him, at least ostensibly (of course there is much more) is that he can't see how his efforts for one person will be significant “when myriads are left” (39). For Davis, I believe, this reasoning would be fatuous: Christian virtue is performed one gesture at a time, the Kingdom of God having the potential of a small but potent mustard seed. More importantly, action on the part of May—any action, including the offering of money—would no doubt have relieved readers of a sense of their own stake in the immigrants' poverty. They would have seen their own “success story” inscribed in “Life,” thus subverting the moral possibilities of the story. But these members of the privileged class who form the first readership of “Life” would need to connect their own economic and spiritual interests to “Life.” Significantly, it is highly probable that the Atlantic audience itself included owners and stockholders of the very industries featured in “Life in the Iron Mills.”

That the story's first audience included individuals who themselves were captains of industry is not so farfetched as it might immediately seem. In 1861, if one had the money for the initial investment, business success was virtually guaranteed. As late as 1857, the rolling mills at Pittsburgh represented a capital investment averaging only a little over $150,000 for each plant (Taylor 236). With the availability of cheap labor through immigrant workers like Hugh and Deborah, the mills and other plants represented an extremely profitable investment—thus accounting for the unbelievable rate of expansion of the manufacturing industries. With the introduction early in the century of three major British innovations—the rolling mills, the puddling process as the means to refine pig iron (of course, Hugh himself is a puddler), and, in the 1840s and 50s, the use of coal in blast furnaces—the entire iron industry was centralized into large-scale operations, and costs were cut significantly. The iron industry highlighted in Davis' story thus increased rapidly during the 1850s and, if taken together with machinery as a single category, was by a considerable margin the leading industry in the nation, according to an 1860 census (Taylor 243). Certainly, individuals were profiting enormously by the expansion of the manufacturing trades. In fact, by the middle part of the century, the value of the manufactured product had increased from $200 million to $10 billion—thus increasing fifty times in fifty years (Taylor 248). It is not unlikely at all that members of the genteel Atlantic audience themselves had a vested interest in the very industry highlighted in the story.

By 1840, the making of cotton cloth, Deborah's trade, had itself become an important manufacturing industry. In 1860, it ranked among the top three of the leading manufacturing industries in the nation (Taylor 243). Business was booming, and it was individuals like those of the Atlantic audience who were profiting: those wealthy enough to hold stock or to own factories. Any thoughtful member of the middle class knew the importance of these industries to the economy of the nation. But those who were personally profiting by these industries were surely far less aware of the personal costs paid by the laboring class. Like Davis herself, the Atlantic readers no doubt often witnessed workers plodding to the factories outside their windows. But at least two factors distanced them from an acute awareness of the conditions of the poor: the fact that many of the poor were immigrants, and the formal response to poverty by middleclass Anglo-Americans.

As recent arrivals in the U.S., immigrant workers were separated from middleclass Americans by both physical distance and culture. Some Atlantic readers might have had the kind of contact with the immigrant workers demonstrated by Kirby, Mitchell, and May: a walk through a factory or a brush of shoulders on the street. Most, however, never personally encountered the immigrant poor. The narrator, who looks out the window to see the “slow stream of human life creeping past, night and morning, to the great mills,” shares the physical separation between the Atlantic readership and the workers (44). But even more profound was the cultural separation between middleclass Americans and immigrant workers. The cellar room of the Welsh Wolfe family and Irish Janey lay at a long economic and cultural distance from the elaborately furnished homes of elite established families. Although many of these workers hailed from northern European countries—Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Germany, to name a few—middleclass Americans tended to view these immigrants with deep suspicion. To them, the immigrants seemed wholly other, alien, unknown. Hugh, for example, speaks English, but does so with an accent: “Summat to make her live,” he says of his korl woman (33). His dialect is far-removed from the highbrow French and Latin quoted by the middleclass visitors to the factory (34, 36), an aspect that heightens the linguistic and cultural distance between the classes. To the narrator, the Wolfes look foreign, even animalistic (30)—“wolfish,” the narrator says of his statue, which images Deb (64); indeed, the face of the statue is “like that of a starving wolfs,” obviously a play on the family name (32). Although Hugh seems, to the narrator, to have a conscience—“honest” “Welsh Wolfe blood” (44)—he nevertheless is wholly other from the Anglo, upper-middleclass group that visits the iron mill.

The sheer number of immigrants arriving in the U.S. exacerbated their poverty and the fear and suspicion with which they were viewed. Immigrant workers, responding to the bribes, agents, and utopian descriptions of American life, surged in vast numbers into America's ports at mid-century, peaking at nearly three million during the 1850s.¹⁰ Indeed, according to one social scientist, the foreign-born in Davis' day constituted at least half of the poor population, and the public tended to view them with more fear than concern. The number of immigrants arriving in the U.S. strengthened the argument that relief-giving be left to benevolent societies and the rich (Axinn 35, 48); the middle class seemed to feel too overwhelmed by the great numbers of poor people to offer much help. By 1860, the middle class was close to giving up on alleviating, let alone ending, poverty. This was the age of abolitionism, reformism, and philanthropic societies, but the economic and social issues surrounding urbanization may have seemed far less weighty than, say, the reality of slavery. Moreover, perhaps feeling helpless in the face of the extensiveness and seriousness of poverty in America's industrialized centers, even the Christian middle class who wanted to help the poor through church efforts could see the power of the market forces at work that kept the poor “in their place.”

Labor was abundant; thus wages were low. And they were also low because, with the exception of a few relatively large and prosperous firms, American manufacturers appear to have been chronically short of working capital.¹¹ Workers were at the mercy of the owners, the government playing little part in regulating conditions for the workers. It was not until the 1850s that unions formed and were finally successful in getting legislated the ten-hour day, and that policy applied at first only to skilled labor having unionized workers, not to unskilled labor and certainly not to immigrants who could barely speak English. Helpless in the face of market conditions and owners eager for profits, people such as Hugh and Deb were forced to keep jobs that often barely paid for their living expenses.

Yet despite the real contingencies endured by these immigrant laborers, many in the Atlantic audience no doubt shared the view prevalent among middleclass Americans: that the poor had somehow morally failed. If people were poor, it was their own fault. Andrew Carnegie, writing in 1891 but representing mid-century attitudes, captures the views of the many middle- and upper-middleclass Christians when he states in the essay, “The Advantages of Poverty,” that “In a country where the millionaire exists there is little excuse for pauperism” (54). Citing Scripture, Carnegie (and others) reiterated the old Puritan idea that the poor themselves were to blame; their condition was a result of their own character and moral depravity. In Carnegie's view, Jesus' parable of the talents (Matt. 25:14-28) was ample support of this principle. Reading this text as applying to the economics of a modern, capitalistic state (rather than, as Christ himself introduces the parable, an illustration of the kingdom of heaven), Carnegie simplistically asserts that the Lord's blessing was on the servant who had “doubled [his or her] capital,” while “Those who had ‘laid up’ their treasures and not increased them were reprimanded” (72). So the reasoning went, as Carnegie and other economically privileged individuals read the plight of the poor through their own religious lens: one's economic status was a direct result of his or her own moral character. Certainly, the Calvinistic faith that took root in a capitalistic, individualistic society often produced views of poverty that did more to bolster the economic position of the middle class, Christian and otherwise, than that of the needy themelves, who would need to find their best advocates among groups like the culturally marginalized Quakers.

All in all, then, the non-immigrant poor were viewed by most white Americans as not being full members of the community, drawing distrust and suspicion from their better-off contemporaries. But for the impoverished immigrant laborers, the situation was even worse, distanced as they were by not only class but also ethnicity and, often, language. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that, as the century wore on, middleclass Americans increasingly turned to a solution more extreme than that of simple philanthropy: the almshouse. Losing their optimism about the curability of poverty as the numbers of the immigrant poor rose, middleclass Americans, including the benevolent-minded liberal Christians who might read the Atlantic, saw institutionalization as the only way to deal with poverty. These New England humanists might publicly or intellectually espouse the social responsibility of the educated, as Sedgwick maintains was the case, thus holding values more reformist than those of the American mainstream (7). Nonetheless, all would be influenced by the growing pessimism among Americans about the curability of poverty. Their own reticence to become personally engaged in the problem is sharply captured through the characterizations of the factory visitors in “Life in the Iron Mills.”

As was the case with Dr. May, many readers would see themselves mirrored in the character Kirby. The character Kirby, who remains aware of the economic problems of the underclass but sees them as insurmountable, exemplifies so many Americans who were losing the reformist mission of an earlier era. “I wash my hands of all social problems,” he says dryly. “My duty to my operatives has a narrow limit,—the pay-hour on Saturday night. Outside of that … I am not responsible” (54). Davis' readers could have seen themselves reflected in Kirby: they were not responsible for poverty. If an individual could not stay gainfully employed, many believed, that person could find the way to the almshouse. It was enough that any middleclass person would simply show some sympathy, as Dr. May does. Giving up on the ability of the family or the church to solve the problem of poverty, middleclass Americans looked to the reformatory potential of institutions to effect change. But although the almshouse movement had been started in the 1830s in order to isolate and rehabilitate the residents, by the late 1850s the physical plants had fallen into such disrepair and the residents were performing such little work that the almshouses seemed a total failure. Nonetheless, with the surge of immigration in the 1850s, the swelling of urban populations, and the accompanying problems of unemployment and poverty, the almshouse increasingly seemed to middleclass Anglo-Americans a perfect solution to new problems. Almost unanimously they endorsed a policy of institutionalization. It was a way to isolate and “rehabilitate” the poor. And it was also a way simply to contain the poor—out of sight, out of mind of the Americans of the working and leisured classes. Situated on the edges of America's cities, these enormous, dormitory-like buildings secluded the unemployed poor behind brick walls and a rhetoric of good intentions. To the poor themselves, however, they were nothing short of a living hell. Not only did the almshouse bring with it the stigma that the individual was a moral failure and a burden to society, worse yet, most almshouses presented horrible living conditions, with rats, poor sanitation, and crowded conditions. Not only the poor but also many insane, delinquent, and even criminal individuals found shelter there. Many, if not most, of the working poor would have rather died than be sent to the almshouse.

This “solution” was what awaited Hugh and Deb if they failed to make do on their paltry wages. People such as they lived under the spectre of the almshouse, and some readers of the Atlantic, like the callous Scrooge of Dickens' A Christmas Carol (1843), may simply have wished “the poorhouse” (as it was commonly called) on the impoverished individuals who crossed their paths. No doubt, the reality of the almhouses in part lies behind many of the narrator's pleas to the readers. To challenge readers to a different response to poverty, the narrator often appeals to the shared humanity of the reader and the immigrant poor (as represented by Hugh and Deb). “You laugh at [their pain]?” the narrator asks at one point. “Are pain and jealousy less savage realities down here in this place I am taking you to than in your own house or your own heart … ? The note is the same, I fancy, be the octave high or low” (23). Later, after Hugh has accepted the stolen money, the narrator makes the same kind of appeal: “You laugh at the shallow temptation?” (46). The characters must be humanized in the minds of the readers if they are to reject existing “solutions” to poverty and consider the complex spiritual appeal at the end of the story. But first, Davis must guide her readers to reject some other of their own responses to poverty.

Mitchell, the cynical socialist, shows the most admirable response to Hugh in terms of his challenge of middleclass values, but even he falls short. He sees the need for profound reform, a reform that will treat both economic and spiritual need, but his failure is that he over-intellectualizes Hugh's situation, refusing to be moved emotionally to the point of offering tangible help to Hugh. Mitchell quotes Scripture, apparently realizing that Hugh's deprivation is more than monetary. “Why, May, look at him!” he challenges. “‘Hungry and thirsty, his soul faints in him’” (36). Hugh himself finds in Mitchell, “even when he idly scoffed at his pain,” a man who truly understands Hugh's experience. To Hugh, he seems (as the narrator puts it), “a Man all-knowing, all-seeing, crowned by Nature, reigning”—but of course Mitchell is no Messiah. Mitchell sees spiritual need, but he is not a spiritual man. Preaching that Hugh's class must save themselves, Mitchell easily dismisses the problem, much as the Atlantic readers would no doubt like to do, by reiterating the middleclass belief that he cannot save the poor because “reform is born of need, not pity” (39). Mitchell's point is that a leader must arise from within the economically oppressed class; thus he rejects the possibility of the culpability of himself and his class to give help to the powerless and oppressed. Curiously, a key context for “Life” is the servitude of that other group of workers, the southern slaves, who were finally emancipated through the work of a group more powerful than they: middleclass abolitionist Americans. Unlike the latter, many of whom were Quakers, as in this story, Mitchell lacks the strenuous, Edwardsian caritas that would move him to an active—not simply rhetorical—response to Hugh.

Even the preacher whom Wolfe hears during his dark night in the city proves inadequate in his response to poverty—his “Christian reform[ist]” impulses are bankrupt (49). Representing those Christians—like many Atlantic readers, according to Sedgwick (7)—who still believed in the possibility of reform, the preacher nonetheless proves to be ineffectual as an agent of economic or spiritual salvation. He has only rhetoric; he has not the Christian works that Davis would identify with Christian salvation. Hugh finds his rhetoric moving, but Hugh does not find in the preacher one willing to suffer with him. As the narrator describes him, the preacher “meant to cure this world-cancer with a steady eye that had never glared with hunger, and a hand that neither poverty nor strychnine-whiskey had taught to shake” (49). According to Davis' Christian vision, the “steady eye” that sees but does not experience is not enough.

The preacher's image here, of course, is not biblical but romantic, recalling Emerson's “transparent eyeball” and his emphasis on correct vision as the means to overcome evil. That Davis alludes darkly to this romantic image and implicitly questions any theory that allows for passive noninvolvement is noteworthy. And certainly, as Kristen Boudreau has argued in another context, Davis rejects “the [Emersonian] mythology of bodily transcendence” that too easily dismisses the “‘real world’ located solidly in the body” (138, 131). Despite what seems like a romantic Christian ending, ultimately Davis aligns herself with the realists and, more importantly, with a radical Christianity that challenges mid-century, Calvinistic complacency about the poor. Clarity of vision is not enough for Davis. Impatient with romanticism, nineteenth-century Calvinistic Christianity, or any system that separates body from soul, laboring class from educated class, or the “vulgar” from the “cultured,” Davis refuses to allow her readers to distance themselves from the poor. The almshouse is no viable solution; neither is a facile Christian reformist mission founded upon idealism and condescension. What Davis asks for is a Christian vision very unlike that of her audience, and she tries to jar them through both irony and the language of romance.

This strategy becomes most apparent at the introduction of the Quaker woman at the end of the narrative. Here, the korl woman's question, introduced near the outset of the story, becomes embedded in the language of romance. The “terrible” question itself, articulated earlier as “What shall we do to be saved?” (35), is now, at the conclusion, “Is this the End? … nothing beyond?—no more?” (64). It is the same question, really, as that one asked earlier. And it has both political and spiritual overtones. The opening epigraph—of which the final question is partially a quotation—distinctly suggests this:

Is this the end?
O Life, as futile, then, as frail!
What hope of answer of redress?

(11)

Many of the educated, genteel readers of the Atlantic would have recognized the lines as being from Tennyson's poem, “In Memoriam” (1850), widely known in its day and the one mostly responsible for securing Tennyson's position as poet laureate. They would have recalled the speaker's conviction in the poem that faith alone can solve the problem of immortality (Tennyson apparently worried about the final destination of his friend, Arthur H. Hallam). But the lines in “Life” are not followed by Tennyson's answer, “Behind the veil, behind the veil” (sec. 56, 1. 28), words that capture a main thrust of the poem. Rather, in “Life” the paraphrased lines are removed from their context—and so removed, they begin to suggest a political response. “Redress” exemplifies the language of a court of law: it means “to set right,” “to rectify,” “to make amends for wrong deeds.” Hugh, of course, has already made amends for his wrong. He has paid for his deed of stealing: he has given up his life. As a grindingly realistic act of suicide—in abject despair, he cuts himself with a piece of tin and bleeds to death—Hugh's death is not redemptive. And only further incarceration or the almshouse (which itself was a form of incarceration) would await the helpless, hopeless Deb.

Until, of course, the entry of the Quaker woman. Three years later, Deb experiences not simply a spiritual resurrection—as Tennyson hoped for Hallam, as May might have hoped for Hugh. Rather, Deb gains a genuine friend, the Friend who comes “not too late” to help Deb “begin [her] life again” (63). But Davis is not suggesting that mere Christian kindness can solve social ills. Neither is she offering a spiritualized escapism as the ending to Deb's story. As Phaelzer mentions, “it is important to qualify the common interpretation of this ending as a fantasized escape from industrial history” because of commonly held notions about the Quakers at the time (Parlor Radical 52). That Davis chooses a Quaker and describes her the way she does undercuts any facile moral that might be drawn from “Life in the Iron Mills.”

Readers of the Atlantic in 1861 would have associated Quakers with abolitionism, prison reform, and social activism. Benjamin Lundy, Lloyd Garrison, and others ran abolitionist newspapers; still others were prominent in establishing the Underground Railways. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Quakers “for more than a century [had been] investigat[ing], case by case, their own poor, caring for the sick, the aged, the imprisoned, training the children, apprenticing the unskilled, gradually improving the social condition of the whole membership” (Sykes 204-05). Quaker employers pioneered welfare schemes for their factories and lessened the working hours of children so that they could attend to their studies. All in all, members of the Society of Friends were known for a broad humanitarianism, even if, as Peter Brock describes, they were also seen as peculiar for their practices, such as refusing to vote during the years of the Mexican war, not paying militia fines and thus being imprisoned in the 1830s and 40s, and vocally maintaining an anti-war stand. What is odd in this story is that the Quaker is figured so passively. She is no reformist actively working for change in American attitudes and public policy, as many Atlantic readers knew they were doing in the antebellum years. She is pictured worshipping in the Quaker meeting house, a stereotype familiar to non-Quaker readers of the day, but significantly, she is repeatedly described in the text as one who simply waits.

Three times the verb in some form is repeated. Joined by Deb in patience and silence, the Quaker woman waits. Certainly, as Phaelzer suggests, she is presented as a “figure of female endurance” in the story (Parlor Radical 51). But for what does she—and Deb—wait? The narrator names, for the Quaker, “the Spirit of Love to speak” (63). For Deb, the narrator ambiguously suggests that it is for “love denied her here” (64). The problem is that Deb has found love and sympathy in the community of Friends; she is said to be “much loved by these silent, restful people” (63). The sentence that follows helps somewhat to explain, but it, too, is ambiguous: she hopes to “find him whom she lost, and that then she will not be all-unworthy” (64). Who is this? Hugh? Christ?

The references to waiting, to “him,” and to hills together recall Psalm 121, surely well-known to Davis' Christian readers: “I lift mine eyes to the hills, from whence cometh my help,” the psalm begins. “My help cometh from the Lord. …” (vv. 1-2). Likewise, Davis' audience would have recalled Ps. 37: “Rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for him … [T]hose that wait upon the Lord, they shall inherit the earth” (vv. 7, 9); “the meek shall inherit the earth” and “shalt … dwell in the land, and verily … shalt be fed” (vv. 11, 3). In the context of the realism of the narrative, the reformist associations generated by the Quaker, and the biblical allusions pointing towards the materiality—not ethereality—of the Lord's help, the penultimate scene of “Life in the Iron Mills” begins to take on a political thrust. The powerless will inherit the earth, the text suggests; the disenfranchised wait for the day of justice and redress, which will occur either this side of Christ's return or the other.

That the Quaker description is immediately followed by a shift towards the physicality of the korl statue itself forecloses the escapist implications that Davis' audience might attach to the religious allusions. Likewise, Davis' own conception of Christian love is captured in the rhetorical shift between the two paragraphs. Spiritual reality involves physical work—thus the spiritual emphasis of the Quaker description gives way to a description of the korl statue itself, representative of Deb, its “bare arm stretched out imploringly,” its “eager, wolfish face,” and “pale, vague lips” that “seem to tremble” (64). Gesturing “soul hunger,” the statue speaks in its very physicality of a hunger that can only be satisfied through concrete, economic help. The juxtaposition of the romantic language—the description of the Quaker's home, even the final line of the narrative (“… God has set the promise of the Dawn”)—against the realism of the narrative should not be seen as a deep flaw in the story, as many critics have suggested, but as a demonstration of the problematic dichotomizing involved in the middle class's thinking about poverty. As Davis sees it, Hugh and Deb's dilemma is not simply a problem of either spiritual or economic poverty. Meeting spiritual needs can happen only through addressing men and women in their very physicality. No easy Christian or Emersonian mythology of bodily transcendence will do. Nor will a facile exhortation to embrace a Calvinist work ethic. The image of the Quaker waiting with Deb, who has exchanged her identity as a poor immigrant for that of a gray-garbed Quaker, itself suggests the importance of the values of community and interdependence in contrast to the Emersonian self-reliance and New England “pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps” mentality.

For that matter, not only is the salvation of the Wolfes at stake in “Life in the Iron Mills,” but also the eternal destiny of the 1861 Atlantic readers themselves. Given the particular religious understanding of Davis, we must conclude that the action called for in the story—for surely the narrative invites a deeply felt emotional response—has spiritual implications for the readers themselves. Saving faith must express itself in concrete, decisive deeds—in this case, the deeds of the Atlantic readers to secure their own salvation. When the korl woman figuratively asks, “What shall we do to be saved?,” the question is, or should be, the question of both the immigrant poor and the story's financially privileged readers. Through the irony of the question (“we” can mean all of us, not just the immigrant poor), Davis challenges the idea that the poor are responsible for their own poverty.

The idea that an individual should personally help a destitute person would have been astonishing to Davis' audience. First of all, the act would imply that indeed the impoverished woman was not responsible for her poverty, that the poverty was not a reflection of her moral character but the fault of larger social structures. If the poor were not expected to solve their own financial problems, if social welfare were the responsibility of the middle class, then the middle class (in this case, even the Christian middle class) was somehow responsible for poverty. They would be compelled to become personally engaged. That idea would be particularly disturbing in light of the middleclass logic that Deborah belongs in an almshouse. The middle class, after all, through the almshouse had taken steps to alleviate poverty—even if that solution was inadequate. Davis' choice of the Quaker, the true Friend who meets both physical and spiritual need, would have seemed a pointed challenge to Davis' audience.

As an individual from a group out of the mainstream, the Quaker benefactress operates much like the good Samaritan in Jesus' parable of Luke 10: 30-37, undercutting any self-congratulation that Davis' mainline Protestant audience might experience. The person who helps the poor in this story should have been a Presbyterian, an Episcopalian, a Unitarian—not the Quaker woman in her strange gray garb. Davis plays on Jesus' parabolic strategy: while Jesus highlights the probable antipathy between the Samaritan and the listeners of the parable, Davis similarly structures her American “parable” by featuring as the helper to Deb someone more or less outside of the readers' group. The potential helpers presented in “Life”—Mitchell, Kirby, and May—mirror the audience in beliefs, ideology, and economic status. Like the priest and the Levite of Jesus' story, however, they prove to be exemplars of failure, outdone by the individual from a minority sect. As Jesus did in his own parable, Davis disallows the middle and privileged classes from seeing their own story inscribed in “Life in the Iron Mills.”

And yet—Davis is not suggesting that mere Christian kindness can solve social ills. The note of hope offered in the final lines hardly seems justified. The religious solution seems too easy. The narrator can laud the Quaker woman for her acts of kindness, and indeed the Quaker seems to deserve the Atlantic readership's commendation. She is the only character in the story to demonstrate any kind of active Christianity. But one Quaker's quiet, sympathetic gestures—especially as those are offered in a context of passive waiting—hardly seem enough. The Quaker's waiting for a Messiah, or for a better day, seems shallow and inadequate as a response to poverty within the larger context of the story's grinding realism. The conclusion of the story, beginning with the entrance of the Quaker, seems too easy to be satisfying, not only to us who encounter the story more than a century after its initial publication, but also to the original readers, who were wealthy, educated, benevolent, wise enough to know that the problems of poverty cannot easily be solved. If there indeed is “a promise of the Dawn,” as the narrator somewhat hastily concludes, such pious rhetoric seems disturbingly inadequate as a solution to the real problems of these immigrant laborers.

And that is precisely the point. I would argue that Davis wants her readers to feel the tension of the last scene. Mere Christian benevolence by a smattering of individuals cannot solve social ills. It may help relieve the pain of poverty for a while, but it is no lasting solution. If the story had ended earlier, just before the introduction of the Quaker at Hugh's jail, we could consider Christian kindness and prayer as adequate responses: surely that would be the effect evoked, the benevolent, liberal Christian audience moved to sympathy and prayer (as May was) for people like the Wolfes. But Davis, impatient with naive Emersonianism and smug Christian benevolence, means to jar an audience entrenched in a well-meaning yet passive Christianity born of a Calvinistic work ethic and cosmology that would put the poor in heart and pocketbook out of the moral reach of the generously endowed. I want to argue that Davis desires that her readers go beyond even the Quaker woman in their active intervention in impoverished people's lives and perhaps in public policy itself.

The narrator, in the romantic language of the final paragraph, extends the portrait of stasis begun with the Quaker who waits. But this time, the image is profoundly disturbing: the narrator reflects on some half-completed tasks for the coming day—a sculpture, a bough of leaves, music, and other “homely fragments” (65)—all trivial items next to the task of intervening in social welfare history. The korl statue itself, the most important emblem of the story, remains veiled, the narrator finding the “desperate need” it expresses too powerful to contemplate (65). Weakly, in unconvincing romantic language, the narrator seems to suggest Tennyson's solution to the “terrible questions” raised by Deb and Hugh: in the “East” (a metaphor commonly associated with Christ), “God has set the promise of the Dawn” (65). Is an afterlife—union with Christ (signified by the “East”)—the best that the poor can hope for?

Surely, as the line implies, the answer does lie in the future, but the question that the korl woman poses at the end makes the most compelling point: “Is this the End?” (64). Although the naive, middleclass narrator seems to believe that Tennysonian hope can serve as an adequate solution, the tension of the narrative suggests that Davis herself is unsure of the destiny of the poor if her contemporaries continue their present policy. She writes to highlight the plight of the poor, to frustrate economically secure readers with examples of their own romanticizing about poverty, and urge on them a profoundly active solution: their own personal intervention in changing social structures. The ending is straightforward—the text does call for active Christian involvement, as the Quaker exemplifies. And the conclusion is also ironic—simple, kind gestures are not enough. The problem calls for structural change. The Quaker waits, looking to the hills. How will the poor realize “the promise of the Dawn” that Davis refers to (65)? Through their own political uprising? Through death and an afterlife? Through the return of Christ? Most likely, given Davis' own theological leanings, the assumptions she knows she must counter, and the realism of the narrative itself, Davis is suggesting an answer far more immediate and attainable: the poor will be “saved” when the middle class actively and personally intervenes in the lives of the poor and in social policy. Through the figure of the Quaker woman, Davis jars her audience much the way that Jesus of Nazareth jarred his own audience in presenting the marginalized Samaritan to offer help to the down-and-out. Even the middleclass narrator fails; that figure is outdone by the Quaker. To the Atlantic readers, no wholly satisfactory solution would seem to be presented in the story; the incompletion gives a jarring effect, the story continuing the parabolic strategy of direct challenge to complacent readers.

In “Life in the Iron Mills,” Davis plays on the very ideals and prejudices of the group she knows so well—the humanistic readers of the privileged class and New England legacy—to shake them free from a complacent, facile Christianity. Through irony, parable, and a manipulation of literary discourses, Davis moves her readers past the easy rhetorical solution of Dr. May (“Make yourself what you will” [37]) to consider—and themselves outdo—the Quaker's expression of an individual act of Christian kindness. By risking identification with the poor through including Deb within the community, the benefactress experiences the Kingdom of God already. She lives according to the ethic of Jesus, not that competitive, survivalist ethic of the nineteenth-century capitalistic marketplace. To the Atlantic readers, her way of life would seem radical, odd—and offensive. Her example, juxtaposed against the disturbing romanticizing by the narrator in the final lines, in fact represents the dawn of a new era. In essence, she lives in accord with the spirit of the age to come. She represents a kind of judgment against all those who carry on with their selfish greed, smug Christian benevolence, and cold Calvinist work ethic. Surely, Rebecca Harding Davis is trying to have it both ways: the hope of eternal salvation for Deb, yes, but also active social intervention on the part of her audience. She wants to secure the spiritual and the physical survival of the immigrant poor and, in effect, the salvation of readers themselves.

Notes

1. Ellery Sedgwick's The Atlantic Monthly, 1857-1909: Yankee Humanism at High Tide and Ebb (1994), is the first detailed treatment of the publishing history of the Atlantic. I am indebted to Sedgwick's study for this essay.

2. The Atlantic was bought late in 1859 by Ticknor and Fields, the publishing firm. The first two underwriters of the magazine had died suddenly in 1859, leaving the magazine in financial straits. James Russell Lowell continued as editor after the buyout but resigned in May, 1861 (the month after Davis's piece appeared), apparently out of irritation by the close supervisory practice of Fields but also, perhaps, out of some differences with Fields about the direction of the magazine. Davis' piece was accepted in January, 1861; Fields formally took over the editorship in May. The Atlantic retained (and in some ways enhanced) its prestigious and influential position under Fields. For a discussion of the transition between editors, see Sedgwick 64-67.

3. As Tillie Olson has so aptly pointed out, the “commonplace” that Davis chose as her topic “was nowhere in books” at the time. Herman Melville had considered the subject in his 1855 “Tartarus of Maids,” but Davis' story is the first extended treatment. Jean Pfaelzer points out that Davis in fact “introduced the industrial revolution of American literature” (234), preceding such naturalists as Dreiser and Glasgow in presenting a story of implicit and explicit working-class rebellion (236).

4. It is this edition that I shall refer to, with page numbers given parenthetically for my references.

5. Indeed, in the first wave of scholarship after 1972, critics attempted to identify continuities and breaks with the romantic and realistic literary traditions. For a sample of the critical discussions on this topic, see Sharon Harris, “Rebecca Harding Davis: From Romanticism to Realism”; also Walter Hesford, who discusses the story as “extend[ing] the accomplishments of the romance” (70), particularly Hawthorne's romance; Judith Fetterley, 306-42, who sees the story as having primary affinity with the romance; and Jean Phaelzer, who moves the text closer to the realistic novels of the century.

6. A recent sampling of this criticism includes Richard A. Hood, “Framing a ‘Life in the Iron Mills’”; William H. Shurr, “Life in the Iron-Mills: A Nineteenth-Century Conversion Narrative”; Kirk Carnutt, “Direct Addresses, Narrative Authority, and Gender in Rebecca Harding Davis' ‘Life in the Iron Mills.’”

7. Kahn dismisses the story for what she sees as a “vague hinting” at “some doctrinal, probably Christian answer” to the meaning behind the Wolfes' suffering. Similarly, James C. Austin maintains that “Life” depicts “in realistic detail the lot of the mill workers, whose only hope is a pitying God” (45). John Conron admires Davis' realism but feels the “gestures” of the characters are “elaborately sentimentalized” (488); he goes on to dismiss the whole story out of hand.

8. The story was originally published in the Atlantic Monthly, beginning in October 1861, and was published between covers in February 1862.

9. For a review of key details of Davis' publication of the story, see Olsen 85-87, and Sedgwick 96.

10. The actual numbers of immigrants arriving in the U.S. are as follows: 538,381 in the 1830s; 1,427,337 in the 1840s; 2,814,554 in the 1850s (the peak decade); 2,084,201 in the 1860s (despite the war years). My figures are from Axinn 35.

11. This was due to the necessity of paying cash for needed raw materials; an owner would discover that he could dispose of his finished product only on long credits or in exchange for goods, not money. The situation in the iron industry was further aggravated by transportation problems—droughts or floods that interrupted navigation on the Ohio River.

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