Rebecca Harding Davis: Life in the Iron-Mills

"A morbid, gloomy man, untaught, unled, left to feed his soul on grossness and crime, and hard grinding labor."

Hugh Wolf, the main character in a story by Rebecca Harding Davis, is summed up in the passage above. "Life in the Iron-Mills" tells the story of a nineteenth century factory town... of the poverty and darkness of its people, and of an utter helplessness.

After reading this story, I had the urge to look back in my journal archives, back to English 48B, to an entry on Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. Davis' "Iron-Mills" left me with such a similar feeling to that which I had of Maggie, and I find myself wanting to say almost exactly the same thing as I did then, about how an unfortunate character of unfortunate circumstances has a faint glimmer of hope, and that if one person had just reached out to help, maybe the character could've found a way out of despair. The two stories are so similar, it felt as if they could've taken place on the same grimy streets, in the same dark alleys, and at the same old mills. While they were set a few decades apart, the subject matter is the same, and I tend to think both authors had the same intention in writing such stories, to reach out to a blinded higher class who needed an awakening to this dank underground, where actual people lived and labored... people who had names and faces, and families and lives.












A piece on "Iron-Mills" at Novelguide.com pointedly concludes that through writing the story, Davis "introduced American literary realism and at the same time provided the first scathing critique of industrial capitalism by showing the price a nation pays for depending on technology in the name of progress."
Perhaps literary realism's ultimate purpose is to make people wake up and smell the rank darkness they would otherwise go on ignoring, or would remain unaware of.