'Life In the Iron Mills' Told of the Suffering of America's Working Classes

“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 novel, Life in the Iron Mills. 159 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, grey lines carved into the haggard faces of passers-by. 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 the U.S. West Coast strangling whole towns.

The white-hot wave of industrialization and urbanization that swept the globe in the 19th century revolutionized the way that human beings work, live, consume, and die, 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 outside. After the great change, laborers flooded into cities in search of work. They found work, alright — but as Davis illustrates, all too often, these workers ended up paying a heavy price.

Class divisions were redrawn like battle lines, with wealthy capitalists and industrialists indulging their whims for gorgeous mansions while the poor and working classes were squeezed into rickety boarding houses, 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 19th 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 U.S. 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 no one in the middle and upper classes was listening to what to 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.

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