Summary Of Lyddie By Katherine Paterson

People make decisions about how their lives should be sometimes. The book in which this essay is referring to is Lyddie written Katherine Paterson. In this book Lyddie, a young to teenage (fictional) girl has sent her family to live with her uncle as her and her brother stay at the farm. Later on in this process her mother sends Lyddie and her brother to work in different places and Lyddie ended up in a factory, after awhile she moved to a different factory in Lowell Massachusetts and in that factory there is a petition to better improve the factory, working to be specific. If you sign the petition you could lose you job and get blacklisted which meant you wouldn’t be able to work in any other factories in the city or town in which you got

Lyddie was the type of girl who had to get things done, on page 88 of the book where it says “She must work harder.” In the text Lyddie pushes herself to work harder than expected which is believed to create stress which, stress is not a pleasant to anybody. Also on page 88 it states “Could she have forgotten me and charlie?” At this point in the novel, Lyddies little sister has passed away and during her mourning stage she believes that possibly she has forgotten about Lyddie and her brother because they have been working away from the family for so long. She was not able to go and visit her family because of the fact she was working in the factory but if she were to sign the petition she could go and be with her family again before there is no family to go back to. Later on in the story, Lyddie had just brought up a new hobbie. She was learning to read after one of her roommates started to read to her from the classic Oliver Twist. Unfortunately on the ninety-eighth page of Lyddie, it states “She was too tired now to copy out a page of Oliver to paste to her loom.” Due to her working hours, Lyddie had copied the pages and pasted them one by one on her loom. The looms were currently sped up and Lyddie pushed herself to work harder than before to keep making produce at a fast rate to get paid good amounts. So in effect to this, Lyddie is so exhausted and tired out she can’t even keep up on doing things that

First of all, in the factory there was a lot of sickness going around. Which for some people, it was deadly. In fact in the text it says “She had been coughing a dry, painful cough through the night that kept both Betsy and Amelia awake, though not Lyddie.” Lyddie’s roommate has just come down with a sickness and she ends up getting sent home. Being in the same room as her meant Lyddie’s risk of getting sick increased and she couldn’t afford to lose her job at that point. On top of this her overseer had a odd liking to Lyddie. He even attempted to get a little bit physical towards her. On the 129th page in the book, it says “She tried to pull back from him, but he clutched tighter.” Mr.Marston her overseer had stopped Lyddie and asked her to wait until all of the other workers had left then he grabbed her and wouldn’t let her go. She was already sick and weak. She stomped on his foot to get away before he could hurt her more. Her overseer has access to Lyddie and her job every single day. He could fire her or even do something worse to her at any point in time. At this point, Lyddie’s other young sister had just been dropped of to her at the factory which brings a whole new set of problems including the following “...That wretched hacking sound that sawed through her rib cage.” Lyddie’s sister has just became sick from the job she does which both puts her and