What Is The Theme Of Life In The Iron Mills By Rebecca Harding Davis

Rebecca Harding Davis, is the author of the “Life in the Iron Mills”, published in 1861. Davis’s goal was to encourage social reform not just for women and the working class, also was directly involve for black people and immigrants as well. In this book we can see the bad life of the workers that labored in the mills and factories among the US in that period of time “Industrial Revolution”, bad treatment from part of the owners, poor safety during their hard work and so on.

The Industrial Revolution, as a whole, it’s very conflictive, because it has good and bad things. The industrial Revolution was an era that things started to improve quickly, it changed the agrarian, handicraft and local economy to a machine manufacturing, also an efficient

Also during that time, people were desperate for work, people did not care about their well-being at the beginning, and business people saw an opportunity there, they were looking at this poor and money needed people as tools. Other pros that we can find in the industrial revolution is that the people was motivated for a change and competition started as well. Behind all that work were the workers, not just men, also were involved women and children. In the industrial revolution child labor was a huge issue. These workers worked in terrible conditions, they needed to work almost the whole day and without breaks. Other feature of the Industrial Revolution is the pollution that the factories brought, Jill Gatlin states in his article, “At the time of Davis’s writing, those who considered environmental pollutants hazardous typically cited their moral as well as physical dangers”. This statement shows that workers were exposed to every kind of hazard without any protection, workers often suffered injuries such as broken bones or finger lost. How the Industrial Revolution was just starting, people were not aware about this problem, pollution contaminated rivers that passed

Hugh was born into poverty and also he is a mill worker since childhood. Hugh character is good, he has good values, and his co workers say that he should not work there, that he is too good for it, in the sense of morality and respect. The story describes the love that Huge has for Deborah, but it is a love of admiration, is not that he is in love with her. In spite of his long hours at the mills, he has an artistic talent this talent is to sculpt out of korl, this talent is going to be crucial in of one the parts of this story and what is Rebecca Davis trying to show the