five more voices
~ five writers, each issue ~
generations of West Virginia creative writing
You're invited
to feel proud!
What is this?
Click the "About" tab
Rebecca Harding Davis:
Her stories shocked people.
At a time when women weren't supposed to talk about such things, Rebecca Harding Davis spotlighted brutal lives in the textile and iron mills, mental hospitals, domestic abuse, and prostitution.
The smoke covers everything, she wrote. “It rolls sullenly in slow folds from the great chimneys of the iron-foundries, and settles down in black, slimy pools on the muddy streets. Smoke on the wharves, smoke on the dingy boats, on the yellow river,—clinging in a coating of greasy soot to the house-front, the two faded poplars, the faces of the passers-by. The long train of mules, dragging masses of pig-iron through the narrow street, have a foul vapor hanging to their reeking sides.”
​​
So begins Rebecca Harding Davis’ Life in the Iron Mills, published more than 160 years ago, in 1861. In that year, 13 Wheeling iron mills were belching out soot, night and day. The prestigious Atlantic Magazine serialized Rebecca's book, but they didn’t put her name on it. The author was listed as “Anonymous.” At that time, non-famous women writers were often published with no writer credit.​​​​​
​
Rebecca Harding Davis would not stay Anonymous for long. Life in the Iron Mills, the first of her 13 novels and novellas, was a surprise national smash hit. The story shocked people. They wanted to know more. After that first Atlantic story, almost all Rebecca's books were published by major publishers, with her name on them.
It was a time when readers wanted to know about justice and injustice. The Civil War had just begun. There was a Union headquarters right across the street from Rebecca’s house, where she lived with her parents. Slavery was hotly debated on every corner. Giant iron mills were springing up in Wheeling, supplying 24/7 back-breaking work to a largely-immigrant work force. The smoke covered everything.
The huge Wheeling iron mills hired thousands of men at low pay, mostly immigrants, to do back-breaking work needed 24/7, to supply a nation hungry for the iron needed for westward expansion and eastern development.
Rebecca Harding Davis was in her twenties. She felt called to write about the mill workers who passed by her front door every day, “the slow stream of human life creeping past, night and morning, to the great mills. Masses of men, with dull, besotted faces bent to the ground, sharpened here and there by pain or cunning; skin and muscle and flesh begrimed with smoke and ashes; stooping all night over boiling caldrons of metal, laired by day in dens of drunkenness and infamy; breathing from infancy to death an air saturated with fog and grease and soot, vileness for soul and body.”
She championed immigrant workers like Hugh and Deborah Wolfe, the main characters of Life in the Iron Mills. The daughter of a prosperous businessman, she could have spent her life in polite Wheeling society. Instead, she managed to get a job as a writer at the local newspaper, something women didn't do in the 1860s.
She started writing fictional books to engage readers in stories that made it easier for them see - and feel for - people trapped in worlds most readers had never known: the iron mills, textile mills, houses of prostitution, mental hospitals. Today, she is recognized as the mother of American fictional realism. In her 1904 autobiography, Bits of Gossip, she wrote that “It always has seemed to me that each human being, before going out into the silence, should leave behind him, not the story of his own life, but of the time in which he lived.”
She set an example for other women who wanted to write. She meant her fictional stories to take American readers into worlds many didn’t know existed and help them see what people were forced to deal with, day after day. The publisher of her 1862 novel, Margaret Howth, describes that book as “a milestone of American letters” that “introduced the working class heroine and the burgeoning industrial revolution into US fiction."
​
Hugh and Deborah Wolfe
​
Life in the Iron Mills tracks one night in the life of 19-year-old mill worker, Hugh Wolfe and his cousin Deborah. Deborah works at a textile mill. Hugh exhausts himself in backbreaking work in the iron mills. They share a dank basement sleeping room. Hugh dreams of being a sculptor. He has talent. Exhausted after his shifts, he practices sculpting with Korl, a waxy waste-product of pig-iron, all he has available. He creates a statue of a woman beside his work station, not classically beautiful, but powerful.
As the story starts, the narrator says, “I am going to be honest. This is what I want you to do. I want you to hide your disgust, take no heed to your clean clothes, and come right down with me, into the thickest of the fog and mud and foul effluvia. I want you to hear this story.”
​
In this excerpt, Deborah, after working all day, is walking to the iron mill, taking Hugh some potato soup for dinner.
​
“By night and day the work goes on, the unsleeping engines groan and shriek, the fiery pools of metal boil and surge. Only for a day in the week, in half-courtesy to public censure, the fires are partially veiled. But as soon as the clock strikes midnight, the great furnaces break forth with renewed fury, the clamor begins with fresh, breathless vigor, the engines sob and shriek like gods in pain.
​
As Deborah hurried down through the heavy rain, the noise of these thousand engines sounded through the sleep and shadow of the city like far-off thunder. The mill to which she was going lay on the river, a mile below the city limits. It was far, and she was weak, aching from standing twelve hours at the spools. Yet it was her almost nightly walk to take this man his supper, though at every square, she sat down to rest, and she knew she should receive small word of thanks…
​
“The road leading to the mills had been quarried from the solid rock, which rose abrupt and bare on one side of the cinder-covered road, while the river, sluggish and black, crept past on the other. The mills for rolling iron are simple immense tent-like roofs, covering acres of ground, open on every side.
Beneath these roofs, Deborah looked in on a city of fires, that burned hot and fiercely in the night. Fire in every horrible form: pits of flame waving in the wind; liqued metal-flames writhing in tortuous streams through the sand; wide caldrons filled with boiling fire, over which bent ghastly wretches stirring the strange brewing; and through all, crowds of half-clad men, looking like revengeful ghosts in the red light, hurried, throwing masses of glittering fire. It was like a street in Hell.” ​
Cutline. Name of artist, descriptiion of what they're doing. A rolling mill
Deborah finds Hugh at the mill, working at his job as a puddler. A puddler must lift large chunks of pig iron into a furnace, then stir the iron as the impurities burn out, then lift the hot glob out of the furnace when it is ready.
While Deborah is there, a group of men including the owner's son and the town doctor are touring the mill. In the dark, they are startled by the sight of Hugh's korl sculpture of the woman beside his work station. One of them tells Hugh he could be a great sculptor. Hugh asks him "Will you help me?" The story spins from there, with disastrous results for Hugh.
.A puddler stirring red hot pig iron. Hugh, in her story was a puddler. Courtesy Haggbridge.com
“It always has seemed to me that each human being, before going out into the silence, should leave behind him, not the story of his own life, but of the time in which he
lived.” ~ Rebecca Harding Davis, Bits of Gossip
Profoundly impacted by industrialization
When Rebecca Harding Davis was a girl, there were no mills in Wheeling. Before her eyes, her peaceful childhood village changed into a crowded, soot-stained mill town. She saw - and felt - the impact of early industrialization up close. It affected her profoundly as a person and as a writer. The town she knew as a child, she wrote, had “two sleepy streets lined with Lombardy poplars, creeping between a slow-moving river and silent, brooding hills. Important news from the world outside was brought to us, when necessary, by a man on a galloping horse. … There were no railroads, no automobiles or trolleys, no telegraphs, no sky-scraping houses. ... Not a single man in the country was the possessor of huge accumulations of money such as are so common now.”
But the Wheeling area, located on the Ohio River, with extensive deposits of iron ore, was attracting wealthy northern industrialists. Westward expansion and the Civil War were creating a booming demand for iron products.
By 1818, the National Road had reached Wheeling, opening up traffic.
Wheeling children were fascinated by stagecoach passengers getting
onto steamboats at the wharf. Conestoga wagons drawn by horses
clattered through the streets, headed west. By 1834, Wheeling’s first
iron mill and railroad depot were built, opening up additional shipping.
By 1880, blast furnaces ran hot and bright all night in 13 iron mills, with
no regulation and frequent accidents. Immigrants from many different
countries worked together under dangerous, brutal conditions, for extremely low pay.
​
Many mill owners did not live there. Watching it happen, Rebecca concluded that the people who ran the mills thought little about - and of - the people who worked there and tried to live there. Given her position in the town, she could have ignored it, but as a writer, she wanted others to see what she saw. As she wrote in her memoir, “It would require a significant failure of empathy to mistake the fiery mills, with their monotonous din and uncertain glare for humane workplaces.”
From anonymous to famous
Rebecca Harding seems never to have doubted that women can and should write if they want, about what they want. There were no schools, so her mother had taught her at home. She read the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe and other women writers. In her '20s, she talked her way onto the otherwise male staff of the The Wheeling Intelligencer, which published her articles and poems without her name. She didn’t get married till her thirties (?), so she was called a spinster at age 28.
After Life in the Iron Mills became a literary sensation, Rebecca Harding was no longer anonymous. People in Wheeling were startled to find the spinster who worked for the newspaper was serializing a hot novella in the prestigious Atlantic Monthly. It established her as a member of the growing American literary scene.
In 1862, she was invited to Boston by her publisher, who wanted to meet her. She spent time with people like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Louisa May Alcott, and stayed at the home of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne called her “a brave new voice.” Much as she enjoyed their company, she was unimpressed by – and disagreed with - the New England Transcendentalist movement, which focused on the ephemeral beauty of the world. Rebecca reflected their definition of “beauty of the world” did not include the ugliness and hurdles many people had to face. In her memoir, she wrote, “[t]heir theories were like beautiful bubbles blown from a child’s pipe, floating overhead, with queer reflections on them of sky and earth and human beings, all in a glow of fairy color and all a little distorted.”
On that trip, she met Clarke Davis, a young lawyer, just starting out. She married him the following year, becoming Rebecca Harding Davis, and moved to his home in Philadelphia. While he built his law practice, she brought money for the family, working as a writer and editor for the New York Tribune. For twenty years, she was a regular contributor to The Atlantic, Saturday Evening Post, and Scribners, among other magazines.
Twenty years later, in the 1880s, as the family finances tightened, Rebecca had to write higher-paying romance stories to bolster the family budget. She had less time to write about social injustices she wanted to explore. In her memoir, she said she was glad to give her children a good start in life. At the same time, she warned her son, writer Richard Harding Davis, never to do "hack work for money."
In her lifetime, she wrote 12 published novels or novellas (little novels), 15 short fictional stories, and hundreds of other written works. Her journalistic writing about mental illness in Pennsylvania led to major reforms in the state's institutional practices. But after she died at age 79, in 1910, her literary contributions were largely forgotten for more than 100 years.
Her story doesn’t end there.
In the 1970s, a well-known writer, Tillie Olsen, randomly bought an April 1861 issue of The Atlantic Monthly in a thrift store. Inside, she found Life in the Iron Mills. The story stunned her. She was even more stunned when she found that a woman had written it.
​
At the time, Olsen had started to outline her master work, Silences, about social forces that keep talented women from writing. In that tattered copy of The Atlantic, Olsen discovered that a woman from present-day West Virginia, wrote with passion in the 1860s. Life in the Iron Mills was further proof, she wrote that women raised powerful voices in Civil War times, and that “a single woman can speak with the many voices of the silenced, and can call others to speak, too.”
​
Olsen compared Life in the Iron Mills to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and
vowed to help bring Rebecca Harding Davis’ important work back into public consciousness.
In 1972, under her direction, Life in the Iron Mills was re-published in book form by the
Feminist Press, and new generations of readers and scholars discovered it. In 2022, the Press
published a 50th-anniversary edition. Reviewers recognized Rebecca Harding Davis as a
foundational American writer.
​
“You must read this book and let your heart be broken.” —New York Times Book Review
​
“One of the earliest recognitions in American literature of the existence of the very poor.” —National Observer
​
“A thought-provoking volume for anyone interested in the evolution of women’s fiction.” —Kirkus Reviews
​
“An American classic that foreshadowed the naturalist technique of later nineteenth-century writers.” —San Francisco Chronicle
Today, Life in the Iron Mills is recognized as an pioneering classic of American literary realism. “Early efforts in the field of literary journalism are today attributed mainly to male writers such as Stephen Crane, Mark Twain, and Richard Harding Davis, with few mentions of their female predecessors," Robin Cadwallader wrote in Women’s Studies in 2020. "However, thirty years before Crane published Maggie, a Girl of the Streets (1893), Rebecca Harding Davis’ The Promise of the Dawn had already enlightened readers … Before there was Richard Harding Davis – world-renowned journalist, war correspondent and storyteller – there was Rebecca.”
​
In her home state, West Virginia, Rebecca Harding Davis is still largely unknown. It is our aim to help change that.
​
Rebecca’s son, Richard Harding Davis, became one of the most celebrated journalists of his day, as a war correspondent and storyteller. For his mother’s 70th birthday, he wrote this tribute: “From the day you struck the first blow for labor in The Iron Mills,” he wrote, “with all the good the novels, the stories brought to people, you were always making the ways straighter, lifting up people, making them happier and healthier. No woman did better for her time than you.”
​
Like his mother, Richard Harding Davis was known for fearless reporting.
Kate Long wrote this story with major help from Wheeling historian and cultural scholar Christina Fisanik.
