“There is a secret down here, in this nightmare fog”: Urban-Industrial Gothic in Nineteenth-Century American Periodicals

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Acknowledgments

Special thanks to the staff at the American Antiquarian Society and the Center for Lowell History (particularly librarian Martha Mayo) for assistance in locating many of the nineteenth-century documents I cite in this study. I am also grateful to librarian Judith Ranta for her research and suggestions.

Notes

¹ Sources differ on the specific dollar value of the estate: Todd claims $8000 (74), a 1904 newspaper account claims $6000 (“Memorial of Louisa Wells” 2), and a 1936 newspaper claims that twenty years after her death, it was worth “between $7,000 and $8,000” (Coburn 2).

² Today French is best known for creating the figure of Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial (1920).

³ For more on Mount Auburn and the development of rural cemeteries, see Stanley French’s “The Cemetery as Cultural Institution: The Establishment of Mount Auburn and the ‘Rural Cemetery.’”

⁴ A few of the many examples of Gothic characters who experience extreme grief after the death of loved ones include Mary Shelley’s Matilda over her father who killed himself (in Matilda), Ann Radcliffe’s Adeline over an unknown murder victim (who turns out to be her father) in The Romance of the Forest, and Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly over his murdered best friend, Waldegrave (in Edgar Huntly).

⁵ See Franz Potter’s The History of Gothic Publishing, 1800–1835: Exhuming the Trade and Katherine Harris’s The Forgotten Gothic: Short Stories from British Literary Annuals.

⁶ Larcom surely prepared herself well for her own future; she would go on to become an accomplished writer and poet, and published numerous pieces in The Atlantic Monthly starting in 1863, including “Among Lowell Mill Girls: A Reminisce” (1881).

⁷ In The History of Gothic Publishing, Potter emphasizes the importance of circulating libraries to the Gothic. His reassessment of the Gothic through investigations into the catalogs of circulating libraries in England “illustrate[s] the continued and sustained interest of Gothic fiction well into the 1830s despite a decline in the publication of the Gothic” (24). As he suggests, “older Gothic novels remained in constant circulation” (9). Potter’s research is focused on British circulating libraries, but Robinson’s comments suggest that the same may also be true of such libraries in the United States.

⁸ See Claire Kahane’s “The Gothic Mirror” for another approach to explaining female readers’ attraction to the Gothic. Her focus on the motherlessness of many Gothic heroine/victims has a parallel in some ways with the girls working in Lowell, most of whom were far from their mothers (and fathers) and often sought out mother-figures among older girls and boardinghouse keepers.

⁹ Knight learned about the Lowell Offering from British writer and activist Harriet Martineau, who visited the Lowell mills in the 1830s. Martineau also discussed and promoted The Offering in her article “Female Industry” in The Edinburgh Review (April 1859). For more on Martineau, see Maria H. Frawley’s “Behind the Scenes of History: Harriet Martineau and The Lowell Offering.”

¹⁰ Labor activist Sarah Bagley accused the editors of rejecting work (hers) that presented unpleasant portraits of the mills. See Adickes’s “Mind Among the Spindles: An Examination of Some of the Journals, Newspapers, and Memoirs of the Lowell Female Operatives” on the generally positive spin that The Offering put on the lives of operatives. As she explains, articles in the journal frequently present “an idealized picture of factory life” (281) and “a romanticized view of Lowell life” (282). See also Lori Merish’s “Factory Labor and Literary Aesthetics: The ‘Lowell Mill Girl,’ Popular Fiction, and the Proletarian Grotesque” for a discussion of the Farley v. Bagley debates and of romanticized portrayals of factory life in the Offering.

¹¹ Sylvia Jenkins Cook makes a similar argument in Working Women, Literary Ladies: “Although many of the contributions to the Offering are conventional in the extreme, some of the authors show a keen awareness of the Romantic literary context of the times, while others begin to develop incipient modes of literary realism” (10). She further suggests “I believe that the women factory writers for the Lowell Offering were similarly contributing to the development of realism, particularly in their acute literary consciousness of the impact of money and materialism on everyday life” (261 n. 6).

¹² Although the story itself has no signature at all, Harriet Farley later published selected stories and poems from her Offering material in Shells from the Strand of the Sea of Genius (1847), where she explains in the Preface that should sales of this volume warrant it, she will release a second series of her stories, to include “Garfilena,” from which we can conclude that it is also among her own contributions. Judith Ranta also attributes the story to Farley.

¹³ This proposed “observant tourist” setting of the story recalls the opening incident of Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian, with the English tourists finding themselves curious about a large and impressive church.

¹⁴ Garfilena sounds remarkably like Elizabeth Lavenza, Mary Shelley’s character in the 1831 version of Frankenstein, who Victor Frankenstein describes as “my more than sister—the beautiful and adored companion of all my occupations and my pleasures” (35). Like Lavenza, Garfilena is strikingly beautiful, of unknown parentage, and adopted into a wealthy family with a young male child of the same age who presumes that she will become his bride.

¹⁵ Garfilena’s innocence and deep bond with nature bring to mind Sibella of Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy, or the Ruin on the Rock (1795); Father Niklas’s character echoes Radcliffe’s Schedoni in The Italian.

¹⁶ In Davis’s story, it is suggested that Kirby controls the votes of the twelve hundred men who work in his mill (28).

¹⁷ Some of the girls wrote of the fact that the large number of women was actually one of the advantages of Lowell. Lucy Larcom, for instance, claimed “To me, it was an incalculable help to find myself among so many working-girls, all of us thrown upon our own resources, but thrown much more upon each others’ sympathies” (178–79).

¹⁸ Martineau was visiting from England, where certainly workers did not have it easy either; however, “By the 1840s, the degraded British textile workers had won a sixty-nine-hour week, with six annual holidays; the Lowell factory week had been extended to seventy-five hours, with four holidays, while wages for piecework kept dropping” (Eisler 36).

¹⁹ Walter Hesford claims that “the significance of ‘Life in the Iron-Mills’ can better be appreciated by setting it in several other literary contexts: The achievement of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the writer to whom Davis owed most; the tradition of the social novel; the religious, apocalyptic bias of mid-nineteenth-century American literature” (70), but he ignores the Gothic context of the tale. Charles Crow’s History of the Gothic: American Gothic only briefly mentions that it has “its own Gothic elements” (103).

²⁰ See Ruth Stoner’s “Sexing the Narrator: Gender in Rebecca Harding Davis’s ‘Life in the Iron-Mills’” for a useful review of the ongoing debate over who is the narrator of this story.

²¹ All quotations from the text of Davis’s story are from the edition edited by Tillie Olsen (1972), which follows the original Atlantic Monthly version of the story. See Janice Lasseter’s “The Censored and Uncensored Literary Lives of Life in the Iron-Mills” for discussion of material excised from this version by the Atlantic.

²² Melville’s “The Paradise of Bachelors and The Tartarus of Maids,” which was published in Harpers in April 1855, portrays similarly disturbing factory conditions: The narrator passes through a “Dantean Gateway” to reach the “Devil’s Dungeon paper-mill” (94); the noise of the machinery is described as “the low, steady, overruling hum of the iron animals” (99), which silences the human workers, who “serve mutely” (99); the air quality is described as “stifling” in the rag-room where, “the air swam with the fine, poisonous particles” (100).

²³ A quick review of Atlantic archives shows numerous tales and poems in the Gothic mode, including works by Henry James and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, to name a few.