Life in the Iron Mills is a short story written by Rebecca Harding Davis in 1861, set in the factory world of the nineteenth century.

[1][2] It was immediately recognized as an innovative work, and introduced American readers to "the bleak lives of industrial workers in the mills and factories of the nation.

[5] "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, - as he saw it, - its creed, its purpose, its queer habits, and the work which it did or left undone in the world."

Rebecca Harding Davis wrote Life in the Iron Mills and other short stories to represent the events going on around her during the era of the American Civil War.

[8] Life in the Iron Mills received much attention during her lifetime; she was also recognized by several literary figures[8] including as Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Amos Bronson Alcott, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Henry Ward Beecher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

According to Gregory Hadley, Davis's writings were partly shaped by the renewed interest of Christianity called the Second Great Awakening, which emphasizes on Personal Faith that was defined on repentance, believed Christ as the Savior, and live according to the Bible and Social Action.

Davis' writings had focused on problems that Christians of her time were concerned with; slavery, work exploitation, equal education, and justice for women.

Until the 1840s well-to-do entrepreneurs established new mills and factories through their own finances because banks usually did not invest in industry or make loans to manufacturers.

Industry thrived until the panic of 1837, originating in Britain, which affected investments in the United States, resulting in the bankruptcies of both British and American manufacturers and extensive unemployment.

Lacking enough money to buy food, many suffered from malnutrition and from diseases like cholera, smallpox, and tuberculosis ("consumption"), with which the main character, Hugh Wolfe, is afflicted.

[12] Author of The Utopian Novel in America, 1886-1896 (1984) and many articles on Davis, Pfaelzer edits the volume's literary selections and supplies the substantial critical introduction, which maintains that Davis inherited the sentimental literary tradition but nonetheless wrote "common stories" that "exposed the tension between sentimentalism, a genre predicated on the repression of the self, and realism, a genre predicated on the search for individual identity.

"[13] Davis's realistic depiction of the gritty, hellish mills and the impoverished workers' lives is far removed from the material advantages of the upper classes often portrayed in domestic fiction.

Life in the Iron Mills challenges the optimism of transcendentalism by showing how industrialism fueled by greedy capitalists destroys the natural environment and the human spirit.

[3] After its publication, it caused a literary sensation with its powerful naturalism that anticipated the work of Émile Zola, Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris.

[3] It was reprinted in the early 1970s by the Feminist Press with a well-known afterword by Tillie Olsen and has continued to be an important text for those who study labor and women’s issues.

Its graphic probe into ethnicity, vocation, and class also encompasses, according to Pfaelzer, what became Davis's most characteristic subject and theme: strong women and powerlessness.

[15] Davis takes pains to initiate her readers into the knowledge of hitherto little acknowledged social realities; she seems a pioneer exploring a territory which, by the end of the nineteenth century, would be recognized as the new American wilderness.

[16] The story also "launched a pathbreaking exposé of the effects of capitalism and industrialization, including the physical, spiritual, and intellectual starvation of immigrant wage earners.

[14] Life in the Iron Mills is an explosive study of the working poor, prophetic of the class struggle that would fill the main chapters of nineteenth century labor history.

[17] As Davis shows, the Industrial Revolution also brought with it class distinctions clearly exhibited by the material wealth of capitalists and industrialists who possessed the means to build lavish homes with elaborate architecture.

Because they lived in such deplorable and disorderly conditions, held such lower-class status, and faced the stress and uncertainty of work, many wage earners indulged in alcohol consumption.

Davis was said to have, "sought to make her readers aware that their material comfort was enabled neither by palliative classical gods nor by cheap coal and river barges but by real human beings, who ate, slept, and toiled in unspeakable conditions" (4).

In one scholarly journal about Life in the Iron-Mills, Jill Gatlin explains that, “She [Davis] portrays pollution not as a source of awe or a sign of wealth, nor as simply a nuisance or an annoyance, but rather as a lethal hazard to laborers”.

[20] Due to industrialization, the manufacturing of goods increasingly grew and, therefore, there were people who were obtaining large quantities of money off of different products that were being produced.

She also wanted to create people who would stand up, demand change, and do something about the horrible conditions that mill workers had to endure during the nineteenth century.

[21] During the beginning times of industrialization, working conditions were horrible for the working-class, and Davis is able to portray the extreme division of social classes accurately throughout the story.

Davis's short story has its own Bedford Cultural Edition, which introduces Life in the Iron Mills literary importance during the 19th century.

Sheila Hassle Hughes exemplifies the conflicts that arise among critics about the themes Life in the Iron Mills represents:[27] Scholars have generally found it difficult to reconcile Davis's radical form with the religious, specifically Christian, features of her tale.

Sharon Harris reads the work as a critique of "passive Christianity", but her study of irony fails to address adequately the remaining constructive or stubbornly spiritual elements of Life in the Iron Mills.

Harris's reading emphasizes the text's religious elements as an aspect of form that the political content ironically undoes, whereas Shurr tends to undermine the social aspects of the tale through his religious form criticism.Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills, was recognized as a significant short story by writers such as Emily Dickinson, Louisa May Alcott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne among many others.