Category: life in the iron mills

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The Canary in Davis’ “Life in the Iron Mills”

When I taught Rebecca Harding Davis’ Life in the Iron Mills (1861) this semester, I asked students to think about the opening paragraphs where the narrator describes the scene and implores the reader to come right down with her “into the thickest of the fog and mud and foul effluvia.” The opening images bring to mind Gothic texts as the narrator describes the trash … Read More The Canary in Davis’ “Life in the Iron Mills”

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Rebecca Harding Davis And Emerson’s Transcednentalism

In Bits of Gossip (1904), Rebecca Harding Davis tells about a dinner she had with Emerson, Hawthorne, Alcott, and others. Of the dinner conversation, she writes, “You heard much sound philosophy and many sublime guesses at the eternal verities; in fact, never were the eternal verities so discussed and pawed over and turned inside out as they were about that time, in Boston, by … Read More Rebecca Harding Davis And Emerson’s Transcednentalism