Life in the Iron Mills- Davis

In order to get a real picture of what it was like to live in the age of the industrial revolution I will be recommending people read Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills! As compared to today’s society I get the impression that people were much stronger in those days. Their work was a labor of change that they wielded with their own hands. The tears and sweat that was shed by workers such Wolfe Hugh came with sacrifice. Most people in today’ society rely on technology and we suffer from an obesity epidemic laden with Diabetes and Heart Disease and though we may have a surplus of food are world can still be bad. It is easier to be good when you are not hungry and most crime nowadays is because of poverty; however Davis points out that the type of hunger those living in the Industrial Revolution endured was beyond humane and unlike anything else. Yet, like many authors we have studied, the strength of the human spirit is salient as we witness Hugh make art in the form of a korl women statue. The narrator notes she has kept the statue in the corner of her library. I can only imagine creating art to be a way to maintain his sanity in the mills and I’m sure Poe would agree except if he would of wrote it he would of made a gruesome scene out of the factory machinery! The interesting part is that we never learn who the narrator is yet she is optimistic writing “ God has set the promise of the Dawn.”