Lowell Offering) Mind Amongst the Spindles.
(Lowell Girls) Mind Amongst The Spindles: A Selection From The Lowell Offering, A Miscellany Wholly Composed By The Factory Girls Of An American City. With An Introduction, By The English Editor [Abel C. Thomas]. London: Charles Knight & Co., 1844.
Small 8vo., (nearly 12 mo.); printed green wrappers, sewn; precious owner’s signature on first blank; some few pages ever so lightly yellowed; covers (especially front cover) with a few closed tears, and some slight chips to front upper wrapper; spine worn away in parts, with page gathers visible, but intact; overall, a good survival of a very fragile book.
First English edition of any appearance of selections from The Lowell Offering, published earlier that year. (Mysteriously, this is a book club edition, but there is no evidence of a previous English version.) This small but potent book contains a comprehensive introduction to the plight of the female Lowell factory workers anonymously published by Abel C. Thomas, as well as a published letter from Miss [Harriet] Martineau to Thomas, May 20, 1844, detailing her interest in the topic and its currency. In part:
"My Dear Friend,
"Your interest in this Lowell book can scarcely equal mine; for I have seen the factory girls in their Lyceum, and have gone over the cotton-mills at Waltham, and made myself familiar on the spot with the factory life in New England; so that in reading the “Offering,” I saw again in my memory the street of houses built by the earnings of the girls,…and the girls themselves trooping to the mill…
"My visit to Lowell was merely for one day, in company with Mr. Emerson’s party….
"At Waltham where I saw the mills, and conversed with the people, I had an opportunity of observing the invigorating effects of MIND in a life of labour. Twice the wages and half the toil would not have made the girls I saw happy and healthy, without that cultivation of mind which afforded them perpetual support, entertainment, and motive for activity. They were not highly educated, but they had pleasure in books and lectures, in correspondence with home; and had their minds so open to fresh ideas, as to be drawn off from thoughts of themselves and their own concerns. ….It was during the hours of work in the mill that the papers in the “Offering” were meditated, and it was after work in the evenings that they were penned." (pp. xvii-xix).
Lest Ms. Martineau leave too happy an impression of the Lowell Mill Girls’ life, Thomas’s introduction (too long and dense to quote here, but well worth reading) provides some of the grimmer, starker realities of their existence, as do of course the contributions by the “girls” themselves that make up this book. Thomas’s familiarity with their plight derives from his short pastorate in Lowell, Massachusetts, where he became one of the founders and the editor of The Lowell Offering. A Universalist evangelist, minister, journalist, and historian, Abel Charles Thomas (1807-1880) spent twenty-five years in Philadelphia in two separate pastorates, during which he wrote “two of the most celebrated pieces of nineteenth-century Universalist controversial literature,” but his time in Lowell so moved him that he began the Lowell Offering, and mentored young female aspiring writers in the textile mills.
An important, dare we say crucial, document of the female labor movement and of the organizing phenomenon that was, and remains, the Lowell Mill Girls movement. A must-have for any feminist library.
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