Mill Agent, The.
[Labor]. Denison, Mary Andrews. The Mill Agent. By the Author of “Opposite the Jail.” Boston: Graves and Young, 1864.
8vo.; title page etching of a factory; occasionally foxed, especially toward edges; purple cloth, elaborately stamped in blind and gilt; spine cocked, covers lightly rubbed; previous owner’s inscription on front endpaper.
First edition. A work of “Mill Fiction,” describing the hard life of the generation of New England women who left their paternal homes to work in the textile mills, where they boarded communally with other workers:
A phenomenon of particular prominence in the 1840s, they were the first generation of free US women to be employed in industry, rather than in domestic service. Primarily daughters of uneducated, rural, lower-middle-class North Americans, these women worked long hours in the mills but dedicated their evenings to education, to self-improvement, and to writing, producing the first US literary journal by and for industrial workers, The Lowell Offering . . . (“Mill Girls” in BGWL, p. 815)
The uncredited author of this work, Mary Andrews Denison, was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1826. She was educated in public and private schools and in 1846 she married Rev. Charles Wheeler Denison, editor of The Emancipator, a New York anti-slavery paper, and of the Boston Olive Branch. The couple lived in many places, including London and British Guiana. Her novel Gertrude Russell, a crusade against alcohol, was published by the American Baptist Publication Society in 1849. Denison contributed to Godey’s Ladies Book, Harper’s Weekly, and People’s Home Journal, and wrote over 60 novels, mostly popular tales about noble, sweet heroines. Her most famous work, That Husband of Mine (1877), promoted the virtues of marriage.
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