The Offering and the Voice

In 1842 Charles Dickens visited the factories at Lowell, Massachusetts and wrote glowing praise for the progressive conditions that he found.  As a child, Dickens had labored in a London factory, and he compared the Lowell factories to the memories of his youth as the difference between “living light and deepest shadow.”  He found the factory workers healthy, clean and well dressed and the factory rooms had “as much fresh air, cleanliness, and comfort, as the nature of the occupation would admit.”  In particular, Dickens was impressed with The Lowell Offering, a collection of stories, articles and poems written and published by the factory workers.

It’s difficult to understand the impact that The Offering had on a nineteenth century audience.  Many people in England and Europe didn’t believe that factory workers could have the intellectual or emotional capacity to appreciate the literary arts, much less to produce their own work.  What’s more, The Offering was the first publication written and edited entirely by women.  Some denied that it was even possible while others celebrated it as proof of progressive ideals.

Unlike the factories in England, the factory system at Lowell had not been built to employ a permanent class of workers.  Roughly two-thirds of the employees were young women from New England farms who would work a few years before returning home or getting married.  So, in order to attract a continual supply of new employees the factories offered religious services, a lending library and lectures in science and the arts.  Many of these young women were well educated, and they enjoyed literature and poetry.  They often shared their own work with each other, and the best of these attempts were collected into a booklet, which became the first edition of The Lowell Offering.

Then in 1845 another magazine appeared in Lowell, and it painted a very different picture of factory life.  The Voice of Industry had been started in Fitchburg Massachusetts by the New England Workingmen’s Association, but it soon moved to Lowell where it was taken over by the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association.  It described life in the factories as twelve-and-a-half hours a day of monotonous, exhausting work that left the workers unable to take advantage of the educational opportunities that had impressed Dickens a few years earlier.  The factory rooms were dark, noisy and poorly ventilated, and the boarding houses were overcrowded and poorly maintained. 

Could conditions have deteriorated so much in only three years, or was Dickens simply wrong?

Anyone who has worked for a large company knows that not all work is equal and not all workers are treated equally.  Many of the early contributors to The Lowell Offering worked in the spinning rooms.  They held highly skilled jobs that paid an average daily wage of 56 cents.  Other jobs in the factories, such as dressing and carding, paid as little as 37.5 cents per day, and working conditions could vary as well.  So The Offering reflected the experiences of the best paid, most skilled workers.

On the other hand, Sarah Bagley, the president of the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association, was a weaver.  Weavers were initially paid 67 cents per day, but that wage had been set high to attract skilled workers.  By 1840 wages for weavers had gone down to only 50 cents per day, and in 1842 they were told they would have to tend two looms instead of one.  So by the time Bagley took over The Voice of Industry she had seen her wages cut by 25% and her and her workload doubled. 

In 1842 The Lowell Offering published an article by Bagley that was critical of factory conditions, but that same year The Offering was purchased by William Schouler, a friend of the factory owners and an opponent of labor reform.  Under Schouler’s ownership The Offering would no longer publish “controversial” material.  By 1845 in the first issue of The Voice Bagley denounced The Offering as a “mouthpiece of the corporations.”  The Offering ceased publication later that year

Dickens arrived in Lowell at a time of change.  The high wages and progressive conditions that had attracted workers twenty years earlier still defined the experiences of some highly skilled workers, but for others conditions had worsened.  The first protests over wage cuts had taken place almost ten years earlier, but the factory owners had become conscious of their own reputation.  From that time forward they would try to control which voices were heard and, presumably, what visiting dignitaries would get to see.