Lyddie, Chapter 13: Speed-Ups, a Flying Shuttle, and the Mill Girls' Own Press

In chapter 13 of the novel Lyddie, the mill machines run faster, the ten-hour petition divides the boardinghouse, and a loose shuttle sends Lyddie to her bed.

The "kiss of death" shuttle: Lyddie had to re-thread it many times a day, sucking fibers from the yarn into her lungs. Lowell National Historical Park; public domain

What happens in the chapter

• Lyddie worries about the petition for a ten-hour day: shorter hours would mean less pay. Diana invites her to a labor meeting and Betsy urges her to read the pro–ten-hour newspaper, but Lyddie refuses. She wishes her friends understood her family's debt and why she works so hard.
• The mills speed up the machines again. Lyddie, now tending four very fast looms, keeps working without complaint. Many workers are leaving, and she knows that if she can't keep pace she'll be fired and replaced — she has heard her overseer, Mr. Marsden, say that plenty of Irish immigrants arriving in Lowell would work for less.
• Then the shuttle flies loose and strikes Lyddie on the side of the head. Diana binds it with an apron and helps her back to the boardinghouse. The doctor who comes is not the usual one, but the man Lyddie saw with Diana over the summer.

Was it real? Injuries in the mills

Yes. Working beside fast machinery in crowded rooms was dangerous: fingers could be crushed in gears or cut, and shuttles could fly off a loom. Most injuries — cuts and bruises — were minor, but not all.

Lowell grew at astonishing speed. Writing in 1845, Henry A. Miles described how, between 1831 and 1841, "the population of the town was multiplied six-fold. The increase was without parallel in any place, in any country…"

Mill worker Barilla Taylor wrote home to her parents on July 14, 1844:

"Ann Graham, if you know her, had her hand torn of[f]. It happened in the carding room. I heard she had it taken of[f] above her elbow. We don't know but she will lose her life because of it."

The Lowell Courier reported others:

"ACCIDENT.—A man by the name of Charles Hamblett was killed, yesterday at half past 7 o'clock, P.M., by being caught in the wheel of one of the Merrimack mills." — May 26, 1840

"A SAD ACCIDENT—We learn that a young man about 16 years of age, had his hand caught in a burring machine, in the Carpet mill, this forenoon, and before it was stopped it had taken in his hand and part of his arm. The arm had to be amputated a little below the elbow." — September 3, 1845

Accidents in the Merrimack Mill. Lowell National Historical Park

Was it real? The mill workers' press

Yes — both papers existed.

Both were written for and by female operatives and circulated widely in the United States and Europe. The Offering was less openly political, and some felt it painted too rosy a picture of mill life.

What historians say

• Julie Husband (1999) calls the Offering the first serial written and published by American factory women, meant to show what "factory girls" could do. It was warmly received: mill workers and their families subscribed, and so did Americans and Europeans curious about factory workers' intellectual lives.
• Sylvia Jenkins Cook (2010) argues that the women studied middle-class manners and self-expression without simply copying them, and wrote a literature of their own lives suggesting that they, not wealthy ladies, were the true forerunners of the modern American woman.
• Katja Kanzler (2005) notes that when Offering writers explained Lowell's attraction, they pointed less to shop goods than to books and learning — libraries, evening schools, improvement circles. The factory itself barely appears; the lyceum, the church and above all the boardinghouse take center stage.

The Lowell Offering. Center for Lowell History

Like many mill workers, Lyddie saved much of her pay in a local bank and watched her savings grow each payday. Lowell Institution of Savings, Shattuck Street, from the 1853 Lowell City Directory advertisements. Lowell National Historical Park

Sources

Based on "Lyddie: Chapter 13 - Speed Up," from the National Park Service Books to Parks series (Lowell National Historical Park), a work of the United States government in the public domain. Quotations are from 1840s sources: Henry A. Miles's Lowell As It Was, and As It Is (1845), Barilla Taylor's 1844 letter (Virginia Taylor Collection, Tsongas Industrial History Center) and the Lowell Courier. Julie Husband's, Sylvia Jenkins Cook's and Katja Kanzler's articles are paraphrased. Lyddie is a novel; this page summarizes the chapter. The lesson's questions are left out, and misspellings in the source ("Adophus," "Insitution") are corrected; rewritten in hubnx's own words.