The Castle and the Clock Tower: Lowell's Mill Workers and the Gothic Novel

Castle Urquhart, a ruin on the shore of Loch Ness in the Scottish Highlands, in a 1929 print by Sir David Young Cameron. Ruins and castles were common settings for Gothic fiction. Digital Commonwealth.

In 1764 the English writer Horace Walpole published The Castle of Otranto, a new kind of story set in the real world but driven by frightening, sometimes horrifying, twists. A sickly young prince is mysteriously crushed by a giant helmet, and his parents scramble to escape an ancient prophecy that threatens their hold on the castle, amid an underground church, ghostly and skeletal apparitions, and crumbling walls.

The book became a model for many that followed, among them The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Italian and The Monk. Their authors called them "Gothic" tales, and the Gothic grew into a genre known for gloomy settings, mysterious events and sometimes supernatural forces. It was one literary answer to the anxieties of a changing society at the end of the 18th century.

Gothic reading in the mill town

About 70 years later, as the scholar Bridget Marshall shows in Industrial Gothic: Workers, Exploitation and Urbanization in Transatlantic Nineteenth-Century Literature (2021), Gothic tales had become popular reading among the workers of New England's growing textile mills. Part of the appeal was surely the thrill of a scary story. But Marshall argues that the Gothic mood, gloomy, mysterious and foreboding, matched the often horrifying conditions in the mills, and that the genre's portrayal of powerless people facing both individual and institutional evil made it especially fitting for the new age of industrial capitalism.

Winslow Homer, "The Bobbin Girl." A young woman winds thread onto an empty bobbin, or "pirn," to be loaded into a shuttle for the looms. Public domain.

By the 1830s, Lowell, Massachusetts, had changed completely and for good. Farmland had become a center of textile production, known for its efficiency and for its workforce of young women, most of them from family farms. For these "mill girls," the job brought unusual access to books through the town's many libraries. According to Marshall, The Castle of Otranto was checked out often, along with Charlotte Temple and The Mysteries of Udolpho, and the young women shared the books and even acted out scenes for fun.

Castles and clock towers

Distant castles and tyrannical nobles might seem far from New England factory life. But consider how this passage from Matthew Lewis's 1796 novel The Monk might strike a young woman working in a place like the Boott Mills, a huge brick complex anchored by looming clock towers:

"The Castle which stood full in my sight, formed an object equally awful and picturesque. Its ponderous Walls tinged by the moon with solemn brightness, its old and partly-ruined Towers lifting themselves into the clouds and seeming to frown on the plains around them, its lofty battlements overgrown with ivy, and folding Gates expanding in honour of the Visionary Inhabitant, made me sensible of a sad and reverential horror."

The Visionary Inhabitant is a ghost, the Bleeding Nun. Walking to and from the imposing mill buildings, so unlike the farms they had left, the workers could easily have pictured such scenes. They usually started work early in the morning and left after sunset, so they mostly saw the factories "tinged by the moon" too.

The Boott Mills clock tower before restoration. Public domain.

In time, American writers wrote Gothic elements straight into their descriptions of mills. In her novel The Silent Partner, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps describes a storm in a fictional New England mill town:

"The wind was high and blew a kind of froth of noise in gusts against the closed windows and doors; but never laid finger's weight upon the steady, deadly underflow of sound that filled the night. A dark night….green whirlpools had grown black, and where the tints of malachite and gold and umber, swinging on their bright arms through the dam had become purple and gray and ghastliness, and wrapped the stone piers in dark field, as if they had been mourners at a mighty funeral."

Making sense of a new kind of work

The Gothic spoke to more than buildings. It gave readers a way to think through new working conditions. For the first time, the clock, not the rhythms of nature as on a farm, set the hours of work. For the Lowell women it was also their first time away from home, which left them doubly vulnerable: as workers, who could be fired or have their pay cut at any moment without reason, and as women, who sometimes faced unwanted romantic or sexual advances from male overseers.

That mix of moral and economic uncertainty produced scenes of terror best understood through the heightened feelings of Gothic tales. Reading and writing in the Gothic mode may also have given the Lowell women a sense of power, a confidence they carried into their own efforts to resist abuse in the mills.

Sources

• Sarah Buchmeier, "The Castle and the Clock Tower: Understanding Industrialization Through the Gothic," National Park Service, part of the Literature and Labor series, written through a Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/factory-life-and-the-gothic.htm
• The article draws on Bridget Marshall, Industrial Gothic (University of Wales Press, 2021) and her 2017 article in Women's Studies, paraphrased here; Matthew Lewis, The Monk (1796); and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Silent Partner (1899 edition).
• Castle Urquhart print: Digital Commonwealth, https://ark.digitalcommonwealth.org/ark:/50959/g732f6664
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.