Lyddie, Chapter 10, Oliver: First Days in the Mill, and a Story Read Aloud

Lowell National Historical Park's Books to Parks series pairs chapters of Katherine Paterson's novel Lyddie with the real history of the Lowell textile mills. In chapter 10, Lyddie begins work in earnest — and discovers a new kind of hunger.

Label of the Merrimack Manufacturing Company, Lowell, about 1845. Lowell National Historical Park, public domain.

The chapter

On her first full day as a mill worker, Lyddie learns that she and Diana will tend three looms together. Within minutes the noise and the dust in the air overwhelm her. When she tries to pause, the overseer is watching. She tells herself that if she could stare down a bear, she can face the machines, and she makes it through the day.

That night she is too tired to go to Diana's boardinghouse to study the rules as planned, too tired even to eat, and she goes to bed right after supper, wondering if she will ever keep up. Her roommate, Betsy, remembering her own first days, begins reading aloud from Oliver Twist — and Lyddie, listening, finds she badly wants to know how Oliver's story ends.

Fact check: were conditions really that hard?

Yes. The mill bell woke workers at 4:30 a.m., and they had to be at their machines by 5. They worked until 7 at night, with only two short half-hour breaks to go back to the boardinghouse for breakfast and midday dinner. Inside, machines filled the rooms with noise and motion, and workers breathed cotton lint and dust all day. Windows stayed shut because cool air damaged the threads, and an overseer watched to make sure everyone kept pace.

Primary sources bear this out. A visitor writing in The Harbinger in 1836 described women tending on average three looms, some four, over thirteen-hour days, in air "charged with cotton filaments and dust, which, we were told, are very injurious to the lungs." The windows were down even on a warm day; a young worker explained, without seeming to find it strange, that "when the wind blew, the threads did not work so well." Within twenty minutes the visitors were sweating from the heat and moisture.

Letter from Mary Cowles to her sister, 1847. Lowell Letters Collection, Center for Lowell History, University of Massachusetts Lowell.

A new worker, Mary Cowles, wrote to her sister in December 1847: "I almost gave up in despair the first day, it made my fingers so sore, but I thought if the other girls could learn I could and now the work seems quite easy to me."

Historians add the longer toll. The mills were kept hot and humid so threads would not break, filling the air with dust that caused lung disease such as brown lung; the constant din cost many workers their hearing; and unguarded machinery caused frequent injuries. A weaver's pay depended on how fast she could tie broken yarns and replace empty bobbins — a job with seven separate steps — and most new operatives found their first days difficult, even harrowing, however much spinning and weaving they had done at home.

Postcard of a weave room in a Lowell cotton mill. Lowell National Historical Park

Fact check: is Lyddie like Oliver Twist?

Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist appeared in installments in 1837–39 and depicts London during the Industrial Revolution. Like Lyddie and her brother Charlie, Oliver is a poor child forced to work for others from a young age, so Lyddie is right to see herself in him. In one scene, Oliver walks to London looking for work, much as Lyddie set out to walk to Lowell:

"Oliver walked twenty miles that day; and all that time tasted nothing but the crust of dry bread, and a few draughts of water, which he begged at the cottage-doors by the road-side."

The two novels share something else: 19th-century novels often move forward through strings of coincidences, and Oliver Twist is notorious for them — critics from Dickens's own day onward have argued over whether they are a flaw or part of its power. Lyddie, too, is full of coincidences, such as her unlikely meeting with Ezekial. In that sense, Paterson's novel both tells a story of the 1800s and works the way novels of that time did.

Visit

Readers can visit the Boott Cotton Mills Museum at Lowell National Historical Park, which has a weave room.

The weave room at the Boott Cotton Mills Museum. Lowell National Historical Park

Sources

• National Park Service, Lowell National Historical Park, "Lyddie: Chapter 10 – Oliver," from the Books to Parks series: https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/lyddie-chapter-10-oliver.htm
• The page quotes "An Account of a Visitor to Lowell" (The Harbinger, 1836; reprinted in the Voice of Industry, 1846), Mary Cowles's 1847 letter, and Dickens's Oliver Twist, and draws on Tsongas Industrial History Center, The Lowell Mill Girls (1999); Thomas Dublin, Women at Work (1993); and Neil Forsyth, "Wonderful Chains: Dickens and Coincidence" (1985), which are paraphrased here.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.