Life In The Iron Mills

“Can you see how foggy the day is? As I stand here, idly tapping the window-pane, and looking out through the rain at the dirty back-yard and the coal-boats below, fragments of an old story float up before me,—a story of this old house into which I happened to come to-day.”

While the narrator is referring to literal fog here, the fogginess that she invokes is also suggestive and metaphorical. It can be seen to refer both to the complicated story that she is telling and to the difficulty of retrieving this story from her memory.

“I dare make my meaning no clearer, but will only tell you my story. It will, perhaps, seem to you as foul and dark as this thick vapor about us, and as pregnant with death, but if your eyes are free as mine are to look deeper, no perfume-tinted dawn will be so fair with promise of the day that shall surely come.”

This passage shows the nature of the narrator’s moral convictions, which are closely bound with her artistic ones. She believes that looking closely at difficult realities leads to truthfulness, which in turn leads to beauty.

“Not many even of the inhabitants of a manufacturing town know the vast machinery of system by which the bodies of workmen are governed, that goes on unceasingly from year to year.”

The separateness of the working class from the upper class is a central subject in this story. The lack of knowledge among the leisure class about the working conditions at the town mill is especially striking because the industry is so central to the town and contributes so much to the town’s atmosphere.