President Felton of Harvard University, while in Paris attending a course of lectures on English Literature by Philarète Chastles, heard an entire lecture on the history and literary merits of The Lowell Offering.
Thiers, the French historian, carried a volume into the Chamber of Deputies, to show what working-women in a republic could do.
George Sand (Madame Dudevant) thought it a great and wonderful thing that the American mill-girls should write and edit a magazine of their own.
Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal gave The Offering a rather back-handed compliment, which is quoted to show the old-time prejudice against female writers. It said,—
“Constrained to speak candidly, we have found amongst the pieces few which would have any chance of admission into a British periodical above the humblest class; yet it must also be admitted, that even where there is no positive attraction, there is nothing irreconcilable with good taste; and some of the articles, the verse as well as the prose, would appear as respectable efforts for females of any rank in life.”
It may be said that at one time the fame of The Lowell Offering caused the mill-girls to be considered very desirable for wives; and that young men came from near and far to pick and choose for themselves, and generally with good success. No doubt these young men thought that, if a young woman had the writing talent, rare in those days, she naturally would have other rare talents towards the making of a good wife; and I can say that my own knowledge, added to recent inquiries, confirms this belief.
The fact was often disputed that a “factory-girl” could write for or edit a magazine, since she had hitherto been considered little better than the loom or frame she tended. Inquiries on the subject came to the editors from different parts of the country, and questions like the following were often put to them: “Do the factory-girls really write the articles published in The Offering?” or, “Do you print them just as they are sent?” or, “Do you revise or rewrite them?”
In the preface to the first volume, Mr. Thomas answered these questions. He says, “The articles are all written by factory-girls, and we do not revise or re-write them. We have taken less liberty with them than editors usually take with other than the most inexperienced writers.” He adds, “Communications much amended in process of training the writers were rigidly excluded from print; and such articles only were published as had been written by females employed in the mills.” He continues, “and thus was published not only the first work written by factory-girls, but also the first magazine or journal written exclusively by women in all the world.”
The contributions to The Offering were on a great variety of subjects. There were allegories, poems, conversations on physiology, astronomy, and other scientific subjects, dissertations on poetry, and on the beauties of nature, didactic pieces on highly moral and religious subjects, translations from French and Latin, stories of factory and other life, sketches of local New England history, and sometimes the chapters of a novel. Miss Curtis, in 1840, wrote an article on “Woman’s Rights,” in which were so many familiar arguments in favor of the equality of the sexes, that it might have been the production of the pen of almost any modern advocate of woman’s rights; but there was this difference, that the writer, though she felt sure of her ground, was too timid to maintain it against the world, and towards the end throws out the query, “whether public life is, after all, woman’s most appropriate and congenial sphere?” It is a curious coincidence, that at this date the English and the American Anti-Slavery Associations were at the point of division on this very question.
There is a certain flavor in all The Lowell Offering writings, both in prose and verse, which reminds one of the books read by the authors, and the models they followed in their compositions. The poetry savors of Mrs. Sigourney, Mrs. Hemans, Miss Landon, Mrs. Barbauld, Milton, Pope, Cowper, and Hannah More. Byron’s sardonic vein is copied by one or two of the most independent minds among them. The prose models of writing were The Spectator, the English classics, “Miss Sedgwick’s Letters,” “The Vicar of Wakefield,” and Lydia Maria Child’s writings.