Loom and spindle

by Harriet Jane Hanson Robinson

Though the literary character of these writings may not rise to the present standard of such productions, yet at that season of intellectual dearth they must have had a certain influence on contemporary literature; and viewed by the critical eye of a later date, it is found that the selections from The Lowell Offering will compare quite favorably with those in the “Ladies’ annuals” of the same date, as, for instance, The Lady’s Repository, The Rose of Sharon, The Lily of the Valley, Gems of Beauty, The Opal, and other like literary curiosities, of which The Lowell Offering may well be ranked as one, and with which, no doubt, it will hold its place in the history of American publications.

These factory-girl writers did not confine their talents within the pages of their own publication. Many of them wrote for the literary newspapers and magazines. One sometimes filled the poet’s corner in Zion’s Herald and in the Saturday Evening Gazette; another took that envied place in The Ladies’ Casket; a third sent poetic effusions to The Lowell Courier and Journal.

These authors represent what may be called the poetic element of factory-life. They were the ideal mill-girls, full of hopes, desires, aspirations; poets of the loom, spinners of verse, artists of factory-life.

The Lowell Offering did a good work, not only among the operatives themselves, but among the rural population from which they had been drawn. It was almost the only magazine that reached their secluded homes, where it was lent from house to house, read and re-read, and thus set the women to thinking, and added its little leaven of progressive thought to the times in which it lived. Its influence or its memory is not by any means forgotten; and if a newspaper or magazine which had so brief an existence is so well remembered after at least fifty years, when the novelty of such a publication is all worn away, it shows that it must have had some vitality, something in it worthy of preservation.

It was considered good Sunday reading. A friend told me recently that as a child she used to watch for its coming, and how much she liked it, because her father, a clergyman, allowed her to read it on Sunday; and on that day it was placed on the table with the Bible, while other secular reading-matter was excluded. Another has said that she used to get the themes for her “compositions” out of the pages of The Lowell Offering.

The names of The Lowell Offering writers, so far as I have been able to gather them, are as follows: Sarah G. Bagley, Josephine L. Baker, Lucy Ann Baker, Caroline Bean, Adeline Bradley, Fidelia O. Brown, M. Bryant, Alice Ann Carter, Joanna Carroll, Eliza J. Cate, Betsey Chamberlain, L. A. Choate, Kate Clapp, Louisa Currier, Maria Currier, Lura Currier, Harriot F. Curtis, Catherine Dodge, M. A. Dodge, Harriet Farley, Margaret F. Foley, A. M. Fosdick, Abby A. Goddard, M. R. Green, Lydia S. Hall, Jane B. Hamilton, Harriet Jane Hanson, Eliza Rice Holbrook, Eliza W. Jennings, Hannah Johnson, E. Kidder, Miss Lane, Emmeline Larcom, Lucy Larcom, L. E. Leavitt, Harriet Lees, Mary A. Leonard, Sarah E. Martin, Mary J. McAffee, E. D. Perver, E. S. Pope, Nancy R. Rainey, Sarah Shedd, Ellen L. Smith, Ellen M. Smith, Laura Spaulding, Mary Ann Spaulding, Emmeline Sprague, S. W. Stewart, Laura Tay, Rebecca C. Thompson, Abby D. Turner, Elizabeth E. Turner, Jane S. Welch, Caroline H. Whitney, A. E. Wilson, Adeline H. Winship, and Sabra Wright, fifty-seven in all.

Most of the writers signed fictitious names, such as Ella, Adelaide, Dorcas, Aramantha, Stella, Kate, Oriana, Ruth Rover, Ione, Dolly Dindle, Grace Gayfeather, and many others.

In 1848 seven books had been published, written by contributors to The Lowell Offering. These were “Lights and Shadows of Factory Life,” and “Rural Scenes in New England,” by Eliza Jane Cate; “Kate in Search of a Husband,” “Jessie’s Flirtations,” and “S. S. Philosophy,” by Harriot F. Curtis; “Domestic Sketches” by Abby A. Goddard, and “Shells from the Strand of the Sea of Genius” by Harriet Farley.

Not many of the lesser lights continued to write after their contributions were no longer in demand for The Offering. But there were a few who had written for the pure love of it, and who, in spite of their other duties, and a restricted life, still clung “to the dreams of their youth,” and kept up the writing habit, even beyond the verge of the allotted threescore years and ten.

There is hardly a complete set of The Lowell Offering in existence. I have Miss Larcom’s copies, which, added to my own, the result of many years of collecting, in the shape of gifts, make as complete a set as I have been able to find. The 1847 copy I never heard of outside my own collection. Mr. L. L. Libbie of Boston has nearly a full set, with a rare collection of bibliology relating to the magazine.