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Material Culture · Chapter 06, 1820–1845

The Lowell Offering

A literary magazine written by mill workers.

The first issue of The Lowell Offering, a magazine written by women mill workers.
The first issue of The Lowell Offering, a magazine written by women mill workers.Front page of The Lowell Offering, No. 1, 1840. Merrimack Valley Textile Museum. Public domain.

From 1840 to 1845, the Lowell Offering published poems, essays, and stories written by mill operatives themselves. Charles Dickens, visiting Lowell in 1842, praised the magazine in his American Notes, and it became an international advertisement for the apparent humanism of American industry. Critics, Sarah Bagley foremost among them, charged in 1845 that the Offering avoided wages and hours to stay in the corporations' good graces; its editor, Harriet Farley, defended its literary purpose. The magazine ceased publication late in 1845 amid falling subscriptions and the very labor controversies it had declined to cover, though a successor briefly followed.

Sources

  1. Government recordLowell Handbook: Mill Girls. National Park Service.
  2. Primary sourceCharles Dickens. American Notes for General Circulation. Chapman and Hall, 1842.
  3. ScholarshipThomas Dublin. Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860. Columbia University Press, 1979.

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