This is a captivating collection of poems and stories from The Lowell Offering, an 1800s monthly literary periodical written by the working-class women of the Lowell, Massachusetts, textile mills. The poems and stories primarily focus on the virtues of devotion and hard work. The authors in this collection are identified by initials or first names only.
Collected poems and stories from The Lowell Offering, a monthly literary periodical first published in 1844 and written by the working-class women of the Lowell, Massachusetts textile mills. In this collection, authors are identified by initials or first names only; works largely focus on the virtues of dedication and hard work.
From 1840-1845, the factory girls who worked in the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts wrote, edited, and published their own literary magazine. This selection of pieces from "The Lowell Offering" was originally published in 1844.
This collection is the first of its kind to interrogate both literal and metaphorical transatlantic exchanges of culture and ideas in nineteenth-century girls’ fiction. As such, it initiates conversations about how the motif of travel in literature taught nineteenth-century girl audiences to reexamine their own cultural biases by offering a fresh perspective on literature that is often studied primarily within a national context. Women and children in nineteenth-century America are often described as being tied to the home and the domestic sphere, but this collection challenges this categorization and shows that girls in particular were often expected to go abroad and to learn new cultural frames in order to enter the realm of adulthood; those who could not afford to go abroad literally could do so through the stories that traveled to them from other lands or the stories they read of others’ travels. Via transatlantic exchange, then, authors, readers, and the characters in the texts covered in this collection confront the idea of what constitutes the self. Books examined in this volume include Adeline Trafton’s An American Girl Abroad (1872), Johanna Spyri’s Heidi (1881), and Elizabeth W. Champney’s eleven-book Vassar Girl Series (1883-92), among others.
