Lucy Larcom and the Poetics of Child Labour

Abstract

Child labour has been present in North America since the beginnings of European colonization, and regulation of their industrial employment dates at least to the early nineteenth century in Rhode Island (Abbott). Given moral injunctions to keep children from mischief and utilitarian demands for labour and family income, such regulation remained basically ineffective. With industrial expansion following the American Civil War children established themselves as a major presence in the workforce and occasionally appeared in industrial stories such as Rebecca Harding Davis’s “Life in the Iron Mills” (1861).