page_title: Lucy Larcom
section_title: Lowell mill girl
hierarchical_section_title: Lucy Larcom / Career / Lowell mill girl
caption_attribution_description: Detail from: Plan of the city of Lowell, Massachusetts Author: Sidney &amp; Neff Publisher: Moody, S. Date: 1850 Location: Lowell (Mass.)
context_page_description: Lucy Larcom was an American teacher, poet, and author.
  In the 1840s, Larcom taught at a school in Illinois before returning to Massachusetts. She went on to become one of the first teachers at Wheaton Female Seminary in Norton, Massachusetts, and taught there from 1854 to 1862. While there, she helped to found Rushlight Literary Magazine, a submission-based student literary magazine which is still published today. From 1865 to 1873, she was the editor of the Boston-based Our Young Folks, which merged with St. Nicholas Magazine in 1874. In 1889, Larcom published one of the best-known accounts of New England childhood of her time, A New England Girlhood, commonly used as a reference in studying antebellum American childhood. This autobiographical text covers the early years of her life, in Beverly Farms and Lowell, Massachusetts.
  Among her earlier and best-known poems are "Hannah Binding Shoes," and "The Rose Enthroned," Larcom's earliest contribution to the Atlantic Monthly, when the poet Lowell was its editor, a poem, that in the absence of signature, was attributed to Emerson by one reviewer.
context_section_description: At age eleven, in 1835, she began working at Boott Mills, a cotton mill in Lowell, as a doffer, to earn extra money for her family. She was among the very youngest of those employed at the mills. Her first work as a Lowell operative was in a spinning-room, doffing and replacing the bobbins, after which she tended a spinning-frame and then a dressing-frame, while looking out windows towards the river. Later, she was employed in a "cloth-room," considered to be a more agreeable working-place because of its fewer hours of confinement, its cleanliness, and the absence of machinery. The last two years of her Lowell life, which covered in all a period of about ten years, were spent in that room, not in measuring cloth, but as bookkeeper, recording the number of pieces and bales. There, she pursued her studies during leisure moments, some textbooks in mathematics, grammar, English or German literature usually laying open on her desk.
  Here, as in her earlier childhood, she put words to her visions through verses and by telling herself stories. Of those days, Larcom stated,— "While yet a child, I used to consider it special good fortune that my home was at Lowell. There was a frank friendliness and sincerity in the social atmosphere that wrought upon me unconsciously, and made the place pleasant to live in. People moved about their every-day duties with purpose and zest, and were genuinely interested in one another; while in the towns on the seaboard it sometimes was as if every man's house was his castle in almost a feudal sense, where the family shut themselves in, on the defensive against intruders." Still, she never lost her love and allegiance to the seaside area where she was born, while frequent visits kept up the charm, and gave her links to her home town.
  The ten years that Larcom spent at the mills made a huge impact on her. The Lowell Offering, a magazine whose editors and contributors were "female operatives in the Lowell mills," was published in 1842, and soon after Larcom became one of its corps of writers. One of her first poems was entitled "The River," and many of her verses and essays were found in its volumes. Some of those Lowell Offering essays appeared afterwards in Similitudes, her first published work.
  It was at one of the meetings of the literary circle, established among the "mill girls", that Larcom first met the poet, John Greenleaf Whittier, who was then in Lowell editing a Free Soil journal. He became her friend, showing his real interest in her at once by criticising her share in the written contributions of the evening. She was then very young, but it was the beginning of an interest and gratitude that continued mutually in an established friendship. Afterward, when she had come to know and dearly love Whittier's sister, Elizabeth ("Lizzie"), the three spent time together. During happy sojourns at Salisbury Beach, near the respective homes at Amesbury and Beverly, in visits at Amesbury, in counsel and work together, out of which in recent time have grown the beautiful compilations of Child-life, and Songs of Three Centuries, their lives ran near together and contributed the one to the other.
caption: Boott Mills, ca. 1850
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