“一本奇怪的混合曲书”: - 麻省理工学院人工智能研究专业

“一本奇怪的混合曲书”:
Lucy Larcom’s An Idyl of Work

mary loeffelholz

在 1875, 波士顿出版商奥斯古德 & 公司

issued Lucy Larcom’s ﬁrst and only book-length narrative
poem, 田园诗般的工作. 大致基于 Larcom 的岁月 (从
1836 到 1846) 作为洛厄尔纺织厂的工厂工人,
马萨诸塞州, 工作田园诗以团体主角为特色:
三个年轻女磨坊工人, who share a room, are fol-
lowed as they extend their friendships to other women and,
最终, leave the mills for their various fates—marriage,
独立, 死亡.

The publication of An Idyl of Work capped a signiﬁcant
investment of time and hope for Larcom, who had been strug-
gling to make her living as a full-time woman of letters, 和
mixed success, for more than a decade. In the 1870s, Larcom
worked alongside her friend and mentor John Greenleaf Whit-
tier on a series of literary anthologies. As she composed An
Idyl throughout 1873, 1874, and the ﬁrst half of 1875, Whit-
tier offered her encouragement. “Don’t forget that Poem,“ 他
wrote her in March 1873; “Work on it whenever thee can get
a chance.” In August 1874 he asked her again, “How about the
Poem? I hope thee will imitate the ‘perfection of the saints’—&
keep always at it until it is ﬁnished. It is a grand . . . theme, &
thee can make it a poem which will have a right to live.”1

1John Greenleaf Whittier to Lucy Larcom, 29 行进 1873 和 11 八月 1874,
盒子 2, Dudley Dulany Addison Collection, Massachusetts Historical Society, 波士顿,
大量的. Whittier took full editorial credit for the three anthologies on which Larcom
worked, although he acknowledged her contributions in his prefaces. On the ten-
sions between Larcom and Whittier over the anthologies, see Shirley Marchalonis,
The New England Quarterly, 卷. LXXX, 不. 1 (行进 2007). C(西德:1) 2007 by The New England
季刊. All right reserved.

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THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

But Whittier had his own ideas about the sort of poem Lar-
com should produce. He wrote to her wondering, “Would it
not be well to describe graphically the interior of the factory—
its appearance on entering—the vast rooms, the looms, &
machinery;—the atmosphere dense with cotton ﬁlaments— . . .
all the circumstances of the scene and time, agreeable or dis-
agreeable?” He worried lest Larcom let her several main char-
acters “talk too much,” preferring once again that she simply
“describe the mill life & its possibilities” in her own voice, 和
he recommended that she not shrink from the story’s autobio-
graphical appeal: “Of course, as the book is about thyself thee
must needs talk of thyself, which is what thy readers want.”
Even as early as July 1873, Whittier was urging Larcom to ﬁn-
ish her poem and turn her attention to more popular, 和更多
proﬁtable, 项目. “Where is the prose mill story which thee
was to write & which I think I saw partly in MS?“ 他问.
“That would sell three to one better than verse.”2

But the poem Larcom apparently wanted to write, 和
stubbornly did write against Whittier’s advice, was more
ambitious—more complex, multilayered, and intertextual—
than the one he had proposed, and she had great expectations
为了它. The central topic of Larcom’s poem is not primarily
the material conditions of the millworkers’ industrial labor—
“the vast room, the looms, & machinery” that bulked so large
in Whittier’s sense of Larcom’s true subject. Her theme is,
相当, the mill girls’ access to culture and the role of culture
in the making of class. For better or worse, Larcom wrote An
Idyl of Work not to indict the corruptions of industrial work
but to demonstrate (in idealized terms, 为了确定) that some
young women in these circumstances became, and perhaps re-
梅尼德, poets and that others combined mill labor with literary
self-culture. This is a poem, 然后, about the material conditions

The Worlds of Lucy Larcom, 1824–1893 (雅典: University of Georgia Press, 1989),
PP. 183–84, 201–3. Quotations from the Addison Collection by permission of the
Massachusetts Historical Society.

2Whittier to Larcom, Addison Collection: 盒子 1, 17 九月(?) 187(?); 盒子 2,

29 行进 1873; 盒子 1, 187(?); 盒子 2, 1 七月 1873.

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LARCOM’S AN IDYL OF WORK

not of industry but of literacy—an issue that threaded its way
through all of Larcom’s working life, long after she left the mills
behind.3

Larcom’s own early introduction to literacy took place un-
der comfortable circumstances. The daughter of a retired sea
captain, she was born in 1824 and spent the ﬁrst eight years
of her life in Beverly, 马萨诸塞州. Her formal education
began at the age of two, when she was sent to a village dame
学校; her reading started with the Bible and quickly advanced
to hymns, which she memorized at the rate of “two or three
hymns in a forenoon or an afternoon.” “Rhyme had always a
sort of magnetic power over me,” she recalled, and it drew her
在, as a child, into readings that included Byron and Southey
as well as her textbooks’ Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Coleridge,
和科比. She found and treasured a battered volume of By-
ron alongside a biography of John Calvin, “not aware of any
unﬁtness or incompatibility,” and “felt no incongruity between
博士. Watts and Mother Goose.”4

The death of Larcom’s father in 1832, 然而,

left the
family unexpectedly indebted. After three years of trying to
make ends meet, Larcom, 她妈妈, and several of her sis-
ters moved to Lowell, 马萨诸塞州, where they opened a
boardinghouse for women millworkers. When the boarding-
house failed to provide the family with a sufﬁcient income,
Lucy Larcom was judged the best suited of the Larcom girls
to go to work in the mills; she succeeded as a laborer, winning
positions of greater responsibility and pay. The work, 虽然
physically demanding, was rewarding enough that she returned

3For Bourdieu’s classic deﬁnition of “cultural capital,” see “The Forms of Capital,”
in The Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, 编辑. 约翰
G. 理查森 (纽约: 格林伍德出版社, 1983), PP. 241–58; see also John Guillory,
Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (芝加哥: 大学
Chicago Press, 1993).

4Lucy Larcom, A New England Girlhood, Outlined from Memory (1889; 波士顿:
Northeastern University Press, 1986), PP. 58, 129–34. In addition to Larcom’s own
memoir, Marchalonis’s The Worlds of Lucy Larcom remains the fullest biography.

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THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

to the mills after an interval of living with an older married
sister, and she stayed on in Lowell—living in a boardinghouse
herself for the ﬁrst time—when, 在 1843, her mother returned
to Beverly.

Among the mills’ attractions by 1843 was the Lowell Offering,
which published the literary efforts of the millworkers. Larcom
soon became a contributor, and her poetry brought her to the
attention of Whittier, who in 1844 was named editor of the
Lowell-based Middlesex Standard. Their connection lapsed in
1846 when Larcom accompanied her sister Emmeline and her
family to Illinois; after engagements as a teacher in village
学校, Larcom eventually settled at the Monticello Seminary
(near the town of Alton), where she could resume her education
while also serving as an instructor. When Larcom returned to
Massachusetts for a teaching position at the Wheaton Female
Seminary in Norton, 马萨诸塞州, 在 1854, she and Whittier
resumed their friendship, now ﬁrmly based on their mutual
ambitions as writers.

Whittier helped Larcom publish her ﬁrst book, Similitudes,
from the Ocean and Prairie, 在 1854, and her poetry began
appearing regularly in periodicals as well. Hoping to make her
living primarily from her literary career, Larcom left her full-
time teaching position at Wheaton in 1863, although she would
return for occasional lectures and for a full term in 1867 到
eke out more income, and from time to time she taught else-
哪里还有. 在 1864 she became an editor (along with J. 时间.
Trowbridge and Gail Hamilton) of Our Young Folks, Ticknor
and Fields’s entry into the burgeoning market for children’s
文学; 在 1868 she assumed full editorial responsibility for
the magazine, which gave her a reliable and quite respectable
annual salary of twelve hundred dollars a year.5 The sale of
Our Young Folks in 1873, 然而, threw her into uncertainty

5A receipt of 5 十月 1869 from Fields, 奥斯古德, and Co., 盒子 1, Addison Col-
lection, gives a sense of the relative contributions Larcom’s various literary activities
made to her income in these years: it shows a partial payment of $500 on her annual salary over ﬁve months in contrast with royalties for her poems of $75 in the same
时期.

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LARCOM’S AN IDYL OF WORK

再次. The loss of her income from the magazine was partly
recouped when she assisted Whittier on compiling and edit-
ing several popular anthologies—Child Life: A Collection of
诗歌 (1871), Child Life in Prose (1873), and Songs of Three
Centuries (1875).

在夏天 1873, Larcom sent James R. Osgood a
number of proposals for new projects of her own, 包括
田园诗般的工作. Even as he wrote Larcom that he wanted to
publish An Idyl, 然而, Osgood discouraged her from rely-
ing on writing as her sole means of support. “Literary matters
是, as you know very well, rather precarious,” he reminded
她, as he refused to entertain her suggestion that she draw a
regular salary from the ﬁrm.6 She took his advice and taught
for a year at Bradford Academy in 1873–74. The hard and, 为了
Larcom, unrewarding work of teaching, as well as her work
on the anthologies, doubtless delayed the completion of the
Idyl, which Osgood had expected by January 1874. 虽然
he leaned heavily on her for editorial support, Whittier also
reminded Larcom of her larger ambition. He helped her pol-
ish the poem’s short preface, and in May 1875, Larcom ﬁnally
delivered An Idyl of Work to Osgood.

Larcom’s ambition was indeed large. She sought to produce
nothing less than a book-length, autobiographical, blank verse
poem on the making of a poet, a composition that would take
its place in a transatlantic poetic conversation. The posthumous
publication of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1850), 遵循-
lowed by Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856),
not only gave Larcom prestigious precursors for her work but
also showed her how one such poem could talk back to an-
其他, as Barrett Browning’s did to Wordsworth’s.7 Larcom
would have known from the example of Josiah Holland’s Kath-
rina (1867), still selling briskly in the 1870s, that American

6Quoted in Marchalonis, The Worlds of Lucy Larcom, PP. 193–94.
7“It is good for me to get stirred up and shaken soundly once in a while,”
Larcom wrote to Whittier of her reading of Aurora Leigh soon after its publication
(22 九月 1857, in Grace F. Shepard, “Letters of Lucy Larcom to the Whittiers,”
New England Quarterly 3 [七月 1930]: 501–18, 508–9).

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THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

middlebrow tastes could happily accommodate a kunstlerro-
man modeled after Wordsworth and Barrett Browning. 经过
the time of Holland’s death in 1881, Kathrina had racked
up sales of ninety-nine thousand copies, “outstripped all of
its fellows in popular favor, and outsold all other American
poems except Longfellow’s ‘Hiawatha.”’8 Larcom had every
reason to suppose that her contribution would be similarly well
received.

An Idyl of Work incorporates into its blank verse narrative
what amounts to a miniature anthology of Larcom’s shorter
poems: at least sixteen lyrics, many of them previously pub-
列出, beginning with “The Loaf-Giver” (a rhyming gloss on the
Anglo-Saxon origins of the word “lady”) and continuing through
various sonnets, narrative ballads, and hymns.9 Larcom’s most
famous English model for such a poem would have been Alfred
Tennyson’s The Princess (1847), with its several well-known
interpolated lyrics punctuating its blank verse narration—“a
Medley,” as Tennyson subtitled his work, that Larcom ad-
mired for its representation of women and for its “proof that
intellectual theories, and the interests of today, can be put
into poetry.”10 Closer to home, Larcom observed that Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow had wrapped a narrative frame around
a number of previously published shorter works to produce his
Tales of a Wayside Inn (ﬁrst series, 1863) and that Whittier had
done much the same with his The Tent on the Beach (1867),
which compiled nine ballads originally published in the At-
lantic Monthly inside a versiﬁed ﬁctional frame of four friends

8Edward Eggleston, “Josiah Gilbert Holland,” Century, 十二月 1881, PP. 161–
67, 165. On Kathrina as a conservative critique of The Prelude and Aurora Leigh,
see my From School to Salon: Reading Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry
(普林斯顿大学: 普林斯顿大学出版社, 2004), PP. 135–44. Eggleston’s comments are
supported by a glance through the holdings of Harvard University’s libraries.

9For “Loaf-Giver,” see Lucy Larcom, 田园诗般的工作 (波士顿: Osgood and Com-
公司, 1875), PP. 15–18; hereafter cited parenthetically by page number as Idyl. 这
etymology for “lady” in “Loaf-Giver” was among Larcom’s many conventional transat-
lantic borrowings. See John Ruskin’s gloss on “lady” in “Of Queen’s Gardens,“ 在
Sesame and Lilies (1865), 编辑. Deborah Epstein Nord (新天堂: Yale University
按, 2002), p. 89.

10Lucy Larcom, untitled lecture on poetry, 盒子 2, Addison Collection.

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LARCOM’S AN IDYL OF WORK

encamped at the seashore (the friends included Whittier, Ba-
yard Taylor, Whittier’s publisher James T. Fields, and Larcom’s
own friend Annie Fields). Like An Idyl of Work, Longfel-
low’s and Whittier’s medley-poems had no one, dominant
protagonist; 反而, the authors attributed their poems to a
number of speakers, in a diffused sociality of letters.11

Embarking on An Idyl of Work in the early 1870s, Larcom
was no doubt content that a long narrative poem with inter-
polated shorter poems—an anthology-poem, as I call it—was
a proper vehicle for her serious poetic ambition.12 Moreover,
experience told her, it would draw an audience. As Whittier’s
friend, she was well aware that The Tent on the Beach had
been surprisingly rewarding for him; 的确, both Whittier and
Longfellow found that incorporating previously published po-
ems into a longer narrative form helped them boost the mea-
ger ﬁnancial returns yielded by periodical publication or slen-
der volumes of poetry.13 Beyond such ﬁnancial considerations,

11Elizabeth Maddock Dillon uses the term “sociality” to mark out the “space of
public sphere activity concerned with private subject production” within a liberal pub-
lic sphere structured by “the desire for recognition.” See her The Gender of Freedom:
Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (斯坦福大学, 加利福尼亚州。: Stanford Univer-
城市出版社, 2004), p. 7. Anthology-poems—especially in their mid-nineteenth-century,
high American,
liberal mode—are centrally concerned with exactly this space of
sociality.

12Christoph Irmscher notes Longfellow’s interest in “the form of the anthology”—
expressed not only in the compiling of his anthologies proper but in medley-style
poems: “the form of the anthology . . . became one of Longfellow’s favorite genres, 从
The Waif (1845) and The Poets and Poetry of Europe (1870), to Tales of a Wayside
Inn (1863), Longfellow’s answer to Boccaccio and Chaucer, 和, ﬁnally, the thirty-one-
volume anthology Poems of Places (1876–1879), the most comprehensive collection of
poems ever published in the United States” (“Longfellow Redux,” Raritan 21 [冬天
2002]: 100–29, 118).

13William Charvat’s reconstruction of Longfellow’s earnings shows that although
Longfellow “made his reputation by his lyrics,” for practical intents and purposes
he “[gave] his lyrics to the world free”; it was Longfellow’s narrative writings that
maintained his income. As published in the Atlantic Monthly from 1861 到 1863, 这
poems that later entered Tales of a Wayside Inn contributed to Longfellow’s total
annual periodicals income of not more than three hundred dollars. Putting a narrative
frame around them, and then using the narrative Tales to pull in buyers for the assorted
“Birds of Passage” lyrics that followed in the volume, yielded a book that sold 22,000
copies in two years and that generated about twelve hundred dollars for Longfellow
in its ﬁrst year of publication. See Charvat, The Profession of Authorship in America
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968), PP. 113–14, 140. Whittier thought his
出版商, James T. Fields, imprudent for ordering an initial print run of 10,000 为了

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THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

immersion
Larcom’s deep (and thoroughly professional)
in the high Victorian Anglo-American literary ﬁeld may well
have convinced her that
late-nineteenth-century poetry in
English did some of its most interesting thinking within the
conﬁnes of such relaxed narrative forms. 乙. Warwick Slinn’s
observation that “we ﬁnd a growing experimentation among
[英国人] Victorian poets with relationships between smaller
discrete units—such as couplets, sonnets, or stanzas—and
extended, often loosely constructed, narrative sequences”
applies to both sides of
the Atlantic. Such long poems
or sequences of poems apparently constituted an informal,
baggy,
transatlantic super-genre for educated nineteenth-
century Anglo-American readers.14 Although to describe such
a form as “experimental” may seem strange to present-day
American critics accustomed to reserving the honoriﬁc for
Whitman’s free verse and Dickinson’s protomodernist lyrics,
Larcom almost certainly viewed her own cultural moment in
that way.15

The Tent on the Beach, but the volume sold out its ﬁrst printing in ten days. See John
乙. Pickard, 编辑。, The Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier, 卷. 3, 1861–1892 (剑桥:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975), PP. 145–46. Whittier’s previously
“negligible” income from books, Charvat reports, rose to “a little over $3,000 一年,”
并在 1868 the total printings for all of Whittier’s books, carried along by The Tent
on the Beach, exceeded 53,000 (Charvat, p. 171).

14乙. Warwick Slinn, “Experimental Form in Victorian Poetry,” in The Cambridge
Companion to Victorian Poetry, 编辑. Joseph Bristow (剑桥: 剑桥大学
按, 2000), p. 58. Slinn ventures that the “obvious nineteenth-century paradigm for
such structures, particularly those that employ lyrics of varying stanzas and length,“ 是
Tennysonian monodrama (p. 59). A partial list of post–Civil War American sequences of
lyrics in various stanzas, something along the lines of Tennyson’s Maud, might include
Edmund Clarence Stedman’s sequence “The Carib Sea,” Emma Lazarus’s sequence of
“Songs” and her “Translations from the Hebrew Poets of Medieval Spain,” in Songs of
a Semite, Sidney Lanier’s “Hymns of the Marshes,” and Trumbell Stickney’s “Eride”
sequence of love poems.

15The paradigm that would canonize Whitman and Dickinson as American hetero-
dox experimentalists was already at work in Larcom’s day. On how American literary
nationalism created the space for the rebellious “American Homer” that Whitman
came to ﬁll, see Timothy Morris’s Becoming Canonical in American Poetry (厄巴纳:
伊利诺伊大学出版社, 1995), 特别是. PP. 1–53. For another valuable historical per-
spective on the supercession of the “schoolroom poets” (Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell,
and Whittier), see Angela Sorby’s Schoolroom Poets: 童年, Performance, 和
the Place of American Poetry, 1865–1917 (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New
England, 2005).

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LARCOM’S AN IDYL OF WORK

When Longfellow, Whittier, and then Larcom wrote long
narrative poems in which lyrics and ballads circulated among
various speakers, they found a way of reﬂecting in poetic form
the means by which poetry is transmitted. That is to say, 在一个
very fundamental, formal level, the subject of all of these po-
ems is the creation and distribution of cultural capital (和我们一样
call it today, after Pierre Bourdieu): how poetry gets read,
translated from one person to another, ordered, 访问过,
preserved. The embedded structure of the anthology-poems
(and of other mid-century “medley” works, like James Russell
Lowell’s The Bigelow Papers, that incorporate poetry within
prose narrative or ﬁctional commentary) offered writers and
readers maps of the nineteenth-century literary ﬁeld, reﬂexive
formal models for the production, circulation, and reception
of poems. 换句话说, anthology-poems formally literal-
ized the matrix of print culture out of which they emerged.
The anthology-poem’s characteristic reframing of languages
by other languages echoes Bakhtin’s famous description of
the novel: here “discourse not only represents, but is itself
represented.”16

The rapidly shifting character of nineteenth-century Anglo-
American publishing—the dramatic expansion of readership,
the multiplication of publication outlets, the commercialization
and stratiﬁcation of the literary ﬁeld—may well have given rise
to poetic experimentation. Trying to account for the fecundity
of nineteenth-century prosody, Herbert Tucker speculatively
links the phenomenon to the conditions of nineteenth-century
print culture: “The nineteenth century developed the nearest
thing that publishing poets have ever had to a mass readership,
with distributive possibilities and marketing schemes to match,
but also new grounds for anxiety about whom a poet was speak-
ing to—indeed, about whether anyone was listening.” The be-
wildering varieties of nineteenth-century versiﬁcation, Tucker
argues, “[bespeak] a serious attempt [by poets] to construct

16中号. 中号. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four
随笔, 编辑. Michael Holquist, 反式. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 336.

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THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

a venue for poetry’s survival.”17 Anthology-poems or medleys,
like anthologies in the more conventional sense, gave new life
to shorter works and offered poets the formal means of imag-
ining and reimagining, idealizing and critiquing, the circulation
of poems (including their own poems) within the burgeoning
print market, both within and across national boundaries.

When Larcom turned from her editorial collaboration with
Whittier on their transatlantic anthology Songs of Three Cen-
turies to concentrate on composing An Idyl of Work, she was
不是, 也许, turning so very far. The poem’s “medley” form, 它是
choice of a group protagonist, its avoidance of concrete detail
about the work of the mills, and its conspicuous transatlantic in-
tertextuality all conspire to interfere with readers’ ability to read
Larcom’s Idyl as an individual story of suffering and release, 作为
a historical document of industrialization, or as a class protest
against oppression. But all of these formal features contribute
to Larcom’s collective biography. For Larcom’s purposes in An
Idyl of Work, mapping the transatlantic literary ﬁeld and writ-
ing her own poetic autobiography seem to have been one and
the same project.

In composing An Idyl of Work, Larcom drew some broad plot
patterns from her transatlantic generic models. Like Tennyson’s
The Princess, Larcom’s Idyl of Work centers on a trio of
young women, but Larcom’s heroines—sober Esther, ethereal
Eleanor, and ﬂighty Isabel—are workers rather than aristocrats,
workers who self-consciously ponder their own relation to aris-
tocratic ideals of “ladyhood.” In the opening of the poem, 可能
ﬂoods idle the mills’ machinery, a circumstance that grants
the young women an unaccustomed occasion for leisure—for
an idyl, as it were.18 Lacking the resources to found a female

17Herbert F. Tucker, “Of Monuments and Moments: Spacetime in Nineteenth-

Century Poetry,” Modern Language Quarterly 58 (九月 1997): 278.

18Larcom’s title both puns on the “idling” of the machinery and invokes another
transatlantic model for the long narrative poem, Tennyson’s The Idylls of the King
(1859); 再次, Larcom challenges the aristocratic bias of her model.

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LARCOM’S AN IDYL OF WORK

center of learning, as does the protagonist of Tennyson’s poem,
Larcom’s heroines nonetheless use their free time to improve
themselves along the lines available to them: reading and
singing to one another, attending church, discussing the ser-
mon and their lives more generally. 和, as in The Princess,
their doings are watched by a group of interested young
男人.

At this point in the plot, Larcom introduces a new character
to her trio: Ruth Woodburn, WHO, as it will turn out, writes
poetry. A few weeks later (recalling Charles Dickens’s visit to
Lowell in 1842), a group of visitors from Britain and Boston
arrives at the mill, among them a Boston man who will at-
tempt to seduce Isabel.19 In high summer, Eleanor and Esther
accompany another friend on a vacation to the New Hamp-
shire mountains, where the women befriend a wealthy woman,
Miriam Willoughby, and draw her into their circuit of poetic ex-
改变. In their absence from Lowell, Eleanor and Esther miss
a threatened strike in the factories, the Idyl’s version of class
apocalypse beheld from a distance, like the burning of Romney
Leigh’s estate in Aurora Leigh. They also miss Isabel’s ﬂight
“up the Boston road” with her would-be seducer. 幸运的是,
the seducer—Miriam Willoughby’s wayward nephew, eventu-
ally also exposed as an embezzler—skips town before stealing
Isabel’s virtue. An Idyl of Work concludes as Esther marries
a doctor, Isabel establishes a modest independence as a seam-
stress in Boston, and Eleanor anticipates a beautiful consump-
tive death in Esther’s arms, overlooking a Boston drenched in
a “suffusing harmony of light” (Idyl, p. 180)—now become a
New Jerusalem.

19In Larcom’s version of Dickens’s famous encounter with American industry,
“Some strangers came one day into the mills,— / Among them English travelers.”
The “strangers” note with dismay that children are working in the mills—“copying /
Our British faults too closely”—before they turn with pleasure to contemplate Larcom’s
virtuous, 聪明的, and comely young-adult heroines (Idyl, PP. 77–78). Dickens’s own
account is in his American Notes (1842), 小伙子. 4. Larcom’s attitudes follow Dickens’s
closely, including his unfavorable comparison of British working conditions with those
在美国. Larcom responded to Dickens’s recollections more directly in her au-
tobiographical essay “Among Lowell Mill-Girls,” Atlantic Monthly, 十一月 1881,
PP. 593–612, 609–10.

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THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

Larcom maps the cultural ﬁeld of the 1840s, the decade
of the poem’s action, throughout the Idyl. Perhaps its most
explicit expression can be found in the description of Esther’s
cherished books:

The bookshelf swung between

Two simple prints,—the “Cotter’s Saturday Night”
And the “Last Supper,” dear to Esther’s heart,
Though scarce true to Da Vinci. On the shelves
Maria Edgeworth’s “Helen” leaned against
Thomas `a Kempis. Bunyan’s “Holy War”
And “Pilgrim’s Progress” stood up stiff between
“Locke on the Understanding” and the Songs
Of Robert Burns. The “Voices of the Night,”
“Bridal of Pennacook,” “Paradise Lost,”
With Irving’s “Sketch-book,” “Ivanhoe,” Watts’s Hymns,
Mingled in democratic neighborhood.

[Idyl, p. 43]

A pure, canonical distillation of early-nineteenth-century, 关于-
spectable, evangelical, transatlantic vernacular literacy, Esther’s
collection of books poignantly sums up the mill girls’ shared
cultural capital in Larcom’s Idyl.20 Robert Burns’s enormously
popular poem “The Cotter’s Saturday Night,” which depicts a
humble, cottage-dwelling family reading the Bible together, 在-
spired numerous paintings and prints.21 For Larcom’s country-
bred mill girls, it would have been a nostalgic image to keep
faith with: their single-sex dormitory refuge from their indus-
trial labor contrasts with the familial domesticity of the rural

20Larcom glossed her own memories of such bookshelves at length a few years later
in “Among Lowell Mill-Girls”: “Among children of the Puritans, the reading of good
books was a matter of course. . . . With the Pilgrim’s Progress many of us had been from
infancy as familiar as we were with the road from our own door-stone to the meeting-
房子. . . . Milton also had the charm of a great story-teller; and the Paradise Lost, 存在
a religious book, was to be found in most home libraries that contained more than
a dozen volumes, a large number for those days.” The mill girls’ tastes, she recalls,
ran to “Standard English works” rather than “the thickets of modern miscellaneous
文学,” since the standards “were almost the only books within reach” (PP. 604,
605).

21Larcom could have had in mind the Scottish painter David Wilkie’s well-known
rendition of “The Cotter’s Saturday Night” (1837), although the self-taught U.S. artist
Eunice Pinney also painted a “Cotter’s Saturday Night” (1820).

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LARCOM’S AN IDYL OF WORK

是
cottage, and their small bookshelf, although orthodox,
nonetheless much wider and more secular than the Cotter’s
阅读. Distanced at yet one more remove from Esther’s mod-
est acquirements by both time and superior cultural knowledge,
Larcom’s narrator in turn endorses the bookshelf’s “democratic
neighborhood” as the foundation not only for Esther’s self-
culture but also for American national culture.

In seeking to deﬁne the literary aims of a democratic Amer-
ican culture, Larcom was open to transatlantic inﬂuence, 但
she had ambitions to exert as well as to receive it. Esther’s
bookshelf is obviously transatlantic in its contents; what is less
obvious is that in compiling it, Larcom sought to recast Marian
Earle’s more impoverished and fragmentary acquisition of lit-
erature in Aurora Leigh. Marian Earle, a poor seamstress taken
up by Aurora’s cousin Romney Leigh, “tramped” alongside her
parents as a child with no access to books except through the
casual charity of other vagrants, like the peddler who

would toss her down

Some odd stray volume from his heavy pack,
A Thomson’s Seasons, mulcted of the Spring,
Or half a play of Shakespeare’s, torn across . . .
Or else a sheaf of leaves (for that small Ruth’s
Small gleanings) torn out from the heart of books,
From Churchyard Elegies and Edens Lost,
From Burns, and Bunyan, Selkirk, and Tom Jones,—
. . . [S]he weeded out
Her book-leaves, threw away the leaves that hurt . . .
And made a nosegay of the sweet and good
To fold within her breast, and pore upon
At broken moments of the noonday glare.22

The raw materials of Marian’s and Esther’s literacies overlap
considerably, save for the absence of American reading in Mar-
ian’s “nosegay.” What differ are the conditions in which the two

22Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh and Other Poems (1856) (伦敦:
Women’s Press, 1978), bk. 3, ll. 972–92; hereafter cited parenthetically by book and
line number.

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THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

women acquire and use their precious, hard-won cultural cap-
ital, conditions that emblematize Larcom’s jealously guarded
sense of divergence between the hopelessly impoverished, 迪斯-
possessed population of the industrializing British countryside
and the American workingwomen of Larcom’s own idealized
girlhood experience, youth who left their family farms or small-
town homes, often temporarily, to labor in New England’s
emerging industries.23

Unlike Aurora Leigh, An Idyl of Work imagines its transat-
lantic cultural capital as an asset that can be shared among
workingwomen, even generated by them. Larcom makes her
point through supporting character Ruth Woodburn. Ruth, WHO
has been disappointed in love, habitually carries about an “old
portfolio of [her own] verse” (Idyl, p. 85). The narrator re-
proves Ruth’s self-indulgent lyrics—“’Tis no good place for
歌曲,” she says, “Dungeoned in self. Birds in a darkened cage/
Stop singing” (Idyl, p. 86)—but the author goes beyond per-
sonal admonition to question the origins of such a literature
of misery. Larcom’s plotting suggests that the stereotypically
feminine poetry of “secret sorrow”—in Cheryl Walker’s criti-
cal term for a dominant strain in nineteenth-century American
women’s verse—stems less from individual romantic loss than
from incomplete, or biased, cultural transmission. Ruth carries
a romantic secret but also, 更重要, “a blurred text of
chained books / in her heart’s crypt” (Idyl, p. 85).24

23The work of Thomas Dublin and other twentieth-century labor historians reaf-
ﬁrms contemporary accounts that, at the time of Larcom’s mill employment, young
women frequently worked for several years in the mills but then returned to the family
farm. Some women found ways—teaching, sewing, marriage—of staying on in urban
centers after leaving the mills. On the evolution of women’s work in the Lowell mills,
see Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community
in Lowell, 马萨诸塞州, 1826–1860 (纽约: 哥伦比亚大学出版社, 1979),
and Transforming Women’s Work: New England Lives in the Industrial Revolution
(伊萨卡岛: 康奈尔大学出版社, 1994). In “Among Lowell Mill-Girls,” Larcom recalls
that during her time in the factory, she and her fellow operatives wept over “Mrs.
Browning’s Cry of the Children” even though “the unillumined darkness of those En-
glish children’s lot seemed as remote from us as what we had read of heathen nations
that sacriﬁced their little ones to idols” (p. 602). Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem
was published in 1843.

24See Cheryl Walker, The Nightingale’s Burden: Women Poets and American Cul-
ture before 1900 (布卢明顿: Indiana University Press, 1982), which identiﬁes “the

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LARCOM’S AN IDYL OF WORK

For Ruth, the fall into sorrowing song results from her ac-
quiring a speciﬁc kind of cultural capital in a speciﬁc educa-
tional setting: the private tutorial in the classics, a version of
the education that Aurora Leigh enjoys with her father (as did
Elizabeth Barrett Browning) and that Larcom regards with
more suspicion than does Barrett Browning. Aurora, after her
father’s death, recalls with longing “The trick of Greek / 和
Latin he had taught me” (Aurora Leigh, bk. 1, ll. 714–15). 为了
Ruth, 也, classical learning is linked with loss. She eventually
recounts her story to Esther, who rescues and befriends her:

“. . . 他 [a schoolteacher] came,

And with old Virgil, made an Italy
Of cold New Hampshire. 我, beyond the rest,
Prizing the Latin lore, we studied much
一起, in long evenings, by ourselves.”

[Idyl, p. 89]

No sexual sin follows, only literary sins, as the teacher, 是-
brose, goes west, falls in love with another woman, and forgets
about Ruth. Abandoned, Ruth tries to instruct her unhappy
lyrics in forgetfulness and, 最终, transcendence.

Ruth Woodburn’s story reﬂects aspects of Larcom’s own life:
her most signiﬁcant romantic relationship, with Frank Spauld-
英, ended when Spaulding settled in California and Larcom
decided not to join him there.25 The differences between

secret sorrow” as the central matter of nineteenth-century American women’s poetry.
Larcom seems already cognizant of what Nina Baym, replying to Walker, complains of
as “narcissistic” in the “nightingale” tradition (“Reinventing Lydia Sigourney,” Ameri-
can Literature 62 [落下 1990]: 389). Unlike Baym, 然而, Larcom can critique this
tradition performatively, by providing both its lyric voice and a surrounding, corrective
narrative. The nineteenth-century identiﬁcation of the “literature of misery”—whose
writers “are chieﬂy women, gifted women may be, full of thought and feeling and fancy,
but poor, lonely and unhappy”—comes from an essay, “When Should We Write,” pub-
lished in the Springﬁeld Daily Republican of 7 七月 1860, probably written by Samuel
Bowles and now well known for its possible application to the poetry of his friend
Emily Dickinson. For a discussion of the essay in this context, see Virginia Jackson,
Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (普林斯顿大学: 普林斯顿大学出版社,
2005), PP. 215–19.

25On Larcom’s relationship with Frank Spaulding, see Marchalonis, The Worlds of

Lucy Larcom, PP. 64–70 and passim.

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THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

Ruth’s and Larcom’s stories, 然而 (Spaulding was a physi-
cian and a businessman, not a teacher of classical languages;
Larcom refused him, not he her), underline the more general
cultural origins and force of Larcom’s critique. “Perhaps your
Ambrose also loves himself / Glassed in her admiration” (Idyl,
p. 92), Esther tells Ruth in response to her revelation. 这
unequal pedagogical erotics leads to entrapment on both sides,
with women’s writing “dungeon’d in self” and men’s relation-
ship to culture degraded to narcissism `a deux.

If this is the social disorder of “secret sorrow” female po-
etics, what is its cure? It lies, Larcom suggests, within Es-
ther’s transatlantic, 民主的, vernacular bookshelf: Esther
attempts to minister to Ruth’s sorrow before she knows its
cause by taking down her Wordsworth and reading aloud
his “Laodamia,” “with its heroic thoughts / Climbing sharp
crags of sorrow with high faith” (Idyl, p. 35). Her therapeutic
choice ﬁts Ruth’s circumstances more than Esther knows, 为了
Wordsworth’s poem critiques both women’s excessive mourn-
ing and the classical male heroic ethos to which it gives a shade’s
嗓音. But when Ruth protests that Wordsworth’s poem is “too
难的, too hard!” Esther sets it aside and takes up a homemade
book from which to read her friend to sleep:

The one she chose

Was a strange medley-book of prose and rhyme
Cut from odd magazines, or pages dim
Of yellow journals, long since out of print;
And pasted in against the faded ink
Of an old log-book, relic of the sea,
And mostly ﬁlled with legends of the shore
That Esther loved, her home-shore of Cape Ann.

[Idyl, p. 36]

The poem Esther reads out of this “medley-book,” a ballad ti-
tled “Peggy Bligh’s Voyage,” is in fact one of the many lyrics
and ballads of her own that Larcom anthologized in the Idyl.26

26The Poetical Works of Lucy Larcom (波士顿: Houghton, Mifﬂin and Company,
1884) reprints “Peggy Bligh’s Voyage” (PP. 6–9) and most of the other lyrics and ballads
incorporated into An Idyl of Work.

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LARCOM’S AN IDYL OF WORK

The scrapbook in which Esther ﬁnds it is recognizably Lar-
com’s nostalgia-laden reﬂection on her own compositional per-
formance as well as a reference to the scrapbook “gleanings” of
Marian Earle’s painfully acquired literacy in Aurora Leigh. Es-
ther’s small anthology melds the world of public print with her
own practices of reading and appropriation, which take their
meaning from the workingwomen with whom she lives in com-
社区, and the passage above nominates their homely literary
活动, alongside Larcom’s more prestigious Anglo-American
literary models, as sources for the poetic form of An Idyl of
工作.

The transatlantic sequence of cultural transmission in Ruth’s
story—from Virgil to Wordsworth to this home-spun American
writing—suggests that the cure for what ails Ruth and her po-
etry is a different, more authentic relationship to the cultural
enterprise: one mediated by women as well as by men, 一
that would read humane letters in the domesticated Anglo-
American vernacular as well as the classical tongues. It is only
after staging this curative scene of cultural transmission be-
tween two workingwomen that Larcom widens her poem’s
focus to imagine literary culture mediating between women
of different classes. When she does so, transatlantic poetic ex-
change is once again her privileged medium and the anthology-
poem her chosen form.

When Esther and Eleanor, vacationing in the New Hamp-
shire mountains, meet the wealthy Miriam Willoughby, they ce-
ment their cross-class friendship by trading poetry—Larcom’s
own nature sonnets along with appreciations of Wordsworth’s
Excursion (Idyl, p. 128)—and by sharing with Miriam their
stratagems for reading in bits and pieces while tending to ma-
chinery. Although forbidden to take books into the mill, Esther
说,

“. . . we rebel; 至少, evade.
Few girls but keep some volume hid away
For stealthy reading. Some tear out the leaves
Of an old Bible, and so get the whole;
For books, not leaves, are tabooed. Others paste
The window-sills with poem, 故事, sketch:

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THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

No one objects to papering bare walls.
I have a memory-book well ﬁlled so.”

[Idyl, p. 129]

再次, it is the mill girls’ improvised technologies of lit-
eracy, not the technologies of manufacturing, that occupy the
foreground of An Idyl of Work. And here, as elsewhere in the
poem, Larcom’s retrospective reconstruction of her Lowell ex-
perience notably subordinates literary activities sponsored by
the mill owners—most famously, their subsidized publication
of The Lowell Offering—to those initiated by the millworkers,
as they themselves set about laying claim to literary culture.27
Esther explains to Miriam that

“. . . we all know

[Whittier’s] ‘Yankee Girl,’ ‘Angel of Patience,’ too.
There’s Bryant’s ‘Thanatopsis,’ ‘Death of the Flowers,’
Hood’s ‘Bridge of Sighs,’ likewise his ‘Song of the Shirt,’
With Shelley’s ‘Skylark,’ Coleridge’s ‘Mont Blanc.’
这些, and more waifs of lovely verse, I’ve learned
Between my window and my shuttle’s ﬂight.”

[Idyl, p. 129]

As foreign as the conditions of the mill girls’ reading are to
the more privileged Miriam, the texts they select are entirely
familiar (as they also would have been to any purchaser of
Whittier’s and Larcom’s Songs of Three Centuries, for which
Esther’s list is virtually a table of contents).

Elizabeth Freeman proposes that

the Lowell mill girls
at mid–nineteenth century represented for nonworking-class

27In their conversation with Miriam Willoughby, one of the mill girls conﬁdes that
Esther’s prose and poetry have appeared “In the ‘Offering,’—you know the magazine /
That the girls publish” (Idyl, p. 139). This brief mention is the poem’s only concession
to Esther’s published authorship. Larcom’s relationship to the Offering was extensive
and continued after she left Lowell to teach in Illinois; see Marchalonis, The Worlds
of Lucy Larcom, PP. 34–35, 48–49.

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LARCOM’S AN IDYL OF WORK

including middle-class women, “the prospect of
observers,
female homosocial reproduction . . . disjoined from home and
家庭, in which women became ‘Lowell girls’ by imitating other
women in a process that blurred property and identity, consoli-
dating both in the hands of women.” Larcom’s Idyl, 实际上, ide-
alizes this power of female homosocial reproduction, attaches
it to the millworkers’ informal technologies of literacy, 和,
through the millworkers’ encounter with Miriam Willoughby,
extends it to women of the upper class.28 Constructed as it is out
of a shared cultural capital, the sociability of this community,
Larcom goes on to insist, is far preferable to socialism of the
Fourieristic variety. Like Aurora Leigh, who tells Romney that
“Your Fouriers failed, / Because not poets enough to under-
站立 / That life develops from within” (Aurora Leigh, bk. 2,
ll. 483–85), Eleanor proclaims, “there’s no home / For anyone,
in everybody’s home; / . . . our one little room is more / To me
than ten Brook Farms” (Idyl, PP. 138–39). Eleanor wants no
part of Fourier’s substitution of phalansteries for families. 这
mill girls’ and Miriam’s idealized commons of Anglo-American
文学, Larcom implies, is grounded in and ideally returns
to the inwardness of private domesticity.29 And yet the circle is
not perfect; as the print of “The Cotter’s Saturday Night” that
oversees the “democratic neighborhood” of Esther’s bookshelf
emphasizes, the idealized anyone’s “home,” presided over by
a husband-father, is not identical to the “little room” shared
by Eleanor, Esther, and Isabel. 的确, to some observers of
the Lowell mills in their early days, those small rooms, hived
in dormitories, seemed more than halfway to the phalanstery:
they brought women together in forms of association outside
the circle of the family; they overlaid bonds of work with bonds

28Elizabeth Freeman, “ ‘What Factory Girls Had Power Do’: The Techno-logic
of Working-Class Feminine Publicity in The Lowell Offering,” Arizona Quarterly 50
(夏天 1994): 110–11. On female millworkers’ lives in the early Lowell boarding-
房屋, see Dublin, Women at Work, PP. 75–85.

29Larcom quoted Aurora Leigh’s strictures on Fourier a few years later in “Among
Lowell Mill-Girls.” “Perhaps we were conservative,” Larcom acknowledges, “and per-
haps some of us dimly felt, with Aurora Leigh, that ‘Your Fouriers failed, / 因为
not poets enough to understand / That life develops from within” ’ (p. 607).

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THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

of domestic life in ways that upset emergent norms of gendered
separate spheres; and they rescaled intimacy.

Larcom’s most ambitious revisions of her British poetic mod-
els pay tribute to the power of this cross-class female literary
commons. Although the themes and staging of the dialogue
between the millworkers and Miss Willoughby echo those of
Wordsworth’s Excursion—especially the Excursion’s debate, 在
its ﬁnal two books, over the consequences of British industrial-
ization for country folk—Larcom positions the mill girls as the
speaking subjects, as well as the objects, of the Idyl’s dialogue
on their condition. To the Wanderer of Wordsworth’s poem,
among the various horrors of child labor is the denial of child-
hood’s natural access to the sublime: the body of the factory
boy “Who, in his very childhood, should appear / Sublime from
present purity and joy” becomes “to the joy of [它是] own mo-
tions dead,” his senses “rarely competent / To impress a vivid
feeling on the mind” of nature’s delights (Excursion, bk. 8, ll.
319–28). Larcom, 相比之下, insists not only that the natural
sublime is accessible to her mill girls’ appreciation but also that
Wordsworth’s version of it is within their capabilities to assess.
In one exchange with the mill girls, Miriam Willoughby recalls
climbing a mountain. Her description directly echoes the as-
cent of Mount Snowdon in Wordsworth’s Prelude, but then it
turns into a pointed critique of the Wordsworthian egotistical
sublime:

And Miriam told them, sitting side by side
On Ossipee’s steep crags, . . .
Told them how once upon Pequawket’s slope
She lingered, as the summer sun went down,
Her fellow-pilgrims vanishing from sight,
Bounding like chamois up into the mists
Of the veiled summit: all the world below,
Path, mountain-forest, changed to one gray blank;
And she alone there in a vapor-rift,
That left one lichened crag, one blasted tree
Above her head, and one vast mountain-gap
Brimmed with a cloudy sunset’s awful red
That lurid gorge seemed widening vast and far

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LARCOM’S AN IDYL OF WORK

As an eternity . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

“Yet that night

Was ghostly, more than heavenly; for we stayed
Till dawn on Pequawket’s hidden top,
Hidden from eyes below, that only saw
Our camp-ﬁre as a star above the cloud.
We to ourselves were shipwrecked mariners
In a great sea of pallid mist, that surged
And curled up to our feet. We stood on rocks
Floating in vapor. Dim isles loomed around
Out of the fog, an archipelago
Of desolation. We were cast adrift
’Mid unsubstantial guesses of a world
Such as old Chaos in his slumber shaped.
And someone said, “We are philosophers!
Life is illusion; we and fogs are real.”
And then another,—with him I agreed,—
“Who climbs to isolation from mankind,
There thinking to ﬁnd wisdom, is a fool.”

[Idyl, PP. 121–23]

In the conclusion to the 1850 Prelude that Larcom here
rewrites, Wordsworth ascends Snowdon only to ﬁnd his down-
ward vision blocked by “a silent sea of hoary mist,” broken
only by a “rift” through which rises “the roar of waters,”
token to Wordsworth of a “mind / That feeds upon inﬁnity,
that broods / Over the dark abyss” (Prelude, bk. 14, ll. 42,
56–59, 70–72). Miriam, 然而, decisively turns away from
Wordsworth’s homeless inﬁnitude. “Who climbs to isolation
from mankind, / There thinking to ﬁnd wisdom, is a fool” (Idyl,
p. 123), Miriam concludes from her experience of the sublime,
and the emphatically social experience of Larcom’s heroines
as they hike the White Mountains ratiﬁes Miriam’s revision of
Wordsworth.30

30Three years after An Idyl of Work appeared, Larcom published a shorter poem,
“In a Cloud Rift,” that similarly views an occluded landscape from the top of Mount
华盛顿: “The gulf profound / Below us seethed with mists, a sullen deep” (Harper’s
New Monthly Magazine, 八月 1878, p. 403). Marchalonis links this poem and another

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THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

The “lurid” chasm visibly and invisibly gaping below Miriam
Willoughby’s view is, as she implies, social rather than onto-
逻辑的. The question posed by Larcom’s Idyl is whether her
heroines’ shared, female-authored revision of Wordsworth’s
egotistical sublime has sufﬁcient power to alter the industrial
景观. The heroines’ bonding over poetry is literally their
escape from, and ﬁguratively Larcom’s solution for, labor un-
rest back in Lowell. (Their friend Minta invites Eleanor and
Esther to New Hampshire as a diversion from “talk of strikes,—
they say that half the looms / Must stop, or wages be reduced”
[Idyl, p. 99]). Eliding the prospect of class-based labor action,
the conclusion of An Idyl of Work moves forward in time from
its 1840s setting to Larcom’s 1870s present to comment on the
role of class in a “true republic”:

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If high rewards no longer stimulate toil,
And mill-folk settle to a stagnant class,
As in old civilizations, then farewell
To the Republic’s hope! What differ we
From other feudalisms? Like ocean-waves
Work populations change. No rich, no poor,
No learned, and no ignorant class or caste
The true republic tolerates; interfused,
Like the sea’s salt, the life of each through all.

[Idyl, p. 178]

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As Larcom’s contemporary readers fully understood, 这些
lines referred to the immigrants who, by the 1870s, had dis-
placed the young New England–born women who had experi-
enced more favorable working conditions in the mills of Lar-
com’s day.31 Converting those “populations” into an educated

poem published in 1877, “Asleep on the Summit,” to Larcom’s trip to the summit of
Mount Washington in the summer of 1877 (The Worlds of Lucy Larcom, PP. 206, 212);
but this corresponding passage in An Idyl of Work suggests either that Larcom had
had earlier opportunities for such a summit view or that her reading of Wordsworth
preceded and conditioned what she saw in nature.

31A testy but perceptive anonymous reviewer in Appleton’s Journal, 例如,
quoted this passage in arguing that “the book was written with the object of proving
by illustration that even the most exhaustive and monotonous labor cannot of itself
deprive one of all opportunity for high mental culture and noble living, and also

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LARCOM’S AN IDYL OF WORK

American workforce is the contemporary subtext of Larcom’s
Idyl. Hoping that an Anglophone culture’s “democratic neigh-
borhood” can assimilate these new workers into social hi-
erarchies that will remain oceanically ﬂuid rather than me-
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chanically ﬁxed, she embodies her desire in a simile:
waves, the new “work populations” wash ashore; like the sea,
they are “interfused” with the life of all. Larcom’s glance to-
ward “Tintern Abbey,” with its concluding sense of human
feeling “more deeply interfused,” recalls Wordsworth’s earlier
appearance among the books “Mingled in democratic neighbor-
hood” on Esther’s bookshelf. Her allusion implies the more lit-
eral historical means by which those arriving populations would
Americanize: through the dissemination of an Anglo-American
vernacular English literary curriculum in the public schools of
美国.

Its social agenda clariﬁed, Larcom’s Idyl sets about resolv-
it once
ing its individual romantic plots, and in doing so,
again borrows from Aurora Leigh. Like Aurora Leigh, An Idyl
of Work closes with a glimpse of the New Jerusalem. 骗局-
sistent with Larcom’s other revisions of Barrett Browning’s
poem, this vision of a social sublime is shared homosocially
(between Eleanor and Esther) rather than heterosexually medi-
ated (aware that her illness rules out marriage, Eleanor’s suitor,
Ralph, retreats to the sidelines, where he loves her “with far-
off reverence” [Idyl, p. 182]). Describing the sunrise for her
cousin Romney Leigh, who has been blinded in the burning
of his country house—seeing it for him—Aurora famously con-
cludes her poem with the biblical materials of the renovated
city of God: “And when / I saw his soul saw,—‘Jasper ﬁrst,’
I said, / ‘And second, sapphire; 第三, chalcedony; / The rest

to protest against the tendency of the change which has come over the conditions
and character of mill labor since the period indicated. The increasing degradation of
certain forms of labor, the rapidly-widening rift between the interests of employer
and employed, ﬁll [Larcom] with alarm, and she sees in them forerunners of national
decay” (3 七月 1875, p. 22). On the transformation of the mills’ labor force in the mid-
to-late nineteenth century, see Dublin, Women at Work, PP. 132–64; Dublin notes
that the “proletarianization of the female work force” (p. 162) was marked both by the
increasing numbers of immigrant women in the mills and by the closing of wage gaps
between higher-paid jobs (held onto by native-born women) and lower-wage positions.

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28
THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY
为了, . . . 最后的, an amethyst’” (Aurora Leigh, bk. 9, ll. 961–
64). Anticipating her death from consumption, Eleanor reminds
Esther that “There’s a City of whose streets / We’ve read to-
gether” (Idyl, p. 181), and she coaxes Esther’s eyes toward the
sunset.

Having drawn “their hearts / Indissolubly close,” the narra-
tor ﬁnally leaves her heroines “looking forth into fair realms /
Of untried being; . . . East and West / Life beckons” (Idyl,
p. 183). As always in An Idyl of Work, the transatlantic Anglo-
American literary ﬁeld—“East and West”—is both the medium
of the workingwomen’s community and the matrix of Larcom’s
claims for the dignity of her protagonists’ collective cultural
biography. What circulates through Larcom’s Idyl is a shared
mid-century Anglo-American dream of literary culture as a me-
diator of class division, a dream that Larcom articulates through
the anthology-poem’s formal power of dramatizing the passage
of poems from hand to working hand.

Both the reception and the sales of An Idyl disappointed
Larcom’s hopes. As Larcom’s biographer Shirley Marchalonis
summarizes, “Some critics liked it, but only friends and for-
mer mill girls bought it; ﬁnancially it was a complete failure.”32
Most nineteenth-century reviewers were polite but not enthu-
siastic. They conceded the poem’s ambition but complained of
its lack of plot or incident, and they found the poem’s collective
protagonist a gallery of types rather than realized individuals.
The Atlantic Monthly’s mixed review, 例如, declared
那 ”[t]he story of the poem is scarcely anything at all: 大多
the sayings and goings and comings of four young girls, 谁的
characters are not forcibly distinguished”—but it also praised
Larcom for the “Wordsworthian courage with which she paints
the scenes of her idyl.”33

32Marchalonis, The Worlds of Lucy Larcom, p. 199.
33“Recent Literature,” Atlantic Monthly, 八月 1876, p. 242.

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LARCOM’S AN IDYL OF WORK

Recent scholars of American literary history have been rather
uniformly indifferent to Larcom’s long poem. Josephine Dono-
van’s entry on Larcom in the still-standard reference work
American Women Writers, 例如, rightly judges An
Idyl of Work to be Larcom’s “most important poetical work,”
but Donovan heartily gives thanks that Larcom elsewhere
treated its subject matter, the life of Lowell factory women
in the 1840s, in prose rather than poetry. “Larcom’s reputation
今天,” Donovan concludes, rests not on her poetry “but rather
on the straightforward, unsentimental picture of her life and
times she has given us in her prose works.” Similarly, 苏珊
Alves’s entry on Larcom in a late-twentieth-century collec-
tion of bibliographical essays on nineteenth-century American
women writers deems Larcom’s prose memoir A New England
Girlhood “far more successful” than An Idyl of Work on the
grounds that “the prose of autobiography is better suited to the
purposes of representing life experiences in the industrial age”
than is “anachronistic” blank verse poetry. And Marchalonis
begins and ends her discussion of the poetic form of An Idyl of
Work with the observation that “its use of blank verse instead
of prose probably did not help sales.”34

Prose works that treated the labor of working-class women
是, 实际上, being written. Larcom’s plotting of An Idyl of
Work goes out of its way to distance her heroines, literally and
ﬁguratively, from the beginnings of labor unrest in the Lowell
mills in the 1840s; and her framing narrative’s picture of class

34Josephine Donovan, “Lucy Larcom,” in American Women Writers: A Critical
Reference Guide from Colonial Times to the Present, 4 vols., 编辑. Lina Mainiero
(纽约: Frederick Ungar, 1980), 2:506, 507; Susan Alves, “Lucy Larcom,“ 在
Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Source-
书, 编辑. Denise D. 骑士 (韦斯特波特, 康涅狄格州: 格林伍德出版社, 1997), PP. 293–96,
295; Marchalonis, The Worlds of Lucy Larcom, p. 199. More recently the 17 四月
2006 “Mass Moment,” issued by the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities
to mark the anniversary of Larcom’s death, declared, along the same lines, that Lar-
com “would be forgotten today except for a work of prose,” her A New England
Girlhood. , 访问过 16 六月 2006.
Among present-day critics, Paula Bernat Bennett is almost alone in taking exception
to the critical neglect of Larcom’s poetry in favor of her prose, arguing that “Larcom’s
strongest poetry . . . deserves much more serious attention than it has received” (see her
Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets: An Anthology [Malden, 大量的。: 布莱克威尔
出版商, 1998], p. 112).

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THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

relations in the United States in the early 1870s equally avoids
direct representation of the economic depression, accelerating
不等式, and swelling labor movements of those years. Lar-
com’s avoidances are all the more striking—and meaningful—
in comparison with two nearly contemporary prose works
by Boston-based authors whom Larcom knew personally, 如果
轻微地: Louisa May Alcott’s Work: A Story of Experience (seri-
alized in 1872 and published as a book in 1873) and Elizabeth
Stuart Phelps’s The Silent Partner (1871).35

Where Larcom’s heroines are attractive even in death, 这
Silent Partner registers industrial labor’s depredations on the
working body: one character dies mangled in the factory ma-
chinery; 其他, Catty Garth, is deaf and blind, her “shrunken
and disﬁgured eyes” and maimed hands the results of her
wool-picking; the central working-class character, Catty’s sis-
ter Sip Garth, is smelly, brown-faced, ragged, and—as Amy
Lang points out—both masculinized and ﬁguratively blackened
by her condition as a wage slave.36 Alcott’s Work is not set
in a factory, but Christie Devon passes through many varieties
of women’s paid employment, from governessing to piecework
sewing, before she falls into despair and is rescued on the verge
of attempting suicide. 最终, as the respectable widow of
an artist turned Civil War ofﬁcer, she joins the cause of reform
on behalf of workingwomen: “I have been and mean to be a
working-woman all my life,” she declares to the working-class
women of her audience, who see with enthusiasm that “the
same lines were on her face that they saw on their own, 她
hands were no ﬁne lady’s hands, her dress plainer than some
of their own.”37

35Elizabeth Stuart Phelps recalled her glancing acquaintance with Larcom in her
Chapters from a Life (波士顿: Houghton Mifﬂin, 1897), PP. 179–81; Louisa May Alcott
was a contributor to Our Young Folks during Larcom’s editorship.

36Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Silent Partner (波士顿: James R. 奥斯古德, 1871),
p. 192 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text); Amy Schrager Lang, The Syntax
of Class: Writing Inequality in Nineteenth-Century America (普林斯顿大学: 普林斯顿大学
大学出版社, 2003), PP. 86–98.

37Louisa May Alcott, 工作: A Story of Experience, 编辑. Joy S. Kasson (1873; 新的

约克: 企鹅, 1994), PP. 332, 333; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

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LARCOM’S AN IDYL OF WORK

During the writing of An Idyl of Work, 然后, Larcom had
immediately before her literary models for a more direct rep-
resentation of the material conditions of industrial work and
of cross-class reform alliances among women; yet she actively
avoided either possibility. Larcom certainly conceived her own
long poem on industrial Lowell as a contribution to the same
public debate entered by Alcott and Phelps. She may also have
written partly in direct rejoinder to their books, both of which
treat the conditions of industrial labor from a narrative perspec-
tive distinct from and horriﬁed by it. Larcom’s wishful depiction
of the blending of literary culture with industrial work in her
Idyl may be understood in part as an effort to repudiate what
Amy Kort calls the “class-based stigma” she must have felt at-
tached to her through Alcott’s and Phelps’s reformist works, A
stigma that had accrued over the years rather than diminish-
英, as workers’ conditions in the mills deteriorated and as class
struggles were painfully revived in the post–Civil War years.38
The plot of The Silent Partner, like that of An Idyl of Work,
turns upon an episode in which springtime high water brings
the machinery of the mills to a halt. In An Idyl of Work,
the consequences of the idling of the mills are pastoral, 作为
young women use their time for outdoor walks, 阅读, and im-
proving conversation. In The Silent Partner, the consequences
are apocalyptic. The millworkers, male and female, wander
“through their holidays in their best clothes” rather than im-
proving their time; as the river continues to rise, they gather
on its banks to watch: “Masses of men, 女性, and children
hung, chained like galley-slaves, to either bank, intent and ex-
pectant” (Partner, p. 264). Untended at home by her sister
Sip, who has stayed out for “A little shopping up town, 和
errand . . . and perhaps another look at the ﬂood” (Partner, p.
275), Catty wanders onto the bridge and is swept away, deaf

38Amy Kort, “Lucy Larcom’s Double-Exposure: Strategic Obscurity in A New En-
gland Girlhood,” American Literary Realism 31 (落下 1998): 25–40. Kort observes that
“the rise of the American middle class during the industrial revolution and the birth
of the middle-class, leisure-centered home must have seemed to have overtaken the
public interpretation of [Larcom’s] own childhood memories, transforming Lowell from
an opportunity to a class-based stigma” (p. 37).

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THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

and blind to her sister who tries to pull her back: “one beck
of a human hand would save her; but she could not see it.
One cry would turn her; but her ears were sealed” (Partner,
p. 278). Beyond rescue by her own kin and kind, Catty be-
comes for Phelps the exemplary ﬁgure of her class: “Type of
the world from which she sprang,—the world of exhausted and
corrupted body, of exhausted and corrupted brain, of exhausted
and corrupted soul, the world of the laboring poor as man has
made it, and as Christ has died for it” (Partner, p. 277). Undis-
ciplined, improvident “slaves” not only to wage labor but to
their own bodily and spiritual degradation, the working poor
of Phelps’s novel are beyond any form of the self-culture prac-
ticed by Larcom’s heroines; their salvation can come only from
outside, whether in the form of Christian redemption or the
enlightened self-interest of reforming millowners.

Larcom’s idealization of her heroines’ reading in Esther’s
homely Anglo-American bookshelf recalls a passage from Al-
cott’s Work in which Alcott’s working heroine Christie is dust-
ing the book-table of her patron David, whom she will fall in
love with and marry.

At the table she paused again, for books always attracted her, 和
here she saw a goodly array whose names were like the faces of old
朋友们, because she remembered them in her father’s library.

Faust was full of ferns, Shakespeare, of rough sketches of the men
and women whom he has made immortal [IE。, David has tucked
leaves and sketches into his books]. Saintly Herbert lay side by side
with Saint Augustine’s confessions. Milton and Montaigne stood so-
cially together, and Andersen’s lovely “M¨archen” ﬂuttered its pictured
leaves in the middle of an open Plato; while several books in unknown
tongues were half-hidden by volumes of Browning, Keats, and Cole-
ridge.

In the middle of this ﬁne society, slender and transparent as the
spirit of a shape, stood a little vase holding one half-opened rose,
fresh and fragrant as if just gathered. [工作, PP. 173–74]

This is no “democratic neighborhood” but rather a “ﬁne society”
of books, a microcosm of cultural hierarchy. Where Larcom’s
plot aims at exposing and countering the unequal pedagogical
erotics linking the male classics tutor to his female student,

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LARCOM’S AN IDYL OF WORK

33
Alcott’s scene blatantly eroticizes the “unknown tongues . . .
half-hidden” by David’s careless mastery. Where Larcom’s plot
insists that culture rightfully can and must be transmitted from
woman to woman, Alcott’s scene of reading ratiﬁes the name
of the father, whose books magically reappear in the possession
of the man destined to inherit the daughter: the rose is there
要采取. Where Larcom’s plot idealizes a lost time when in-
dustrial workers could ﬁnd time to read, this moment comes to
Alcott’s Christie after she has been rescued from a suicide she
preferred to the ultimate degradation of factory employment.39
And in the end, Work leaves culture to do the job of improving
the better classes rather than pondering its accessibility to
women of the working class: even as Christie commits herself
to a cross-class, cross-race reform movement, she relegates the
work of culture to her prosperous friend Bella, whose task it is
to provide the men and women of her own class with “the sort
of society we need more of, and might so easily have if those
who possess the means of culture cared for the best sort, 和
took pride in acquiring it” (工作, p. 339).40

39As a seamstress, Christie initially has time for self-culture: “Her evenings at home
were devoted to books, for she had the true New England woman’s desire for education,
and read or studied for the love of it. Thus she had much to think of as her needle
ﬂew” (工作, p. 103). When her sewing work contracts and industrial labor remains
her only untried option, she meets the absolute class boundary of her sense of self.
Alcott comments that “to those who know nothing of the pangs of pride, the sacriﬁces
of feeling, the martyrdoms of youth, love, 希望, and ambition that go on under the
faded cloaks of these poor gentlewomen, who tell them to go into factories, or scrub
in kitchens, for there is work enough for all, the most convincing answer would be,
‘Try it’ ” (工作, p. 117). As Amy Lang observes, “Christie’s native gentility, her perfect
middle-classness, that is to say, blocks the possibility of her proletarianization” (Syntax
of Class, p. 124).

40Jean Fagan Yellin’s early feminist reading called Christie’s “loving league of sisters,
old and young, black and white, rich and poor” (工作, p. 343), a utopian “feminist
commune” (“From Success to Experience: Louisa May Alcott’s Work,” Massachusetts
审查 21 [落下 1980]: 528). Kathryn R. Kent concurs, although she notes that the
ending’s elaboration of “new forms of female-female association” still “mobilizes the
terms of afﬁliation offered by a remade family” (Making Girls into Women: 美国人
Women’s Writing and the Rise of Lesbian Identity [达勒姆, 北卡罗来纳州: 杜克大学
按, 2003], p. 65). More skeptically, Lang concludes that Christie’s ability to serve
as intermediary between all the novel’s class positions “displays the unique social
competence of the white middle-class woman. Eluding the strictures of class, 她
embodies the prospect of class harmony by assimilating all class experience to herself
(Syntax of Class, p. 127).

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THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

Christie’s reverie over David’s books throws into relief the
kinds of class critique Larcom does accomplish in An Idyl of
工作, as against her poem’s evasions. Larcom’s effort to re-
claim the meaning of her own collective past and project it
forward into the national future is a serious one. The high
blank verse form of her narrative and the lyrics and ballads
that circulate through it are an attempt not only to seize the
implements of literary culture directly for laboring women but
also to provide respectable Anglo-American literary culture of
the 1870s with a genealogy in more humble technologies of
literacy. The form of the anthology-poem enables Larcom to
model and reﬂect upon an idealized miniature of transatlantic
nineteenth-century liberal print culture: its history, its hopes,
its reform narratives, its modes of circulation.41 An Idyl of
Work deserves respect, 然后, not only for its wishfulness and
its ambitions but for its very real accomplishments as well.

41For a comprehensive account of how questions of reform saturated and consti-
tuted the transatlantic Anglo-American literary ﬁeld in ﬁction during the nineteenth
世纪, see Amanda Claybaugh, The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in
the Anglo-American World (伊萨卡岛: 康奈尔大学出版社, 2006). Claybaugh demon-
strates that transatlantic discourses of reform shaped many kinds of literary ambition,
including the high literary ambitions of writers who, like Henry James, were largely
indifferent to the practical goals of reform movements.

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Mary Loeffelholz is Professor of English at Northeastern Uni-
versity and the editor of Studies in American Fiction.
Her most recent book is From School to Salon: Read-
ing Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry.
Her current book project is a study of “anthology form” in
American poetry from the 1840s to the Harlem Renaissance.

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3 “一本奇怪的混合曲书”: 图像

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