Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction, Janice Carlisle
Significant Nineteenth-Century Factory Legislation and Factory Literature: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text, Elizabeth Reed

John Brown, A Memoir of Robert Blincoe, An Orphan Boy (1832)

William Dodd, A Narrative of the Experience and Sufferings of William Dodd, A Factory Cripple.Written by Himself (1841)

James Myles, Chapters in the Life of a Dundee Factory Boy (1850)

Ellen Johnston, “Autobiography of Ellen Johnston, ‘The Factory Girl’” (1867) and “Autobiography” (1869)

Appendix A: Contemporary Perspectives on A Memoir of Robert Blincoe

Appendix B: Contemporary Perspectives on William Dodd’s Narrative

Appendix C: Contemporary Perspectives on Myles’s Chapters in the Life of a Dundee Factory Boy

Appendix D: Contemporary Perspectives on Johnston’s “Autobiography”: Selected Poems from Autobiography, Poems and Songs of Ellen Johnston,The “Factory Girl” (1867 and 1869)

Appendix E: Contemporary Documents: Parliamentary Testimony as Autobiography

Appendix F: Factory Life: Contemporary Views

Appendix G: Factory Legislation: Contemporary Views

Select Bibliography

About the Author

James R. Simmons, Jr. is Associate Professor of English at Louisiana Tech University.

Janice Carlisle is Professor of English at Yale University.

Reviews

“Factory Lives is a wonderful and wonderfully affordable resource for anyone who teaches British nineteenth-century literature, culture, or history. The text does a real service by providing a representative sampling of working-class autobiographies from this period. The engagingly learned introduction by Janice Carlisle provides a rich and wide-ranging contextualization that will help teachers and students approach these texts from a variety of theoretical and disciplinary angles. I cannot imagine teaching a course on the Condition of England novel without including this collection on my reading list.” — Elaine Hadley, University of Chicago “This eye-opening edition of working-class autobiographies written by men and women who labored in the harsh industrial system of Victorian Britain is a useful addition to our understanding of the era’s full human costs in terms of physical and psychological suffering. It is an engaging emotional experience to read these carefully selected accounts of individuals working long hours in the mills and factories. The collection of official reports and legislative documents that attempted to bring social reforms places these autobiographies in their full and proper historical and political contexts. An added bonus of the edition is the inclusion of a range of contemporary poetry and fiction on industrial life.” — William B. Thesing, University of South Carolina