This program will be held in person but participation via Zoom is also available. Please add your email if you'd like to participate via Zoom to the registration form. 

Popular stories about Lowell’s so-called “mill girls” in the nineteenth century (and even today) often highlight the happy aspects of mill girls’ lives. According to popular lore, their wages enabled them to send their brothers to college, or to dress up in fancy clothes and wear gold watches. Mill girls and mill owners alike promoted the fact that they had ample time to socialize and pursue intellectual and cultural improvement; they wrote and published poems and stories in The Lowell Offering and played pianos in their boarding houses. But the people who worked in the mills of Lowell (and elsewhere) in the nineteenth century faced a variety of dangers, including working conditions that threatened their health; hazardous mill machinery and buildings; predatory overseers and mill owners; and abuse and harassment at their workplace and in their domestic lives. This talk will focus on some of the real dangers encountered by the mill girls as well as how popular literature of the nineteenth century portrayed their lives.

Bridget M. Marshall is Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell where she teaches courses on Gothic novels, disability in literature, witchcraft trials, and American literature. Her most recent book is Industrial Gothic: Workers, Exploitation and Urbanization in Transatlantic Nineteenth-Century Literature (2021, University of Wales Press). In it she explores how nineteenth-century British and American literature reflects anxieties about the Industrial Revolution and how authors used Gothic stock characters and imagery – vampires, ghosts, and haunted buildings – to explore some of the real-life terrors of the world’s industrial transformation.