Rebecca Harding Davis wrote “Life in the Iron Works” in the mid-19th century, in part to raise awareness of working conditions in industrial factories. In an effort to present the reality of the factory environment and the lives of the factory workers, Davis uses vivid, concrete descriptions of the factories, the workers' homes, and the workers themselves. However, the realism of his story is not objective; Davis has a reforming agenda and his word pictures are colored accordingly. One theme that receives a particularly negative undertone in the story is that of big business and the money associated with it. Davis uses this negative depiction of money to highlight the damage that the stubborn pursuit of wealth inflicts on the humanity of those who desire it. The story of "Life in the Iron Works" revolves around Hugh Wolfe, a factory worker whose difference from his faceless, machine-like co-workers is established even before Hugh himself makes its appearance. The main narrative begins, not with Hugh, but with his cousin Deborah; the third-person point of view allows the reader to see Deborah in a seemingly objective light as she returns home tired from work in the cotton mills at eleven o'clock in the evening. The description of this woman reveals that she does not drink as her fellow cotton pickers do and assumes that "perhaps the wretch, weak and flabby, had in her pale life some stimulant to keep her in shape, a little love or hope, perhaps, or urgent need” (5). Deborah is described as "flabby", a word that connotes both limpness and helplessness, suggesting that she is not only exhausted, but also powerless to change her situation; Meanwhile, his life is “pale” and without the vivid moments we all desire. However, even this "miserable" has something to rectify...... middle of paper ......y because "the root of all evil" would be too simplistic; rather, what it suggests is that the distribution of wealth in mid-19th century America was unequal and that those who had money did little to effectively help the workers whose Exploitation had made them rich in the first place. In her portraits of Mitchell and the “Christian reformer” whose sermon Hugh hears (24), she even suggests that the reformers, often themselves wealthy, have no useful perspective on the social ills they wish to reform. Money, she seems to suggest, provides the rich with a numbing comfort that distances them from the suffering of workers like Hugh: like Kirby, they see these workers as necessary cogs in the economic machine, rather than as human beings humans whose human desires for the comfort, beauty, and kindness that money promises can drive them to destroy their own humanity.