WD Howells was 23 in August 1860 when he traveled from the forests of frontier Ohio to New England to glimpse where his literary idols lived and worked. A junior editor in Columbus, Howells achieved notoriety from writing a campaign biography for Abraham Lincoln, the Republican party’s candidate for president.  The 170-page profile was mostly a collection of Lincoln speeches that introduced the Illinois lawyer to a wider American audience.  Howells wrote the bio without meeting the future president. 

Howells was born in a town on the Ohio River and grew up in Hamilton north of Cincinnati where his father edited a newspaper. Later the family moved to the state capitol. Howells was precocious and despite attending neither high school nor college taught himself French, German and Spanish. His consuming passion was poetry and for that reason he used his earnings to make a pilgrimage to the haunts of Longfellow, Hawthorne, Whittier and Emerson. 

Following Lincoln’s victory in November, young Howells was rewarded with being named the U.S. consul in Venice where he would spend four years.  Later Howells became editor of the Atlantic Monthly, wrote more than a dozen well-received novels and in the final decades of the 19^th century became the dean of American letters.

In 1860 travel was arduous.  Wanting first to visit Portland, Maine, the birthplace of the poet he admired most, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Howells traveled to Toronto and Quebec and then went south on the Grand Trunk railroad to Portland.  

Boston was the epicenter of American letters and Howells was awestruck.  Amazingly, the shy 23-year-old met the most illustrious American writers, gaining entrance into the inner circles of literary New England.  He dined variously with Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Too shy to join in most conversations, Howells was regaled with stories of English writers Tennyson, Carlisle and Dickens.  He experienced for the first-time dinner with courses and recalled how Emerson dismissed Edgar Allan Poe as “the jingle man,” while Lowell described Hawthorne as “an unrivalled dreamer.” Surprisingly in this tumultuous time preceding the Civil War, Howells said politics was never discussed.

At Lowell, a few miles from Boston, Howells visited one of the town’s textile mills. He was aghast at “the whirring spools, the ceaseless flight of their shuttles and the bewildering sight and sound of all their mechanisms.”  It was, he wrote in his 1900 memoir, “the death of the joy that ought to come from work.” He recalled sitting of an evening at the door of his hotel watching long files of work-worn factory girls stream by. They had emerged, he wrote, from ten hours work “in those hideous mills and lodged…in barracks where they rested from their toil.”

In 1860 there were two dozen large cotton mills in Lowell employing several thousand female workers who were recruited from farms and villages throughout New England.  The mill girls, as they were called, were typically between the ages of 15 and 30.  They worked 12 to 14 hours each day, six days a week and lived in single sex boarding houses overseen by a matron who stressed temperance and Christian principles.  Work slowed in summer when many women returned to the farms.

Lowell was in its way a city of dark satanic mills like that written about in 1807 by English poet William Blake. Or, in the idiom of our time, Lowell was a 19^th century equivalent of China’s batch labor system where workers are brought from the countryside to coastal factories where  nimble female fingers assemble high-tech electronics. 

WB Howells was a lifelong progressive, a critic of unfettered capitalism, an advocate for workers’ rights. However, he is most remembered for his writing, his advocacy of young writers, and his discovery and mentoring of Mark Twain. #