The educational mission of such schools was spelled out in another newspaper notice:Īmong the varied and useful operations of Christian beneficence, at the present day, Sabbath Schools occupy an important place. As one Massachusetts newspaper reported, the Sabbath School’s “primary object is the instruction of sons of indigent parents, who, from various causes, are unable to attend school on week days” ( Essex Register June 26, 1816). Sabbath-schools (later Sunday Schools) had been in existence for over half a century-there was a Methodist school in Virginia in the 1780s, and schools for religious instruction in Philadelphia and Newburyport, Massachusetts, in the early 1790s-but the great wave of such schools began in the early 1810s, with Savage a participant and contributor. All of these were prepared for younger readers, as were such later works as Sunday-School Conversations (1829), Conversations on the Attributes of God (1831), Blind Miriam Restored to Sight (1833), and Trial and Self-Discipline (1835), her last work.Īs many of these titles indicate, they emerged from Savage’s career in education: she ran a private school in Salem, Massachusetts, in the early 1810s, before starting, in 1813, a “Sabbath school” like that started by Mary in The Factory Girl. In 1823 she published a self-help book, Advice to a Young Woman at Service, in 1824 the moral tales The Suspected Boy and The Badge, in 1826 another moral tale entitled The Two Birth-Days, and in 1827 a history text, Life of Philip, the Indian Chief. In 1820, she would publish Filial Affection or, The Clergyman’s Granddaughter, with James Talbot, also a novel, following in 1821. We do not know how many works Savage published, although at least twelve have been identified by her biographer Margaret B. Her father was a shopkeeper, but there were writers in her family, including a first cousin, James Savage, an antiquarian involved in printing. The Factory Girl is one of the first fictional works to reflect on that shift.įor Sarah Savage, the novel, published anonymously in 1814, marked the beginning of a long writing career. In an environment where one leaves home part of the day to work in a distinctive community, education, courtship, family, and morality all take on a different inflection. If the work cycle of the traditional community was seasonal and collective, it is now hourly and individual, as Mary demonstrates when she negotiates the length of her workday and reflects on the careful use of home and leisure time. If the traditional community was one in which all neighbors were known, the factory is a place where one makes entirely new acquaintances: the novel’s protagonist has apparently never met any of the workers who appear at the end of chapter one. But for Savage, the factory is something else, a new kind of social problem, one suggested in the novel’s first chapter by the deathbed warning of Mary’s father, “that she does not work for any one, or with any body, who is not good.” The factory, in other words, designates a different social and moral environment. Cotton factories had been in the greater Boston area for at least a generation-George Washington visited a Beverly factory in 1789-and by 1814, in the aftermath of President Thomas Jefferson’s embargo and the War of 1812, the industrial economy was achieving some national publicity. There are a few moments when the factory’s material environment appears-Mary’s work is “reeling cotton,” a task “neither difficult nor laborious”-but if we are looking for the detail-rich setting of later nineteenth-century writing, we will not find it here. Today’s readers may find The Factory Girl confusing in its lack of industrial details. Detail of cover, Sarah Savage, The Factory Girl, 1815 edition (Boston: Monroe, Francis & Parker)
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