A few facts will show the character of these girls. One of the ministers was asked how many teachers he thought he could furnish from among the working-girls. He replied, “About five hundred.” A lecturer in the Lowell Lyceum stated that four fifths of his audience were factory girls, that when he entered the hall most of the girls were reading from books, and when he began his lecture every one seemed to be taking notes. Charles Dickens, after his visit to Lowell in 1842, wrote: “I solemnly declare that from all the crowd I saw in the different factories, I cannot recall one face that gave me a painful impression; not one young girl whom, assuming it to be a matter of necessity that she should gain her daily bread by the labor of her hands, I would have removed if I had the power.”
Mrs. Larcom kept a boarding-house for the operatives, and Lucy was thrown in close association with these strong young women. She had access to the little accumulation of books that one of them had made,--Maria Edgeworth’s “Helen,” Thomas à Kempis, Bunyan’s “Holy War,” Locke “On the Understanding,” and “Paradise Lost.” This formed good reading for a girl of ten.
Lucy’s sister Emeline started in the boarding-house two or three little fortnightly papers, to which the girls contributed. Each ran a troubled existence of a few months, and then gave place to its successor, bearing a new name. “The Casket,” for a time, held their jewels of thought; then “The Bouquet” gathered their full-blown ideas into a more pretentious collection. The most permanent of these literary productions was one that started with the intention of being very profound,--it was called “The Diving Bell.” The significance of the name was carefully set forth in the first number:--
“Our Diving Bell shall deep descend, And bring from the immortal mind Thoughts that to improve us tend, Of each variety and kind.”
Lucy soon became a poetical contributor; and when the paper was read, and the guessing as to the author of each piece began--for they were anonymous--the other girls were soon able to tell her work by its music and thought. Among the yellow and worm-eaten pages of the once popular “Diving Bell,” we find the following specimen of her earliest poetry:--