Rebecca Harding Davis wrote “Life in the Iron Mills” in the mid-nineteenth century in part to raise awareness of working conditions in industrial plants. Aiming to present the reality of the factory environment and the lives of the workers, Davis uses vivid and concrete descriptions of the factories, the workers' homes, and the workers themselves. Yet the realism of his story is not objective; Davis has a reform agenda, and her verbal images are colored accordingly. One theme that receives a particularly negative shadow in history is big business and the money associated with it. Davis uses this negative portrayal of money to emphasize the harm that the single-minded pursuit of wealth does to the humanity of those who desire it. The story of "Life in the Iron Mills" revolves around Hugh Wolfe, a factory worker whose difference from his faceless, machine-like colleagues is established even before Hugh himself makes an 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 staggers wearily home from work in the cotton mills at eleven o'clock at night. This woman's description reveals that she does not drink as her fellow cotton pickers do, and speculates that "perhaps the weak, flabby wretch had some stimulant in her pale life to keep her up, a little love or hope, it might be, or urgent necessity” (5). Debora is described as “flaccid,” a word that connotes both weakness and helplessness, suggesting that she is not only exhausted, but also incapable of changing her situation; meanwhile, his life is “pale” and without the vivid moments we all desire. Yet even this "wretch" has something to keep quiet about... middle of paper... as "the root of all evil" would be too simplistic; what she suggests, rather, is that the distribution of wealth in mid-nineteenth-century America was uneven, and that those who had money did little to effectively help the workers whose exploitation had made them rich in the first place. In his portraits of Mitchell and the “Christian reformer” whose sermon Hugh listens to (24), he even suggests that reformers, often wealthy themselves, have no useful perspective on the social ills they wish to reform. Money, he seems to suggest, provides the rich with a paralyzing comfort that distances them from the suffering of workers like Hugh: like Kirby, they see such workers as necessary cogs in the economic machine, rather than as other human beings whose human desires for comfort, beauty and kindness that money promises can push them to destroy their own humanity.