An Analysis Of Katherine Paterson's Lyddie

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Everyone makes decisions every day, both big and small. In the novel Lyddie, by Katherine Paterson, the main character, a girl named Lyddie, lives in the mid-1800’s during the American Industrial Revolution. She travels to Lowell, Massachusetts to start work as a factory girl. The story illustrates what life would have been like for a factory girl, and sheds light on important topics like child labor, unfair treatment of factory workers, and other hardships of the time period. Diana Goss, one of Lyddie’s first friends at the factory, is a part of the Female Labor Reform Association, a group that wants an end to the hardships. A petition is circulating and Lyddie must decide if she wants to sign or not. While there are reasons Lyddie should …show more content…

She has to save up the money if she ever wants to pay it off and go home to the farm. Lyddie is trying to convince Betsy not to sign the petition. “I mean, please, don’t sign. I can’t. I got to have the money. To pay the debts before-.”(92). Lyddie wants to keep everything the way that it is because she fears she won’t make enough money for the debt. Lyddie wants to stop the talk of the petition in her room in the boardinghouse. “She was making far more money than she ever had at home in Vermont or was ever likely to.”(93). She is arguing with Betsy and Amelia, and wants the wages to stay the same as they are because it was the most money she had ever made and she could make enough money to go home faster. Lyddie feels that signing the petition is like giving up. She is stubborn in making money because she longs to one day return to the farm with her family. Lyddie is trying to convince her roomates that they should not go against the corporation. “But we’d be paid less…’if we just work ten hours, we’d be paid much less.”(91). Lyddie is worried about the pay decline if the girls sign the petition because she cares about making money. This shows that Lyddie cares about the money and paying off the debt, so she should not sign the

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