Summary Of The Brutality Of Honesty Carpenter

1043 Words3 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: My life experiences

The Brutality of Honesty As an infant, Sarah Carpenter grew up under a comfortable and healthy roof. However, when her father died, Carpenter and her family immediately suffered the consequences. At just eight years old, Carpenter and her mother were relocated to work in Cressbrook Mill in Derbyshire, England, while her brother was placed in the Bristol workhouse in England. Carpenter reported that she and the other workers awoke at five in the morning and worked until nine o’clock at night to earn a non-substantial amount of money for living. However, in the middle of her diary, Carpenter introduced Birks and Hughes, her “master and overseer” at the mill. She narrated gruesome stories telling of how she and the other children were beaten …show more content…

Carpenter wrote her diary entries never imagining anyone else would read them; this privacy allowed her to be completely honest in her writing. Her bitter feelings towards factory work and her master immediately surfaced in the beginning of her entry when she launched into stories of her master and his abuse. Carpenter reflects her resentful feelings toward her master as she wrote, “He [the master] never went by any other name than Tom the Devil. He was a very bad man - he was encouraged by the master in ill-treating all the hands, but particularly the children. Everybody was frightened of him. He would not even let us speak. He once fell poorly, and very glad we were. We wished he might die.” By nicknaming him “The Devil” and wishing for his death, Carpenter and the other children showed that they despised their cruel master. Carpenter’s perspectives on his insolent actions bluntly demonstrate her resentfulness towards the master; however, under this layer of bitterness is fear. She exposed her fear as she described the punishment of getting her head shaved due to a mistake. She wrote that, “This head shaving was a dreadful punishment. We were more afraid of it than any other” , proving that she was terrified of her master and his severe punishments, especially his head shaving chastisement. Interestingly, there are …show more content…

Carpenter not only disclosed her personal experiences, but she also recorded the experiences of the other children with the master. Namely, she remembered Mary, a young girl who “accidently knocked her food can to the floor. The master kicked her where he should not do, and it caused her to wear away until she died.” Carpenter’s heartfelt account of Mary’s innocence revealed her compassion and sympathy towards Mary and her undeserved punishment. Furthermore, she wrote of Caroline Thompson, who “was beat till she went out of her mind.” Her narrative relates directly to the context, as it is living proof of why children regularly suffered “mental and physical deficiencies” while laboring in factories. Statistics give further evidence to these deficiencies, as average weights, heights, and cognitive development significantly decreased in children during the time of the Industrial Revolution. Shown by her compelling stories of eight other children who were abused by the master, Carpenter felt sympathy for all of the other children that toiled alongside her, as she spent more time in the entry lamenting the other children’s lives instead of her own. Notably, Carpenter frequently uses the word “we” when discussing feelings toward factory work and the master, demonstrating

Show More
Related

  • Summary Of Camelot On The Lowell Textile Mills By Stephen Yafa

    562 Words  | 2 Pages

    What would one expect to be the sentiment of a young women who worked in the Lowell textile mills? It is just such a depressing story; and the sad heroines are the young women of Lowell - Lucy Larcom- who Stephen Yafa portrays in his excerpt “Camelot on the Merrimack.” A perception through the eyes of a thirteen-year-old Lucy Larcom reveals that, “For her and the other young girls, the long and tedious hours they spent tending to demanding machines robbed them of their childhood.” The imagery in “Camelot on the Merrimack,” from Big Cotton by Stephen H. Yafa disclose the working conditions in those sordid mills.

    Read More

  • Ap World History Dbq Research Paper

    854 Words  | 2 Pages

    Many of us complain about the tough hours we work or the amount of chores we have to complete, but think about the truly harsh conditions that young girls and women had to work in the textile industry with very little pay and no accolades. Back in the 18th century, when the Industrial Revolution struck, it made it hard for female mill workers to enjoy being employed. Due to the terrible working conditions, the amount of hours worked, and the low wages were a few of the similarities that the female mill workers in England and Japan shared.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Emma Griffith's Liberty Dawn

    1060 Words  | 3 Pages

    For the first time in history children were an important factor of the economic system, but at a terrible price. The master of the factories employed children for two reasons. One, because of their small body which can get inside the machines to clean it and use their nimble fingers. Second, the masters use to pay low wages to the children who could be easily manipulated. The average age for the parents to send their children to work was ten. Although, Conventional wisdom dictates that the age at which children started work was connected to the poverty of the family. Griffith presents two autobiographies to put across her point. Autobiography of Edward Davis who lacked even the basic necessities of life because of his father’s heavy drinking habit and was forced to join work at a small age of six, whereas the memoir of Richard Boswell tells the opposite. He was raised up in an affluent family who studied in a boarding school. He was taken out of school at the age of thirteen to become a draper’s apprentice. The author goes further and places child employees into three groups, according to the kind of jobs that were available in their neighbourhood. First group composed of children living in rural areas with no domestic industry to work in. Therefore, the average of a child to work in rural area was ten. Before that, farmers use to assign small jobs to the children such as scaring birds, keeping sheep

    Read More

  • Mill Times By David Macaulay Analysis

    1151 Words  | 3 Pages

    A multitude of mills going up created back water which hindered the mill’s wheels from turning more freely, but with more competitors came more jobs to the area. In addition to more work came the need for more workers. Francis Lowell of Massachusetts decided to make a wholesome atmosphere to attract young country women to his mill to work. He offered wholesome living with room and board, decent pay, strict rules, and curfews to enforce the safety of the girls that worked for him. These workers came to be known as the “Lowell girls”.

    Read More

  • Lucy Larpom: Mill Girl Poet, By Lucy Larcom

    1428 Words  | 3 Pages

    In Slavicek’s “Lucy Larcom: Mill Girl Poet” (2015), she discusses the life and literature of a famous poet and mill girl Lucy Larcom. Like most child mill workers, Lucy began as a bobbin doffer, Monday through Friday she spent up to fourteen hours a day at the mill, and eight hours a day on Saturdays. Lucy wrote in her autobiography: "I defied the machinery to make me its slave. Its incessant discords could not drown the music of my thoughts if I would let them fly high enough." She escaped the busy mill through her writing, a common escape for many Lowell mill girls. Lucy cut articles from newspapers and pasted them around the window 's wooden frame next to her spinning wheel. Several of Lucy 's poems appeared in the Lowell Offering, a monthly magazine for the mill girls that featured stories, songs, and poems written by the young mill girls themselves. This made them different from many of the other women of their time

    Read More

  • Factory Labor and the Domestic Sphere in the Lowell Offering

    3258 Words  | 7 Pages

    This ESSAY discusses the female Lowell factory worker as portrayed in the Offering. Although the magazine never expressed an overtly feminist view of the factory girls' condition, nor invoked a working-class consciousness similar to later labor expressions in Lowell, there is evidence of a narrative strategy and ideology speaking both to the factory women and the middle-class readership outside of the mill town. The paper's short stories, epistolary narratives and commentaries seek to legitimize an operatives' role within the feminine ideal of domesticity. In conforming to the norms of feminine literature, the Offering reconstructs the operatives' character. It subordinates the evidence for independence or autonomy to relate stories of familial or sentimental ties binding the factory girl to the world outside of factory life. The magazine sought to provide an answer to this question: given her new liberties, what kept the "factory girl" from losing contact with her moral sentiments?

    Read More

  • Examples Of Honesty In The Crucible

    739 Words  | 2 Pages

    They say “Honesty is the best policy”, but that isn’t necessarily true especially for those who lived in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. Honesty may have been a good trait for someone to have, but during the witch trials people rethought that. In The Crucible, Arthur Miller portrayed many people as good puritans. Always loyal and honest throughout their lives, and avoiding any sins that they possibly could. But there were people who had to sin to save their lives or even to save their reputation. Abigail Williams was just an young girl who turned to lying in order to save herself during the Salem Witch Trials. At the same time, Elizabeth Proctor was not agreeing with the witch business that she was accused of. You could tell lies during this time, and no one would think that you were turning too sins because the entire town was becoming obsessed about all those accused of possible witchcraft. While some were being accused, others were avoiding the truth when confessing. Like when Abigail never confessed to drinking blood when she was with Tituba and Betty. In The Crucible, Honesty was portrayed

    Read More

  • Gilded Age: Captains Of Industry

    1281 Words  | 3 Pages

    Often, children were forced to work due to money-related issues, and the conditions they worked in were terrible. Children worked in coal mining, such as at Woodward Coal Mining in Kingston, Pennsylvania (Doc. 7). Children were used to make the process of producing products cheaper, and they were paid low wages; the capitalists hired children just to keep the process of making products going and to make profit. One cause of child labor in harsh conditions was the unfateful fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory in New York City in 1911. Teenaged immigrant girls that were employed there worked under sweatshop-like conditions. The building they worked in was inadequately equipped in case of a fire, for the doors were locked, leaving no exit for the girls, and the single fire escape collapsed with the rescue effort; as a result, when the fire started, they were unable to escape. 145 workers were killed, but the company owners were not penalized harshly for this tragedy. This further demonstrates that capitalists were able to get away with the harsh conditions that they put their laborers, especially child laborers, through for their own benefit, which is making more money and using any means to get it, even if those means are low wages and harsh working

    Read More

  • Industrial Revolution Dbq Essay

    759 Words  | 2 Pages

    Young girls were not allowed to open the windows and had to breathe in the dust, deal with the nerve-racking noises of the machines all day, and were expected to continue work even if they 're suffering from a violent headache or toothache (Doc 2). The author of this report is in favor of employing young women since he claimed they seemed happy and they loved their machines so they polished them and tied ribbons on them, but he didn 't consider that they were implemented to make their awful situations more bearable. A woman who worked in both factory and field also stated she preferred working in the field rather than the factory because it was hard work but it never hurt her health (Doc 1), showing how dangerous it was to work in a factory with poor living conditions. Poor living conditions were common for nearly all workers, and similar to what the journalist saw, may have been overlooked due to everyone seeming

    Read More

  • Benefits of the Market Revolution on the Economy

    616 Words  | 2 Pages

    Harriet Hanson Robinson, a “Lowell Girl,” Describes her labor in a textile mill, 1831 pg.239

    Read More

  • Lowell: A Place of Opportunity or Exploitation?

    800 Words  | 2 Pages

    The owners of the factories in New England, like in Lowell, Massachusetts, oppressed young girls by being careless with their safety. It was already terrible that women made one-eighth of what men made; their affordability for employers made girls, especially immigrants, desirable to save money. That could be the cause of the employer’s lack of regard for their safety. In the factories, from sunrise to sunset, women, men, and children had to breathe in unhealthy and unventilated air. In addition, men and women were being injured and killed because of hazardous surroundings, as Mary S. Paul writes to her father, “My life and health are spared while others are cut off.” Workers have been breaking their necks and ribs and being killed by cars (Doc F). It is an employer’s responsibility to keep his/her employees safe because, in reality, it would be in their interest to keep their workers alive to make them money. Still the girl’s well-being and interests were ignored because it would trouble the factory owners. As a result of the owner’s profiteering, employees were dying.

    Read More

  • Government Corruption In The Progressive Era

    652 Words  | 2 Pages

    Many businesses and factories hired children because they were easier to exploit; they could be paid less for more work in dangerous conditions. Plus, their small size made many children idea for working with small parts or fitting into small spaces. Children as young as four could be found working in factories, though most were between eight and twelve. Despite the economic gains made by the business that employed them, many children suffered in the workplace. The industrial setting caused many health problems for the children that, if they lived long enough, they would carry with them for the rest of their lives. Children were also more likely to face accidents in the workplace, often caused by fatigue, and many were seriously injured or killed. Despite efforts by reformers to regulate child labor, it wasn’t until the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 that children under 14 were prohibited from

    Read More

  • The Lowell Textile Mills

    1369 Words  | 3 Pages

    In the early years while the profits were high working conditions looked promising to the mill girls in their brief opening experiences of factory work. Jobs required little skill because the machinery was mostly self-acting. It looked very pleasant at first, the rooms were so light, spacious, and clean, the girls so pretty and neatly dressed, and the machinery so brightly polished or nicely painted (Harriet Farley, Letters from Susan, Letter Second).

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Women Miners In The English Coal Pits

    1379 Words  | 3 Pages

    With the gradual advancements of society in the 1800’s came new conflicts to face. England, the leading country of technology at the time, seemed to be in good economic standing as it profited from such products the industrial revolution brought. This meant the need for workers increased which produced jobs but often resulted in the mistreatment of its laborers. Unfortunately the victims targeted were kids that were deprived of a happy childhood. A testimony by a sub-commissioner of mines in 1842 titled Women Miners in the English Coal Pits and The Sadler Report (1832), an interview of various kids, shows the deplorable conditions these kids were forced to face.

    Read More

  • Child Labor During the Industrial Revolution

    946 Words  | 2 Pages

    Imagine waking up at five in the morning to walk over a mile to a factory where you work until noon where you get a half hour break for lunch, then it’s back to work until nine or ten at night, when you are finally allowed to go home and you are only eight years old. Today that seems unimaginable, but during the early 19th century it was the everyday life of thousands of children whose ages range from as young as five until you died. During the Industrial Revolution many children were required to work dangerous jobs to help their families.

    Read More

More about Summary Of The Brutality Of Honesty Carpenter

Open Document