Hi, Willa:

Thanks for those links. And yes, the Doffing Mistress does seem to have an uncharacteristically positive tone. Mill work was noisy and gruelling and involved a high degree of child labour. My grandmother was a very intelligent person, and she bitterly resented being forced to leave school at the age of 12 to take up such drudgery.

I found the movie "Fairy Tale: A True Story", set in a Yorkshire mill town at the beginning of the 20th century, to give a very moving portrayal of how such mill work would end childhood, and all its dreams and imagining, for the young workers. What interested me about that movie was that apparently even the lower-middle class children of a manager at the mill would face this fate.

Cheers, Hester