"Reform is born of need, not pity. No vital movement of the people’s has worked down, for good or evil; fermented, instead, carried up the heaving, cloggy mass."
—
Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills. I finished reading this 1861 novella.
The protagonist is a foundry worker who carves crude sculptures out of the leftover material. Some bourgeois big-wigs see a particular sculpture and sympathetically remark that factory-work has stunted his creative potential and that in a fairer world, his talents would be nurtured. (They of course offer no help.) The idea that everyone has an inalienable right to self-improvement gives the worker the tragic delusion that he can actually escape the industrial system.
