I’m almost two months late with this excerpt from John Greenleaf Whittier, poet, newspaperman, and abolitionist—but it’s always a good passage to revisit in the fall when the days get shorter and we turn the clocks back. This is an excerpt from Whittier’s essay “The Lighting Up” from his book The Stranger in Lowell (Boston: Waite, Pierce, and Co., 1845), a compilation of short pieces published in a local newspaper, The Middlesex Standard, which he was editing during his stay in Lowell. The essays were written in the fall of 1844.–PM

“This evening, the 20th of the ninth month, is the time fixed upon for lighting the mills for night-labor; and I have just returned from witnessing for the first time the effect of the new illumination.

“Passing over the bridge, nearly to the Dracut shore,  I had a fine view of the long line of mills, the city beyond, and the broad sweep from the falls. The light of a tranquil and gorgeous sunset ws slowly fading from river and sky, and the shadows of the trees on the Dracut slopes were blending in dusky indistinctness with the great shadow of night. Suddenly gleams of light broke from the black masses of masonry on the Lowell bank; at first feeble and scattered, flitting from window to window, appearing and disappearing, like will-o’-wisps in a forest, or fire-flies in a summer’s night. Anon, tier after tier of windows became radiant, until the whole vast wall, stretching far up the river, from basement to roof, became chequered with light, reflected with the star-beams from the still water beneath. With a little effort of fancy, one could readily transform the huge mills, thus illuminated, into palaces, lighted up for festival occasions, and the figures of the workers, passing to and fro before the windows, into forms of beauty and fashion, moving in graceful dances.

“Alas! this music of the shuttle, and the day-long dance to it, are not altogether of the kind which Milton speaks of when he invokes the ’soft Lydian airs’ of voluptuous leisure. From this time henceforward, for half a weary year, from the bell-call of morning twilight to half past seven in the evening, with two brief intermissions for two hasty meals, the operatives will be confined to their tasks. The proverbial facility of the Yankees in dispatching their dinners in the least possible time, seems to have been taken advantage of, and reduced to a system, on the Lowell corporations. Strange as it may seem to the uninitiated, the working men and women here contrive to repair to their lodgings, make the necessary preliminary ablutions, devour their beef and pudding, and hurry back to their looms and jacks, in the brief space of half an hour. In this way the working day in Lowell is eked out to an average throughout the year of twelve and a half hours. This is a serious evil, demanding earnest consideration of the human and philanthropic. Both classes—the employer and the employed—would in the end be greated benefitted by the general adoption of  the ‘ten hour system,’ although the one might suffer a slight diminution in daily wages, and the other in yearly profits. …”

Whittier was 37 years old when he lived in Lowell.