Chapters In The Life Of A Dundee Factory Boy

Chapters in the life of a Dundee factory boy, an autobiography [by J. Myles].

First edition in book form, originally published in the columns of the Northern Warder according to the dedication. The author, who worked first in a spinning mill, writes of the moral degradation of the female spinners and the drinking habits in mills, and of his own reading (Defoe, Smollet, Bunyan). He then turned shoemaker, met Robert Nicoll, the poet, married, and settled down. An uncommon contribution to Victorian working-class literature.

Factory Lives

Factory Lives contains four works of great importance in the field of nineteenth-century working-class autobiography: John Brown’s A Memoir of Robert Blincoe; William Dodd’s A Narrative of the Experience and Sufferings of William Dodd; Ellen Johnston’s “Autobiography”; and James Myles’s Chapters in the Life of a Dundee Factory Boy. This Broadview edition also includes a remarkably rich selection of historical documents that provide context for these works. Appendices include contemporary responses to the autobiographies, debates on factory legislation, transcripts of testimony given before parliamentary committees on child labour, and excerpts from literary works on factory life by Harriet Martineau, Frances Trollope, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, among others.

Chapters in the Life of a Dundee Factory Boy, Written by Himself