Lyddie Worthen is the main character in Katherine Patterson’s Lyddie. Lyddie is a young girl living on a Vermont farm in the 1840’s. This is the time of the Industrial Revolution. Lyddie’s father has abandoned the family and Lyddie’s mother leaves her and her brother behind thinking that the world is coming to an end. The only thing Lyddie has left is her farm which she desperately wants to hold on to. In order to keep her farm Lyddie has to work off the debts on her farm, but the job she has isn’t paying enough, so she leaves to begin a new life as a factory girl at the newly developed textile mills in Lowell Massachusetts. Because of working in the Lowell mills Lyddie gets a broader sense of herself. She is able to make some choices about who she wants to be in her life.
Lyddie is working at a place called Cutlers Tavern for very low wages. If she keeps working like this she will never be able to pay off her debts, so she decides to go to Lowell and work in the mills so that she can make more money.
She is told by a customer who works in the mills “you’d do well in the mill you know. You’d clear at least two dollars a week. And’ she paused ‘you’d be independent.’” (p. 25)
Lyddie then makes the choice to go to the mill. She realizes that at the mill she will be able to pay off the farm debts faster. This is a hard choice for Lyddie, if she stays at the tavern she knows that she will continue to make money and eventually pay off the debt. If she goes to the mill she has a chance of not getting the job at all but if she does get the job she will be able to pay off the farm debts much faster. This is when Lyddie begins to take her life into her own hand and makes the choice to take a chance at the mill.
When Lyddie begins working at the mill, she starts making much more and with that money she is able to buy a book. Lyddie does not have a good education and people at the mills by her roommate Betsy she becomes passionate about reading so she goes to buy a book.
“’I-I come to purchase at book…’” “’what book do you have in mind…’” “’uh-uh Oliver Twist if you please sir’” (p.83-84) she then pays with two silver dollars.
By making the choice to purchase that book she opens the doors to education and becomes a smarter person who loves to learn. She also changes from a thrifty penny pincher to someone who realizes that money isn’t always the most important thing in life.
Because of Lyddie’s love for reading she makes the choice to leave the farm that she has just returned to, and leave Luke, the man who loves her to go to Oberlin College in Ohio.
“I’m off’ she said ‘to Ohio, there’s a college there that will that will take a women just like a man’”. (p.181) By making the choice to go to college Lyddie is showing that she won’t give up on her education and won’t give up on an adventurous life. Even though things haven’t been great for her she is still ready to start another chapter in her life. What does the author want us to understand about the power of the Industrial Revolution? I think that in Lyddie it is showing that the Industrial Revolution gave people many opportunities in their lives. The Industrial Revolution also had lots of hard moments where people would get sick, break a bone, or even die. The Industrial Revolution seemed to rule a lot of people’s lives and ruin their families. Lyddie took advantage of the Industrial Revolution well and through the choices she made was able to pull past just being a factory girl and take different paths in life.
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