The Silent Partner: Including "The Tenth of January"

by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, Mari Jo Buhle (Afterword), Florence Howe (Afterword)

The Silent Partner (1871) and “The Tenth of January” (1868) were among the earliest realistic portrayals of industrial life—and social injustice—in the United States. The novel focuses on Sip, a mill worker, and Miss Kelso, the silent partner in the mill after her father’s death. The lives of these two women intersect as worker and owner as they both reject marriage proposals in favor of new vocations—underscoring Phelps’s vision that, regardless of class, women can be united around their right to work.

Genres: Fiction, School, Feminism, Read For School, Classics

386 pages, Paperback

Published July 1, 1993

About the author

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, born Mary Gray Phelps, was an American author.

She was born at Andover, Massachusetts. In most of her writings she used her mother's name "Elizabeth Stuart Phelps" as a pseudonym, both before and after her marriage in 1888 to Herbert Dickinson Ward, a journalist seventeen years younger. She also used the pseudonym Mary Adams. Her father Austin Phelps was pastor of the Pine Street Congregational Church until 1848, when he accepted a position as the Chair of Rhetoric at Andover Theological Seminary and moved the family to Boston.

Ward wrote three Spiritualist novels, The Gates Ajar, Between the Gates and Beyond the Gates, and a novella about animal rights, Loveliness. While writing other popular stories, she was also a great advocate, by lecturing and otherwise, for social reform, temperance, and the emancipation of women. She was also involved in clothing reform for women, urging them to burn their corsets in 1874.

Ward's mother, Elizabeth (Wooster) Stuart Phelps, (August 13, 1815—November 30, 1852) wrote the Kitty Brown books under the pen name H. Trusta.

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and her husband co-authored two Biblical romances in 1890 and 1891. Her autobiography, Chapters from a Life was published in 1896 after being serialized in McClure's. She also wrote a large number of essays for Harper's

Phelps continued to write short stories and novels into the twentieth century. One work, Trixy (1904), dealt with another cause she supported, anti-vivisection (a topic on which she also addressed the Massachusetts State Legislature). Her last work, Comrades (1911), was published posthumously. Phelps died January 28, 1911, in Newton Center, Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Helen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This volume, which contains a novel plus a novella/long short story, is difficult, at first to appreciate, since it is written in a rather stiff "19th C" style, that is remote from today's world. Some of the style, especially in the portrayals of the society personalities, is meant to heighten irony, is a way to slyly mock stiff personages - but the reader only appreciates this about a third of the way through the book. The novella "The Tenth of January" is a shattering portrayal of a tragic relationship, culminating in the cataclysmic destruction, due to the installation of heavy machinery, as well as shoddy structural members, of a mill. The reader will remember the searing images conjured up by the writer of the final moments of the mill and some of its workers. "The Silent Partner" details the slow enlightenment of the heroine to the social realities of the town she lives in some seasons, and the price the workers in her family's mill pay so that she can live a luxurious, carefree life. The backwardness, stubborn prejudice of the well-born in the town is highlighted by the stiffness of the prose when they are featured, but the reader is treated to fluid imagery and metaphor when the writer, and the heroine seeks to understand and convey to the reader the anguish of the workers and the seeming impossibility of members of that class to ever emerge from their misery. The picture of mid-19th C child labor, as well as mostly girls working in cotton spinning and weaving mills is likely to stay with the reader. After all, these were the working conditions of today's forefathers, if they labored in factories or mills. The working conditions were atrocious, and there is even mention of the poisonous air and belching smoke of industry - a reference to the environmental damage of unfettered industry, not just the destruction of most of the workers' health because of poorly-ventilated industrial weaving and spinning rooms, with no provision for the protection of the young workers from the omnipresent dust, fibers. The writer was immensely popular in the mid-19th C, as the excellent Afterward informs us; only Harriett Beecher Stowe sold more copies at that time. I can see why Phelps is not widely read today, though she should be; mostly, it would be because of the seemingly formulaic stiffness of the prose, and the lack of extended transitions from scene to scene. It's also difficult for the modern reader to supply context, which would have been automatic for the 19th C reader. We may not immediately know what Phelps is referring to occasionally, or what the emphasis on certain possessions, or attitudes would signify to a reader of that era. There are notes to the Afterward but no notes to the two works by Phelps. The book is a reprinting of the 19th C novel from plates of the 19th C - charming in a way, but the book could use some notes - or, the Afterward could have been an Introduction instead. That's a minor quibble to what is an impressive volume of two works, which will reward the reader with a glimpse into the world of the 19th C New England mill town, if the reader doesn't give up and sticks to it. The reader will find the book is worth it - definitely becomes more exciting and absorbing the further in one gets into this book.

[Sean · Rating 4 out of 5]

I took a while getting used to the style, which zooms from character to character, shifting scope from micro to macro fluidly. But this is a beautifully-written narrative of a mill town with a sharp economic divide, and a wealthy woman for whom this becomes suddenly relevant and a problem to be solved.

It seems like it heads toward a cheesy ending, but rest assured, it does not. Mostly.

[Molly Cooper Willis · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

I’m shocked by how much I enjoyed this! I didn’t expect a 19th century text to so compellingly examine industrial capitalism through the intersecting lenses of class, gender, and disability. While hilariously unsubtle at times, I was able to appreciate the broader themes of reform and class consciousness simply because of Phelps’s delightful character work. Like, that breakup scene literally made me laugh out loud. I mean, “Of course I shall miss you, Maverick. So I should miss the piano, if it were taken out of the parlor.” Yikes! Someone check on Maverick.
Beyond the humor, the occasional bout of startlingly lyrical prose makes this book’s more devastating moments all the more disturbing in their austerity. Phelps’s lack of subtlety doesn’t extend to these moments; rather, she allows the injustice and horror to speak for themselves.
Tracking common words/phrases/images throughout this novel reveals a level of sophistication not immediately apparent. While I would love to go into detail, I already have a paper due tomorrow night in which I will be exploring the prevalence of dampness/wetness throughout the book, so I really can’t be bothered. Plus, I don’t think anyone actually reads these. Alas, the year of long reviews is but an opportunity to practice shouting into the void.
Anyway, Sip Garth supremacy.

“I’m not used…to feeling at all; it’s never been asked of me before.”

“We are not cruel, we are only asleep.”

“It ain’t that there shouldn’t be music anywhere. It’s only that the music shouldn’t ride over the master.”

“As if the heart of a little child, just for being the heart of a little child, must somehow, somewhere, play forever in the smile of an undying morning.”

“If not in this world in another, perhaps? In any? Somewhere? Somehow?”

[Elizzy B · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dos dramones. Algún día encontraré tiempo para hacer críticas más largas...lo digo en serio.

[Ash · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent novel detailing factory conditions and workers' lives. While I can see and would expect many contemporary readers to see it less as a novel ('work of art,' 'story') than as a documentary polemic simply reconfigured into novel form or simply a dated 'political' piece, Phelps' stark yet understated meeting of content and style builds a fully realized world and full characters that quickly took away all the doubt I had coming into it, for the same reasons listed above.

The buried narrator throughout seems to simply have an eyebrow raised as they make slight asides and notes to the reader; I really enjoyed the voice of the narrator in the background. This voice adds layers and different tones to the reader as he or she first hears what the character is saying, and then what the narrator has to say about it, or them, and occasionally the reader will have conflicted reactions or not know who to 'side' with.

The buried tone and plot situation of a child's death is also stark in its simplicity, and the foreshadowing (yes, I know in a novel like this everyone knows a child will die in the factory,)is so slight and crafted in such a manner that it is painful and experienced as a loss almost with a sense of wonder. Narratively the child's death is sad and surprising, and I felt for him as I would for any fictional character in the circumstances; however, what then added in the mystical quality of his death is that slow realization that this character DID die, many times. Only in this manner does the potential 'documentary polemic' slip in, yet the author's expert craft makes it poignant and powerful instead: realizing the realism as opposed to being beaten over the head with a treatise. The best analog I can come up with for how the author handled this situation is Camus' The Fall, in which the titular fall is near silent and takes up all the time of a few seconds.

[Geicodave · Rating 4 out of 5]

A novel (The Silent Partner) and a short story (The Tenth of January) by an author popular in the mid nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but all but forgotten today. The works focus on the horrible working conditions in the New England textile mills and their effects upon the employees.The works also explore the roles of upper and working class women and argue strongly for increased economic and social freedom for women. The Silent Partner is one of the first novels by an American writer to deal frankly with the misery accompanying the Industrial Revolution. The author's style is, in my mind, too elliptical and stilted to put her in the first rank of American writers, but she wrote many other works which I have not read and so my opinion is based solely on these two works. Many of her other books are available on the Internet Archive.

[Derek · Rating 3 out of 5]

Including perhaps the most sensational and bizarre death-by-water scene in 19th century fiction, this novel is by turns bold and melodramatic, engaging and frustrating. Compare to Gaskell's *North and South* as a proto-feminist narrative about labor relations.

[Pascale · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Silent Partner is Perley Kelso, who finds herself in that position, much against her will, once her father dies in an accident. Thereafter, her father's associates Maverick Hayle and Hayle Sr refuse to let the young woman take on any portion of his responsibilities within the mill they jointly operate. Once upon a time this wouldn't have disturbed Perley, but after a chance encounter with an articulate mill-hand, Sip, Perley has made it her life's mission to improve the living and working conditions of her employees. In short order she breaks her engagement with the superficial Maverick and launches various initiatives to alleviate the sufferings of her especial protégée Sip and the laborers at large. Various tragedies occur. Sip loses her beloved sister Catty, a deaf-mute from birth. The eight year old Bub Mell dies smashed by a machine while trying to steal tobacco from a fellow child worker. The Bub Mell episode is by far the most Dickensian and the most moving of the whole book. When a violent strike is about the erupt because the mill needs to lower wages temporarily, Perley saves the day because she has won the trust and affection of her workers. Eventually both Perley and Sip independently reach the decision never to marry. Perley believes she needs to remain single in order to keep pushing her reforms, and Sip can't bear the thought of producing babies who will end up working in the mills. For an earnest social novel this still reads quite well, although Perley's attitude would probably strike some people today as patronizing.

"The Tenth of January" is an odd animal. While the climax of the story is a catastrophic accident in a mill, most of it is devoted to Asenath's disappointment in love. Disfigured by numerous beatings at the hands of her alcoholic mother, Asenath led a joyless life until Dick arrived in town, boarded with her and her father, and eventually asked Sene to marry him. Alas, one gloomy day Asenath finds out that Dick, although he intends to honor his pledge to her, has fallen for the town's beauty, Del, a good but superficial girl. For months Asenath wonders what course to take and contemplates suicide. The collapse of the mill answers her prayers. Dick arrives on the scene, rescues the lightly injured Del and vanishes, leaving Sene to die as a martyr to unrequited love and shoddy capitalistic practices. I must say I found the whole thing rather melodramatic as well as ideologically unsound. Poorly built factories are still with us, at least in the Third World, and I doubt that the majority of women who die there when there's an accident see it as a blessed release from their love troubles.

[abigail · Rating 5 out of 5]

comparing men to furniture? iconic.

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

“That’s why I hate your kind of folks. It ain’t because they don’t care, it’s because they don’t know; nor they don’t care enough to know.”

The Silent Partner is about an unlikely friendship between Perley, a socialite, and Sip, a factory girl. For the first time, Perley becomes aware of the existence of suffering and poverty, and she feels she can never again be happy now that she knows such suffering exists. She resolves to try to make a positive difference

The Tenth of January is also about inequality. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps felt compelled to write the short story about the Pemberton Mill collapse in 1860. The disaster killed mostly women, and the owners put profit before safety.

[Nora · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was surprisingly good- a Christian-minded activist novel about the industrial revolution. Read for my American Lit class. I was impressed by the powerful, independent female lead, and the two chess scenes are impeccably written.

[Amber Ziegler · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not bad compared to other pieces of popular American literature from the 19th century.

[Barbara · Rating 3 out of 5]

A kid gets ground up working in a factory. It's basically The Jungle, but with ladies.

[Leah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another "American Women Writers" class book.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

a rich girl makes friends with one of her dad's mill hands. sounds bad but i liked it.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Patrizza Bizzell wrote a paper talking, in part, about this book. It's been a delight, especially after reading Easterley. What's up with humanitarianism, anyway?

[Simone · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting critique of capitalist exploitation of factory workers, especially females, in late 19th century New England.