"HUMOROUS INCIDENTS AND SOUND COMMON SENSE".

Allis Rosenberg Wolfe's publication of five "Letters of a Lowell Mill Girl and Friends: 1845-1846," represents an important contribution to the study of the New England factory women. These letters, sent to the 22 year-old Harriet Hanson by her friends Maria and Lura Currier and H.E. Back and now in the Harriet Hanson Robinson papers in the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, are among the only surviving manuscript materials that document the perceptions of the Yankee mill women of the 1840's. The following remarks are designed to clarify and extend our understanding of the letters' contents, now that they have at last been made more accessible. Wolfe publishes perhaps two-thirds of the letters, an unfortunate if possibly necessary, for reasons of space editing of such rare documents. The portions retained are well chosen, but the general character of the letters is inevitably blurred. In short, all five letters in the Robinson papers must be seen as representing the complex experience of those mill women who went back and forth between factory town and rural community.