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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. The narrator in “Life in the Iron Mills” says that it is nearly how long since the Wolfes lived in the boarding house in the beginning of the story?
(a) 4 years
(b) 30 years
(c) 10 years
(d) 20 years

2. What does Mitchell refer to as “the cure for all the world’s diseases” in “Life in the Iron Mills”?
(a) Justice
(b) Money
(c) Beauty
(d) Honor

3. What word from “Life in the Iron Mills” means slow, dull, or sluggish?
(a) Torpid
(b) Tainted
(c) Trepid
(d) Torrid

4. The narrator describes Hugh Wolfe as a furnace-tender at one of whose rolling-mills in “Life in the Iron Mills”?
(a) Kirby and John’s
(b) Peter and Paul’s
(c) Anderson and Smith’s
(d) Maxwell and Thoreau’s

5. What is the name of Rebecca Harding Davis’s eldest son who became a writer and journalist?
(a) Peter Harding Davis
(b) James Harding Davis
(c) John Harding Davis
(d) Richard Harding Davis

6. What kind of tobacco does the narrator describe the drunken Irishmen puffing on in the beginning of “Life in the Iron Mills”?
(a) Skydancer tobacco
(b) Lynchburg tobacco
(c) Williamsburg tobacco
(d) Lucky Strike tobacco

7. What does Hugh use to commit suicide in jail in “Life in the Iron Mills”?
(a) A police gun
(b) A rope
(c) A bed sheet
(d) A piece of tin

8. The author of “A Biographical Interpretation” states that Rebecca Harding Davis grew up along what river?
(a) The Hudson River
(b) The Colorado River
(c) The Ohio River
(d) The Columbus River

9. What is the name of the overseer that comes with the visiting men to the mill in “Life in the Iron Mills”?
(a) Mr. Mitchell
(b) Mr. Clarke
(c) Mr. Kirk
(d) Mr. Wolfe

10. One of the visiting men tells the owner’s son at the mill in “Life in the Iron Mills,” “If it were not that you must have heard it so often, I would tell you that your works looks like” what?
(a) The fires of the underworld
(b) The River Styx
(c) Dante’s Inferno
(d) The Apocalypse

11. The narrator states in the beginning of “Life in the Iron Mills,” “The idiosyncrasy of this town is” what?
(a) Smoke
(b) Paint
(c) Cleanliness
(d) Sunshine

12. In what year did the author of “A Biographical Interpretation” republish Life in the Iron Mills and Other Stories?
(a) 1969
(b) 1988
(c) 1992
(d) 1972

13. The narrator in “Life in the Iron Mills” describes Hugh Wolfe as “A morbid, gloomy man, untaught, unled, left to feed his soul in” what?
(a) Taverns and brothels and wherever sick men live
(b) Art and beauty based on memories of his youth
(c) Grossness and crime, and hard, grinding labor
(d) Poverty and Godliness

14. When was Margret Howth published?
(a) 1914
(b) 1798
(c) 1861
(d) 1884

15. The narrator describes the mill workers in the beginning of “Life in the Iron Mills” as “laired in by day in dens of drunkenness and” what?
(a) Rebellion
(b) Tyranny
(c) Infamy
(d) Misery

Short Answer Questions

1. Rebecca Harding Davis met and became acquainted with whom while staying with Nathanial Hawthorne?

2. Who was the publisher that accepted “Life in the Iron Mills” immediately and began a long friendship with Rebecca Harding Davis?

3. How many men are in the group of visitors that come through the mill where Hugh works in “Life in the Iron Mills”?

4. The character called Mitchell in “Life in the Iron Mills” is said to be an amateur what?

5. When was Rebecca Harding Davis’s last essay, “The Disease of Money-Getting,” published?

(see the answer keys)

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