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This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions, and 10 short essay questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. How long has Deborah stood at the spools at her job in the beginning of “Life in the Iron Mills”?
(a) 10 hours
(b) 6 hours
(c) 8 hours
(d) 12 hours

2. Where does Deborah go to live after serving her jail sentence in “Life in the Iron Mills”?
(a) With Janey and her husband
(b) With her mother
(c) With Old Wolfe
(d) With the Quakers

3. When Hugh decides to keep the money in “Life in the Iron Mills,” he realizes of his watch at the mill, “He need not go, need never go again, thank God! – shaking off the thought with” what?
(a) Unspeakable loathing
(b) A shudder of grief
(c) Critical irony
(d) Unmistakable joy

4. What Latin phrase, translated as “Hungry and thirsty, his soul faints him” is used in “Life in the Iron Mills”?
(a) De profundis clamavi
(b) Clamat au arian
(c) Scribet et libret
(d) Semper fidelis

5. 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) Grossness and crime, and hard, grinding labor
(b) Taverns and brothels and wherever sick men live
(c) Art and beauty based on memories of his youth
(d) Poverty and Godliness

Short Answer Questions

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

2. When was Margret Howth published?

3. Mitchell claims in “Life in the Iron Mills,” “Reform is born of need, not” what?

4. One of the men that visits the mill along with other men in “Life in the Iron Mills” is the son of which of the mill-owners?

5. The narrator in “Life in the Iron Mills” describes “man’s law” as that “which seizes on one” what?

Short Essay Questions

1. How would you describe the setting of “Life in the Iron Mills”? What tone is established through the story’s setting?

2. Who did Rebecca Harding Davis meet on her first trip North, according to the author of “A Biographical Interpretation”?

3. What happens to Deborah at the end of “Life in the Iron Mills”? What does the narrator reveal at the end of the story?

4. What is the outcome for Hugh in the denouement of “Life in the Iron Mills”?

5. How would you describe the language style in “Life in the Iron Mills”?

6. How did Rebecca Harding meet L. Clarke Davis? Where did they first meet, according to the author of “A Biographical Interpretation”?

7. What does Hugh look down on from his prison window at in “Life in the Iron Mills”? What does this scene make him realize?

8. How did the outbreak of the Civil War impact Rebecca Harding Davis’s work, according to the author of “A Biographical Interpretation”?

9. How would you describe the author’s use of dialogue in “Life in the Iron Mills”?

10. What does Deb attempt to give Hugh after they return home from the mill in “Life in the Iron Mills”? How does Hugh respond?

(see the answer keys)

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