Chapter 1 Summary

Margret Howth: A Story of To-Day is Rebecca Harding Davis' novel of life in a textile mill town in Indiana, in the early 1860's. Contrary to most popular novels written in this time period, the author presents the unattractive side of the emerging Industrial Age and the imminent Civil War in America.

The novel begins with the narrator, Margret Howth, explaining that she is about to tell a story of To-Day. Margret's world is a bleak one, where hunger and poverty rule, and hope is a distant memory. Margret hopes that her story will be told when she is dead, so that people will know the anguish of the time in which she lived.

Margret shares that the reason that she is writing this book is because the sight of some old journals today has prodded her memory back to October 1860, and her...