HOWELLS, William Dean

Annie Kilburn

New York: Harper and Brothers, 1889. First Edition. First printing. Octavo; gilt-titled red cloth, [iv], [1]-331pp; 4pp ads. Slight wear to cloth at corners and spine ends, corners bumped, spine darkened, contemporary and later ownership inscriptions to front free endpaper; a Very Good, internally sound copy. The American edition was preceded by about a month by the Edinburgh edition; the novel was initially serialized in Harper's, Jun-Nov 1888.

Set in the fictional New England factory town of Hatsboro, the plot centers on the well-meaning but ultimately flawed and patronizing attempts by the title character – a young, upper-class judge's daughter, recently returned from a decade of schooling in Rome – to alleviate the wretched social conditions of the town's female factory workers. She is ultimately dissuaded from her project by her reform-minded minister, who embodies the ideals of Tolstoian Christian anarchist-socialism and, by extension, Howells' own developing views on questions of capital and labor. Along the way are many vivid, highly realistic portraits of 19th-century female factory life, drawn from Howells' first-hand researches in the mill-town of Lowell, Massachusetts.

Though generally overlooked – possibly a result of its being sandwiched between Howells' two literary masterpieces, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1889) – Annie Kilburn is a classic of economic fiction and an important benchmark in Howells' career. It's the closest Howells ever came to a straightforward "labor novel," and marks a clear move towards the Christian Socialism to which he had begun to turn following the execution of the Haymarket martyrs in 1887. The novel met with decidedly mixed reviews in the contemporary press (a review in the Chicago Tribune led off with the headline: "A dull and unprofitable use of the literary microscope"); perhaps unsurprisingly, early editions have by now (January 2026) grown rather thin on the ground – something that can honestly be said of precious few of Howells' works. BAL 9641. GIBSON & ARMS 89a. RANTA, Women & Children of the Mills, 436.

Price: $200.00

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