Rebecca Harding Davis "Life in the Iron Mills"

"This 1905 shows just one blast furnace (number 7) and the ore yard where the iron ore was stored to feed it day and night." From Heritage Education Center

The Iron-Mills would become an icon for progress, in both directions though. Technology was advance for "progress" but humanity and quality of life was sliding backwards. Davis beats her point in to the extent that the work is almost taking a modernist approach to industry sixty years before it exists. The overbearing tone of the story is that of damnation and pity. Damning industry and its evil for killing the once beautiful land and pity for the people who must work within. But within this horror there sparks the glimmer of creativity inside Wolfe which is then extinguished through a misguided attempt at help. Ending up with Wolfe losing his mind and killing himself to end the torment and his wife finding peace with the Quakers outside the city.

So once Deb leaves the city which represents hells she find peace in heaven. The city is referred to many times as hell and comparisons to Dante's Inferno are brought up to demonize this urban setting. And all the while the narrator is just pointing all this out to the reader as if both are just spirits floating and observing it all. In the same way Virgil leads Dante through hell. Davis leads the reader through an industrial hell.