ABSTRACT
Nineteenth-century literature offers numerous texts that employ the tropes, themes, and rhetoric of the Gothic to portray the real-life horrors of factory life, framing the Industrial Revolution as a site of Gothic excess and horror. This chapter considers both nonfictional and fictional stories of nineteenth-century mill and factory workers that are part of the subgenre the author call "Industrial Gothic." Industrial Gothic texts employ the Gothic figure of the monster and offer plots that involve imprisonment and victimization (especially sexual victimization) of workers. Popular "recipes for a Gothic novel" don't tend to list factories, overseers, or textile workers as ingredients, but the standard elements of Gothic novels proved easily adaptable to the factory setting. In both England and America, nineteenth-century writers portrayed industrial machines as Gothic monsters that perpetrated brutal bodily violence upon workers, both through long-term damage to their health and terrifying and all-too-common industrial accidents.
