Life in the Iron Mills

The aspect of this story that most interested me was the transition that Hugh had when Deborah gave him the money. At first he absolutely refuses to use it and he has every intention of taking it back to Mitchell. But as he thinks about it more he becomes more and more convinced that not only should he use the money, but that it is his right to do so. So the question is how much of that decision was influenced by him actually having the money in front of him. If he had not had the money and he started to think about the rights people had to money would he have come to the same conclusion or did the fact that he had that much money give him a desire to rationalize why he should keep it? I think that at least part of it was rationalization on his part. For someone so poor that much money would have been too huge a temptation to resist. But how much of it wasn’t rationalization? I would assume that at least part of it was his own natural feelings because he was already longing for something more. To have ways to express himself, which were only partial satisfied by his carvings in the Kohl. I think that some of it was also a desire to protect Deborah. He must have realized that if he turned the money in he would have to say how he had got it and that would implicate Deborah unless he lied. So at least on a subconscious level he was probably protecting her, although the lure of having that much money was probably a much bigger factor in his decision than that. Of course even if he had tried to use the money it was in the form of a check and so it was probably already made out to someone else. So it was very unlikely that he would have been able to use the money from the start. Is that a more subtle commentary by the author? Even if the main context is something else is she also implying that not only are the workers poor and mistreated, but they’re too ignorant to even differentiate between a something which will truly lift them out of poverty and what is only a false hope at best. Besides that one of the themes of the book is that the only way for a revolution to happen either to individuals or on a larger scale is if it comes from the people who need it, which means basically that they have to lift themselves up. So even by stealing from a rich person they are in a way getting help from the upper class, and so the endeavor is doomed to failure from the start whether or not they can get away with stealing, because the check is useless to them because they can’t cash it even if they don’t realizes that.