Lizzy Glenn

A seamstress in an American city works by candle for a shirt-maker who pays by the piece and fines by the stitch, and the arithmetic does not permit her to live. Arthur left school at thirteen, half-blind and apprenticed to a watchmaker, and became one of the most widely read Americans of his century; this is his sweatshop book, and the wages quoted in it were the real ones. Fifty-nine plates of interiors by painters including Edvard Munch and Thomas Le Clear run from 1820 to 1912, rooms that hold the same cramped, lamplit labor this story never escapes.