Lyddie Analysis

There are many risks in life that sometimes you have to take for the best or better outcomes, you just have to be brave enough and have courage. In the fictional novel Lyddie by Katherine Paterson there is a young lady named Lyddie Worthern; the main character. Lyddie is a farm girl with a family of four others (Lyddie’s the oldest child) ; her mother, her brother Charlie/Charles, and her two younger sisters Agnus and Rachel. Lyddie’s mother sends her off to a tavern to pay off debts and faces a lot of challenges, risks and hard labor. (Keep in mind that the time place of this book, and the rest of the characters including Lyddie take place in The Industrial Revolution.)
Lyddie is offered to sign a petition for fewer hours ( the ten-hour
Lyddie has hope and a game plan to go back home eventually: ”She must work harder. She must earn all the money to pay what they owed, so she could gather her family together back on the farm while she still had family left to gather. (88)” Lyddie has hope to work hard enough to get enough of money to gather her family to take care of them again. Besty signed the petition and Lyddie: “Besty signed the petition...Now you’ll be blacklisted, and what will I do without you? (111)” This is one of the biggest risks that Lyddie will have to take if she signs the petition. Betsy signed the petition, and is now walking on thin ice with losing her job (being blacklisted). Lyddie’s mother moved in with Lyddies aunt Clarissa and uncle Juhda with Rachel and Agnus (Agnus recently died because of her health) when she sent Lyddie off to the tavern to pay off her debts: “They have put our mother to the asylum at Brattlebro. Now they are thinking to sell the farm. (122;note to Charles)” This shows that without the factory she (and Rachel) would have nowhere to go, and her mother is in the (insane) asylum so Lyddie can’t get to her either. Lyddie has a roof over her head, food, and making “a lot” of money. They may not be the best-poor working conditions, crappy
Rachel isn’t going to stay very healthy there and the (working) conditions that she and many other young girls-women are in is very terrible. Diana Goss, (one of the people that Lyddie works with and is friends with), offers Lyddie to help out with the 10 hour movement: “Of the movement. The ten-hour movement. (82)” Both women and men are tired of long hours so they’re forming a turnout;making a petition and marching/striking. This is just the beginning of their movement and commands of better conditions to work and live in. Workers only make a small profit from the products that they take hours to make and are forced to take on a lot more work then they’re supposed to be doing: “We’re working longer hours, tending more machines, all of which have been speeded to demon pace, so the corporation can make a packet of money. (92)” The girls only work as much as they do because the corporation gets most of their money from all of their hard labor. Lyddies sister Rachel lives with her and the air there is very polluted: “She began to lie awake listening for the awful sound, until finally, she knew she must send the child away - anywhere, just so she was not breathing this poison air. (139)” Lyddie must send Rachel away so that her sickness doesn’t get any worse or serious. Rachel has gotten a cough from the polluted air in the factory and Lyddie has to do what is best for her health and send her away so a safe and clean home. The factory