Gerald W. McFarland | Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.4

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Gerald W. McFarland | Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

A Child of Toil: The Life of Charles Snow, 1831–1889. By Vernon F. Snow. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999. xvi, 315 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-8156-8126-7.)

In A Child of Toil, Vernon F. Snow traces the life of his great-grandfather, Charles Snow. It is the story of a working-class man whose daily activities can be described in great detail because for many years he conscientiously recorded those activities in a journal. In fact, nearly two-thirds of the text of A Child of Toil consists of excerpts from his four surviving diaries. 1

Born in Pulaski, New York, in 1831, Snow became an apprentice foundry worker in his hometown in his late teens. At age twenty he married and in 1854 moved himself, his wife, and two young sons to Ottawa, Illinois. There he held a succession of jobs in local foundries until 1877. The choicest sections of Snow's diaries and of the book concern this twenty-three-year period, when unremitting labor and growing family responsibilities often left him deeply discouraged and weary. Working ten or more hours a day every day except Sunday took its toll; although the diary entries are more descriptive than introspective, ample evidence surfaces of the exhaustion and frustration that the daily grind produced in him. . . .

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