The Bishop of Cottontown: A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills

About the book

In the Tennessee Valley, the world of plantations and thoroughbred horses gives way to the demands of cotton manufacturing. Richard Travis combines inherited position with a powerful role in the Acme Mills, while Hillard Watts, the preacher known as the Bishop, measures people by their capacity for kindness. Their surrounding community supplies intersecting stories of work, money, family, and moral obligation. The exploitation of children in the mills becomes a central test of what prosperity should mean and whom it should benefit. Moore arranges the novel's five parts around stages of cotton production, making the industry's material processes a framework for its human consequences. Its reforming concern for workers coexists with racial prejudice and an idealized account of the older plantation order.

• Child labor and industrial reform
• Practical faith
• Progress and inherited prejudice

Why read it

The cotton-production structure connects the novel's social argument to the labor and materials on which the community depends.

John C. Winston Company 1906 edition, illustrated by the Kinneys