 The English novelist Charles Dickens , who visited in 1842 , remarked favorably on the conditions : " I cannot recall or separate one young face that gave me a painful impression ; not one young girl whom , assuming it to be matter of necessity that she should gain her daily bread by the labour of her hands , I would have removed from those works if I had had the power " " However , there was concern among many workers that foreign visitors were being presented with a sanitized view of the mills , by textile corporations who were trading on the image of the ‘ literary operative ’ to mask the grim realities of factory life . “ Very pretty picture , ” wrote an operative in the Voice of Industry , responding to a rosy account of life and learning in the mills , “ but we who work in the factory know the sober reality to be quite another thing altogether . ” The “ sober reality ” was twelve to fourteen hours of dreary , exhausting work , which many workers experienced as hostile to intellectual development . 
