English woman who strove to keep body and soul together by means of the
needle:

With fingers weary and worn,
With eyelids heavy and red,
A woman sat in unwomanly rags,
Plying her needle and thread.

Meanwhile, as Hood wrote and as the whole English people learned by
heart his vivid lines, as great ladies wept over them and street singers
sang them in the darkest slums of London, a man, hungry and ill-clad, in
an attic in faraway Cambridge, Massachusetts, was struggling to put into
metal an idea to lighten the toil of those who lived by the needle. His
name was Elias Howe and he hailed from Eli Whitney's old home, Worcester
County, Massachusetts. There Howe was born in 1819. His father was an
unsuccessful farmer, who also had some small mills, but seems to have
succeeded in nothing he undertook.

Young Howe led the ordinary life of a New England country boy, going to
school in winter and working about the farm until the age of sixteen,
handling tools every day, like any farmer's boy of the time. Hearing
of high wages and interesting work in Lowell, that growing town on the
Merrimac, he went there in 1835 and found employment; but two years
later, when the panic of 1837 came on, he left Lowell and went to work
in a machine shop in Cambridge. It is said that, for a time, he occupied
a room with his cousin, Nathaniel P. Banks, who rose from bobbin boy in
a cotton mill to Speaker of the United States House of Representatives
and Major-General in the Civil War.

Next we hear of Howe in Boston, working in the shop of Ari Davis, an
eccentric maker and repairer of fine machinery. Here the young mechanic
heard of the desirability of a sewing machine and began to puzzle over
the problem. Many an inventor before him had attempted to make sewing
machines and some had just fallen short of success. Thomas Saint, an
Englishman, had patented one fifty years earlier; and about this very
time a Frenchman named Thimmonier was working eighty sewing machines
making army uniforms, when needle workers of Paris, fearing that the
bread was to be taken from them, broke into his workroom and destroyed
the machines. Thimmonier tried again, but his machine never came into
general use. Several patents had been issued on sewing machines in
the United States, but without any practical result. An inventor named
Walter Hunt had discovered the principle of the lock-stitch and had
built a machine but had wearied of his work a