- description
- # The Machine-End Worker
## Overview
"The Machine-End Worker" is a subsection of a larger work, detailing a specific scene or passage. It is part of the segment titled "II. THE TARTARUS OF MAIDS" and was extracted from the file "billy_budd.txt" as part of the "Melville Complete Works" collection.
## Context
This subsection is situated within the segment "II. THE TARTARUS OF MAIDS," which is itself part of a larger work, likely a novel or collection of stories by Herman Melville. The text was extracted from the file "billy_budd.txt" and is organized within the "Melville Complete Works" collection. This particular subsection follows "The Great Machine" and precedes "The Machine."
## Contents
This passage focuses on the narrator's observation of a woman working at the end of a paper-making machine. The woman, a former nurse who recently began this work due to poor economic conditions, is described as looking "sad." The narrator notes the machine's output of foolscap paper, with occasional finer grades like cream-laid and royal sheets. The narrator reflects on the myriad future uses of this blank paper, from sermons and legal documents to personal letters and death warrants. This contemplation leads to a comparison with John Locke's theory of the human mind at birth being like a blank sheet, susceptible to whatever is written upon it.
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- 2026-01-30T20:49:32.007Z
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- description_title
- The Machine-End Worker
- end_line
- 8045
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:05.323Z
- extracted_by
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- start_line
- 8015
- text
- Previously absorbed by the wheels and cylinders, my attention was now
directed to a sad-looking woman standing by.
‘That is rather an elderly person so silently tending the machine-end
here. She would not seem wholly used to it either.’
‘Oh,’ knowingly whispered Cupid, through the din, ‘she only came last
week. She was a nurse formerly. But the business is poor in these parts,
and she’s left it. But look at the paper she is piling there.’
‘Ay, foolscap,’ handling the piles of moist, warm sheets, which
continually were being delivered into the woman’s waiting hands. ‘Don’t
you turn out anything but foolscap at this machine?’
‘Oh, sometimes, but not often, we turn out finer work--cream-laid and
royal sheets, we call them. But foolscap being in chief demand, we turn
out foolscap most.’
It was very curious. Looking at that blank paper continually dropping,
dropping, dropping, my mind ran on in wonderings of those strange uses
to which those thousand sheets eventually would be put. All sorts of
writings would be writ on those now vacant things--sermons, lawyers’
briefs, physicians’ prescriptions, love-letters, marriage certificates,
bills of divorce, registers of births, death-warrants, and so on,
without end. Then, recurring back to them as they here lay all blank, I
could not but bethink me of that celebrated comparison of John Locke,
who, in demonstration of his theory that man had no innate ideas,
compared the human mind at birth to a sheet of blank paper; something
destined to be scribbled on, but what sort of characters no soul might
tell.
- title
- The Machine-End Worker