by Seth Koven
Nellie Dowell and Muriel Lester’s East London, c. 1916
Adapted from Kelly’s Post Office Directory Map, 1916
1 Bryant and May Match Factory, Fairfield Road 2 Cook’s East London Soap Works 3 Bow Church and Gladstone Statue 4 Factory Girls’ Club, Albert Terrace 5 Original Kingsley Hall, Botolph and Eagling Road 6 Children’s House
7 Kingsley Rooms, 58–60 Bruce Road 8 Bruce Road Congregational Church 9 Kingsley Hall, Powis Road 10 Stepney Union Workhouse, Bromley, St. Leonard’s 11 Poplar and Stepney Sick Asylum/Poor Law Infirmary (St. Andrews Hospital) 12 Marner Street, school and center of Dowell family life, 1880s to 1900s 13 Berger Hall, Regions Beyond Inland Mission and Medical Missionary Center 14 R. Bell and Company
15 Limehouse Canal (Cut)
16 313 Brunswick Road (Harriet “Granny” Sloan’s residence) 17 Chrisp Street, Lusitania Riot in Poplar
the Match Girl and the Heiress
the Match Girl and the Heiress
Seth Koven
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD
Copyright © 2014 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW
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Jacket illustration © Francesco Bongiorni for Marlena Agency. Jacket design by Faceout Studio All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Koven, Seth, 1958– The match girl and the heiress / Seth Koven.
pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-691-15850-1 (hardback) 1. Dowell, Nellie, 1876–1923. 2. Lester, Muriel, 1883–1968. 3. Women social reformers—Great Britain—Biography. 4. Feminists—Great Britain—Biography. 5. Great Britain—Social conditions—20th century. I. Title.
HQ1595.A3K69 2015
305.42092′2–dc23
[B] 2014013276
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Minion Pro with ITC Benquiat Std display Printed on acid-free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
For Joan, Daniel, Zoe, and Eli—with love.
Contents
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
CHAPTER ONE
Victorian Childhoods and Two Victorian Children 21
The Education of Nellie Dowell 23
The Apprenticeship of Muriel Lester 57
Conclusions: The Challenges of Unlearning 75
CHAPTER TWO
Capitalism, from Below and Down Under: The Global Traffic in Matches and Match Girls 77
The Work of the Match Girl in Victorian Culture 79
How Match Factory Women Became Match Girls 85
Match Girls’ Militant: Why the Bell’s Match Factory Strike of 1893/94 Failed 95
Metropolitan Match Girls Abroad: Immoral Circulations of Matches and Match Girls 104
Conclusions 130
CHAPTER THREE
“Being a Christian” in Edwardian Britain 135
“God Is Love” 137
Foundational Fables, Ethical Awakening 154
God’s Empire 171
From Paupers to Citizens 177
Conclusions 181
CHAPTER FOUR
Body Biographies in War and Peace 184
Taking Nellie’s Temperature 186
Narrating Nellie 190
“You don’t look near so well really” 201
Muriel Lester’s Spiritual Therapeutics 212
Bodies at War 219
Grammars of Difference, Erotics of Illness in Nellie’s Letters to Muriel 226
“Why it is I don’t know” 237
Conclusions: Dialects for the Heart 252
CHAPTER FIVE
Love and Christian Revolution 256
Henry Lester’s Gift 261
Feminisms at War 274
Reconciliation and Christian Revolution 288
“Love your enemies, bless them that curse you” 301
Telling the Truth, Becoming an Heiress 315
Conclusions 328
Afterlives 330
Manuscript Sources 353
Notes 357
Index 435
Acknowledgments
THIS BOOK BEARS ONLY my name on its cover and title page. Single authorship is one of the many fictions of the discipline of history. So many have made it possible for me to write this. Endnotes not only point readers to sources, they also begin to tell the story of gladly incurred debts and obligations. That’s why I have so many of them.
A year-long fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities launched this project and got me into archives. I thank the Department of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick and the School of Arts and Sciences for generous leave time and research funds. Without this, my scholarship could not happen. Home to a remarkable cohort of scholars in all fields, Rutgers is a bit of heaven for historians of gender, sexuality, women, and culture across time and space. Julie Livingston opened up new possibilities for thinking about the body, pain and medical archives and closely read sections of this book several times. Ann Fabian contributed her artful intellect to honing important arguments. Carla Yanni in Art History has tried her best to teach me how to see and read the built environment and been an invaluable collaborator in institution building through the Rutgers British Studies Center. Many other Rutgers colleagues have contributed insights through conversations they may well not even remember: Indrani Chatterjee, Alice Echols, Kate Flint, Jennifer Jones, Toby Jones, Temma Kaplan, Jennifer Mittelstadt, Barry Qualls, Johanna Schoen, Bonnie Smith, and Judith Surkis. Belinda Davis and Pieter Judson deserve special thanks for homemade delicacies, which sweetened their vigorous critiques of my manuscript as it emerged out of partially formed ideas. I can’t imagine a more generous writing group. The brilliant work of Rutgers’ graduate students has greatly enriched this book. Some—Allison Miller, Christopher Bischof, Yvette Lane, and Kate Imy among them—also offered cogent critiques of individual chapters.
A research leave at the University of California, Berkeley came at a perfect time as I was writing the first half of this book. Thomas Laqueur has provided years of inspiring friendship and intellectual comradeship. Long ago, he told me that I was writing a history of the ethical subject. At the time, I had no idea what he meant, but his provocation got me going. James Vernon forgave me for asking him to read chapters full of first names and made them better. Other colleagues in Berkeley welcomed me, swapped ideas, and read work: Margaret Anderson, John Connelly, Catherine Gallagher, John Gillis, Carla Hesse, Alan Karras, David Lieberman, Fredric Mintz, Mark Peterson, Ethan Shagan, Jonathan Sheehan, and Yuri Slezkine. Fourteen months as a visiting scholar in residence at the Department of History, University of Pennsylvania provided undisturbed solitude for finishing this book. Lynn Lees, a true model of excellence, made this possible. I kept close at hand her incisive criticisms of the entire manuscript.
Adele Lindenmeyr has been nothing short of a lifesaver. Faster and vastly more intellectually agile than any special delivery service, she read countless drafts and helped bring clarity to my ideas and prose. Paul Steege helped me to think hard about Alltagsgeschichte. I presented parts of this project at Johns Hopkins at its inception and much later when it was almost finished. I thank Judith Walkowitz for her astute comments and John Marshall for resisting several key arguments: figuring out why made them stronger. Matt Houlbrook has been part of this from the outset and unstinting in his critical generosity. Sue Morgan and Joy Dixon did t
heir best to guide me through the thickets of Victorian religion, spirituality and theology. Leela Gandhi helped me conceptualize affect and ethics; Martha Vicinus pushed me to sharpen my arguments about female amity and much else while Kali Israel asked good questions about life writing and storytelling. Sally Alexander told me things about what I had written that I could not have seen without her. Sonya Michel brought her unsentimental acumen to bear on several chapters while supporting this work with the great gift of her friendship. For many years, Olivia Dix has made me feel at home in London by opening hers to me.
For conversations about and assistance with this project, I also thank Ross Forman, Anna Davin, Fiona Gibbs, Ellen Ross, Lara Kriegel, Deborah Nord, Helena Michie, Susan Bernstein, Jordanna Bailkin, Charlotte Macdonald, Peter Mandler, Carolyn Steedman, Sybil Oldfield, Susan Pedersen, John Plotz, Diana Maltz, Elizabeth Kolsky, Ramya Sreenivasan, Paula Fass, Graham Mooney, Jane Shaw, Nadia Valman, Emma Francis, and Vivien Dietz. For impeccable transcriptions, I thank Benjamin Dabby. Chris Pond has been a sharp-eyed reader as well as an invaluable intellectual resource about all things related to Loughton, Essex and East London. Chris’s labors at the Loughton District Historical Society, like Christopher Lloyd’s and the staff of Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Stefan Dickers’ at Bishopsgate Institute prove just how crucial deep local knowledge is for producing history. Bishopsgate Institute has been a particularly generous ally in producing images for this book.
Robert Baker opened his Longcot home and gave me access to Mary Hughes’ papers. Peter Sander and Biddy Pepin shared Rosa Waugh Hobhouse papers in their respective hands. Niall Hobhouse and Francis Graham put the archival riches of their Hobhouse ancestors at my disposal. I thank archivists, librarians and staff at Tower Hamlets Local History Library, Hackney Archives, Friends House Library (London), the Wellington Municipal Archives, Epping Forest District Museum (Waltham Abbey), Loughton District Historical Society, Bedfordshire and Luton Archives & Records Service, Archives New Zealand, Gonville and Caius (Oxford), Queen Mary, Wellington Library, the National Archives (Kew), the British Library, London Metropolitan Archives, the Peace Collection (Swarthmore College), British Library of Political and Economic Science (LSE), Essex Record Office, Mill Hill School, St. Leonard’s School (Scotland), The Modern Record Office (Warwick), Van Pelt Library (University of Pennsylvania), Alexander Library (Rutgers) and its image specialists, and Bancroft Library (UC Berkeley). For help with images, I especially thank Wendy Chmielewski and the staff at Swarthmore’s Peace Collection. I owe a particular debt to Tony Lucas at Kingsley Hall, Dagenham for unstinting hospitality; to Alice Mackay and the team of archivists and interviewers who formed the heart and soul of the Heritage Lottery Project to preserve the Lester papers and create a powerful oral history of Kingsley Hall’s past.
I benefited immensely from the responses of audiences at many universities and conferences to this work: Kingsley Hall (Dagenham), Rutgers, UC Berkeley, Davidson, Indiana, Columbia, Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Penn State, Johns Hopkins, NYU, Queen Mary (London), Rice, Wisconsin (Madison), Warwick, University of Southern California, Victoria University (Wellington, New Zealand), NAVSA, NACBS, PCCBS, NECBS, MACBS, and the Delaware Valley British Studies Seminar. Several passages in this book first appeared in my article, “The ‘Sticky Sediment’ of Daily Life: Radical Domesticity, Revolutionary Christianity and the Problem of Wealth in Britain from the 1880s to the 1930s,” Representations 120:1 (Fall 2012): 39–82.
It was my great good fortune that Deborah Cohen and Sharon Marcus reviewed the manuscript for Princeton University Press and delivered terrifically smart responses to it. I thank them. Brigitta van Rheinberg is that rare editor who cares deeply about history and knows a lot of it. Her careful reading of each line of the manuscript gave me a critically enthusiastic guide to make it better. What errors of fact and interpretation remain in this book, despite the best efforts of so many, are entirely my own. For editorial assistance, I thank Claudia Acevedo, Christine Retz, Kathleen Cioffi, and Dimitri Karetnikov at Princeton University Press as well as M. Dale Booth, Allison Miller, and especially Rebecca Solnit. My father William Koven and mother-in-law Suzanne Raffel Gruber never tired of hearing and asking questions about Nellie Dowell and Muriel Lester. Their enthusiasm meant the world to me and their deaths taught me that we can become orphans at any age.
This book is dedicated to my family: Joan, who inspires me by making art of daily life, and our wonderful children, Daniel, Zoe, and Eli. Their love makes so much possible.
the Match Girl and the Heiress
Introduction
I CANNOT SAY WITH CERTAINTY how and when they met, but I do know that Muriel Lester and Nellie Dowell loved one another. That they ever met seems improbable, more the stuff of moralizing fiction than history. Muriel was the cherished daughter of a wealthy Baptist shipbuilder, reared in the virtuous abundance of the Lester family’s gracious Essex homes.1 A half-orphaned Cockney toiling in the match industry by age twelve, Nellie spent her earliest years in East London’s mean streets and cramped tenements, and her girlhood as a pauper ward of the state confined to Poor Law hospitals and “barrack schools.”2 During the first decades of the twentieth century, they were “loving mates” who shared their fears, cares, and hopes. Their love allowed them to glimpse the possibility of remaking the world according to their own idealistic vision of Christ’s teachings. They claimed social rights, not philanthropic doles, for their slum neighbors. They struggled for peace in war-intoxicated communities grieving for brothers, fathers, and husbands lost to the western front. Nellie dreamed of ladies’ clean white hands. Muriel yearned to free herself from the burden of wealth. Together, they sought to create a society based on radically egalitarian principles, which knew no divisions based on class, gender, race, or nation.3 (See fig. I.1.)
I.1. Nellie, her mother Harriet Dowell, and nephew Willie Dellar lived on the first floor of No. 58. Muriel, Doris, and sometimes Kingsley Lester lived at No. 60. By November 1914, they tore down the second floor wall dividing their two homes to create Kingsley Rooms. 58–60 Bruce Road (Photograph taken by author, July 2006.)
This book is about Muriel and Nellie, the worlds of wealth and want into which they were born, the historical forces that brought them together, and the “New Jerusalem” they tried to build in their London slum neighborhood of Bow.4 Their friendship was one terrain on which they used Christian love to repair their fractured world. The surviving fragments of their relationship disclose an all-but-forgotten project of radical Christian idealism tempered by an acute pragmatism born of the exigencies of slum life. They explored what it meant to be rights-bearing citizens, not subjects, in a democratic polity. Convinced that even the smallest gestures—downcast eyes or a deferential nod of the head—perpetuated the burdened histories of class, race, and gender oppression, Nellie and Muriel believed that they could begin to unmake and remake these formations—and hence the world—through how they lived their own lives.5 The local and the global, the everyday and the utopian, the private and the public existed in fruitful tension as distinct but connected realms of thought, action, and feeling.
Shadowing Muriel and Nellie are two much-maligned figures of nineteenth-century culture and historical scholarship: Lady Bountiful, who talks sisterhood with the outcast poor in smug tones of condescending sympathy; and the worker-on-the-make, who internalizes capitalist labor discipline, apes her betters, and suffers from an acute case of what Karl Marx called “false consciousness.”6 Just because Muriel vigorously critiqued Lady Bountiful does not exempt her from the charge of (sometimes) resembling her. Nor does it diminish the extent to which some laboring men and women in Bow wanted and expected her to play that part. Likewise, the more deeply that I researched Nellie’s life, the clearer it became that I could not cast her as an “organic intellectual”—the term coined by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci in the 1920s to describe workers whose experiences with capitalist exploitation made them into revolutionary critics of i
t. For the better part of two decades in the match industry, Nellie served her rapacious global capitalist employers on two continents and three countries only too well rather than joining coworkers in the vibrant women’s trade union movement. In loving one another and sharing their work in Bow, Nellie and Muriel set out to break—and break free from—these deeply engrained class and gender archetypes that had been so much a part of their upbringing. Their relationship makes it possible to assess just how far it was possible—and impossible—for them to do this. What were the gains from this undertaking? How can we reckon their costs? My answers to these questions foreground the tenacity of Victorian values as well as Nellie and Muriel’s recasting of them to serve radical twentieth-century ends.
This book offers an intimate history of very large-scale historical developments and processes—class relations, gender formation, same-sex desire, and ethical subjectivity; war, pacifism, and Christian revolution; shop-floor labor politics and global capitalism; world citizenship and grassroots democracy. It is also a history about intimacy between two women. The “intimate” unlocks the affective economy of their relationship and provides a key to understanding the program they sought to enact.7 Their story is part of a much broader impulse among thousands of well-to-do women and men in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Europe and the United States to traverse cultural and class boundaries in seeking “friendship” with the outcast. A few like Muriel self-consciously “unclassed” themselves by entering into voluntary poverty to model a society liberated from the constraints and inequalities of class. Nellie could not afford to “unclass” herself. She lived and died a very poor woman. She, like Muriel, crossed borders into a place of their own making, one committed to the unfinished business of reimagining gender, class, and nation by breaking down the hierarchies upholding them.
