The Match Girl and the Heiress

by Seth Koven

  That place was Kingsley Hall, Britain’s first Christian revolutionary “People’s House” and the institutional incarnation of Nellie and Muriel’s friendship where they tried to translate ideals of fellowship into the stuff of everyday life. Founded in February 1915 in an abandoned hellfire Baptist chapel amid the furies unleashed by the world at war, it was an outpost of pacifism, feminism, and socialism committed to radical social sharing. Muriel and Kingsley Hall’s original residents established East London’s chapter of the pan-denominational Brethren of the Common Table, whose members satisfied their minimal weekly needs for food, shelter, and clothing and then placed whatever excess remained from their earnings on the Communion table for others to take.8 They asked no questions and accepted no thanks. A special London correspondent from the United States witnessed the earnest Brethren in conversation at Kingsley Hall. He gleefully reported that the involuntarily poor among them upbraided their well-born friends for excessive self-denial. “It drives me wild to see these people going short of things they want,” one widowed mother of four complained. “They ain’t used to it. It’s going too far.”9 At times comically self-serious, residents of Kingsley Hall decided it was too risky to leave fun to chance: they held temperance “Joy Nights” where men and women could laugh, dance, and socialize.

  The Hall also functioned as a vibrant center of community life in East London with its Montessori-inspired nursery school; men’s school in civics and Scripture; and restaurant for working women under the auspices of the London Society for Women’s Suffrage. Some called it a “settlement house,” but Muriel eventually rejected this name, which smacked of missionary uplift incompatible with the Hall’s commitment to rights-based democracy. Ardent defenders of human freedom, community members imposed on themselves rules about everything from the proper disposition of toothpaste in washbasins to protocols about gossip. Often mistaken for members of a modern monastery, the residents of Kingsley Hall lived as if each minute detail of their intimately regulated lives resonated through the cosmos. They were so vigilant because the stakes were so high: nothing less than inaugurating a nonviolent Christian revolution in the heart of the world’s wealthiest imperial metropolis. They tethered their faith in God’s unbounded love to an egalitarian everyday ethics. Muriel declared Kingsley Hall an “overdue act of justice.”10 During the war, jingoistic neighbors suspiciously eyed it as a pacifist refuge for the kaiser’s deluded dupes. In the war’s immediate aftermath, Marxists (Muriel called them “Communists”) belittled their naïve faith that the rich would willingly dispossess themselves of wealth and power.

  Kingsley Hall’s early history cannot be disentangled from Nellie and Muriel’s, but the Hall was never theirs. The language of possession is not quite right. It is at odds with Kingsley Hall’s theology and ideology. Residents sought freedom from the tyranny of money and things. Possessions and the desire for them were afflictions of capitalism and its malign handmaiden, imperialism. Many others in the community joined Nellie and Muriel in making Kingsley Hall, foremost among them Muriel’s quietly determined younger sister Doris. The two were partners in almost everything they did in East London. Doris was as shy as Muriel was charismatic, but in all sorts of ways she drove their work, especially among children. She moves in and out of Muriel and Nellie’s story. (See fig. I.2.)

  I.2. The two sisters, Muriel Lester (left) and Doris Lester (right), shared their lives and labors as daughters and social workers. The similarity in their modest demeanors, hairstyles, and simple dress belied profound differences between charismatic Muriel and shy but strong-minded Doris. (Left) Muriel Lester, portrait by Paul Swann, 1930. (Courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute.) (Right) Doris Lester, portrait, studio postcard, n.d., Platten Papers, Loughton Library. (Courtesy of Loughton and District Historical Society, Ben Platten Collection.)

  By the time Muriel Lester died in 1968 in a modest roughcast Loughton cottage, she had become a grande dame of global pacifism and social justice Christianity. Revered and reviled in her lifetime, she hosted her friend Mohandas Gandhi at Kingsley Hall for several months during the 1931 Round Table Conference and marched with him in earthquake-shattered Bihar a few years later. One of the best-known faces of the world-wide peace movement, she circled and recircled the globe as ambassador-at-large for the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the pacifist organization that she and Doris first joined in 1915. She witnessed and exposed the traffic in drugs in Japanese-occupied Manchuria. She rejected war even in the face of Nazi atrocities. She befriended leaders of the United States’ civil rights movement, including Bayard Rustin. Along the way, she also inspired an impressive sheaf of scathing confidential reports in the secret files of MI5, MI12, and the India Office chronicling her dangerous anticolonial and antiwar activities.11 With more than a touch of resentment, at least one relative still remembers her and Doris as the “mad aunts” whose poverty cost the Lester family too much of its fortune.12 The truly devout in Britain can pilgrimage to Kingsley Hall’s branch in Dagenham to see one of her well-preserved modishly simple capes, her signature outerwear. In North America, they can visit the sole surviving Muriel Lester House in the United States: a vegetarian residential cooperative at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. All this happened after Nellie’s death in January 1923; but it is essential to understanding their history as well as the circumstances that have made it possible to reconstruct their story.

  The renown that Muriel courted and accumulated from the 1920s to the 1960s enabled the Kingsley Hall in Bow along with its satellite branch in far eastern Dagenham to survive into the twenty-first century. (It did not hurt that Sir Richard Attenborough made the restoration of Kingsley Hall Bow, so badly treated during R. D. Laing’s occupancy of it in the mid-1960s with his community of schizophrenics, part of the filming of Gandhi.) It also ensured the preservation of the Lester papers, including Muriel’s typescript biographical fragments about Nellie, “From Birth to Death,” and Nellie’s letters to Muriel. I went to Dagenham looking for Muriel Lester, the once-famous, now-mostly-forgotten Christian revolutionary saint. I found Nellie Dowell.

  My first day at Kingsley Hall Dagenham, I read Nellie’s witty warm letters to Muriel. I was instantly struck by her humor and intellect as well as her evident discomfort with letter writing and the conventions of Standard English.13 Full of mundane chat, her longing for Muriel, and events so inconsequential that she probably forgot them the next day, Nellie’s letters invite listening to her talk as much as reading what she wrote. They retain the rhythms and freshness of speech as thoughts take flight without regard to formal punctuation. Nellie’s letters baffled, delighted, and intrigued me.14 (See fig. I.3.) Who was Nellie? Why did she write these letters, what did they signify, and why did Muriel save them?

  I.3. Nellie wrote this letter to Muriel on Valentine’s Day 1912—a token of their loving friendship. Nellie Dowell to Muriel Lester, February 14, 1912, Dowell Letters. (Courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute.)

  My training as a social historian brought me to the London Family History Centre of the National Archives with its helpful staff and wonderfully accessible records of births, deaths, marriages, and much else. I had no idea when Nellie died and only a broad range of possible dates for her birth. Her epistolary relationship with Muriel suggested, at least upon initial readings, that Muriel was not only her better but her elder. She must have been born after 1883, I assumed. As I eventually discovered, Nellie had many names and several different dates of birth at various times when she entered institutions and official archives. She was Nellie, Nell, Nella, Ellen, and Eleanor. Nellie can be a nickname for several other first names as well. My initial guesses were all bad ones. By the random accidents that make history and are part of writing history, Kingsley Hall had retained no copies of its own Eighth Annual Report that included Muriel’s essay commemorating Nellie’s life and death, “The Salt of the Earth.” That would have made the task much easier since Muriel gave the precise date of Nellie’s death: January 31, 1923. In any case
, I began to believe that I might do something substantial about Muriel and Nellie only when the Bow registrar’s office handed me a copy of her death certificate. It told me that Eleanor Dowell was forty-seven and died of mitral valvular disease in 1923 at 58 Bruce Road.

  My archival quest and so much of the story that I will tell began with these simple facts. These clues eventually led to census data and to scattered evidence of her movements through London Board schools, Poor Law institutions, public asylums and voluntary hospitals as well as ships’ logs to and from New Zealand. Nellie, I came to learn, had a remarkable global life as a proletarian match factory worker and Cockney cosmopolitan before she met Muriel. When her father died at sea in 1881, poverty compelled her devoted mother Harriet Dowell—who outlived Nellie by several years—to give her up to Poor Law officials. They classified her as a Poor Law half-orphan and sent her to late-Victorian Britain’s most controversial Poor Law school and orphanage, Forest Gate School. Nellie entered the match industry in the year of the world-famous “Match Girls’ Strike” of 1888. Labor conflicts dogged her everywhere she went. Her arrival in Wellington in June 1900 was fiercely debated in the New Zealand Parliament and sparked a political crisis for the Liberal ministry. Her labor assignment to Sweden around 1907 was outwardly peaceful, but a time of inward ferment. She began to question truths about God and nation that she had long taken for granted. In the winter of 1909–10, an attack of rheumatic fever abruptly ended her ability to withstand factory labor; it also freed her to devote her time and love to Muriel and their joint ventures in East London. Nellie and her mother Harriett joined Doris and Muriel at the modest row houses 58–60 Bruce Road that served as their headquarters and home.15

  No sources make it possible to reconstruct how Muriel and Nellie’s contemporaries perceived their partnership, besides Nellie’s allusion to friendly gossip about them in a single letter. However, depictions of philanthropic ladies and the objects of their benevolence abound in Victorian culture. Scholars have written copiously and critically about what Dickens’s indomitable Mrs. Jellyby and her many flesh-and-blood counterparts saw when they looked through their philanthropic telescopes to inspect the “dirtiest little unfortunates” in Britain and its empire.16 Many others have reconstructed how such unfortunates—so-called objects of private benevolence and public welfare—responded to and resisted the disciplinary imperatives of philanthropists and state bureaucrats to become “heroes of their own lives.”17 It has proved much more elusive to reconstruct and analyze cross-class benevolence and social welfare in and as a dynamic negotiated relationship between individuals. Nellie’s letters offer the possibility of doing that by handing Mrs. Jellyby’s telescope to her to find out what Muriel, Kingsley Hall, Bow and public-private welfare looked like through her eyes.

  By putting Muriel’s and Nellie’s stories back together, I reconstruct their Christian revolutionary project as part of their evolving relationship within the broader context of Britain in war and peace during the first three decades of the twentieth century.18 This book joins unglamorous methods of social history research (turning thousands of pages of different hospital admissions registers in the hope that perhaps Nellie had once been admitted there) with cultural and literary-textual analysis.19 I combine insights from feminist and queer theory with those of scholars of everyday life and historical geographers’ contributions to the interplay between place, space, and self.20 I track Muriel and Nellie’s global itineraries while paying close attention to their day-to-day lives.21 By approaching large-scale developments as refracted through their relationship, I sustain my focus on class, gender, sexual, and social subjectivity, which can easily fall by the wayside in the exciting new global approaches to modern British history.

  I also have written this book because Muriel and Nellie’s friendship—its tensions and tenderness, their failures and foibles—moved me. Courage is not a category much used by historians, but it was something that Nellie and Muriel abundantly needed and possessed as they faced the daunting task of changing themselves and their world. Plutarch, the Greco-Roman author of Parallel Lives, eloquently distinguished “lives” from “histories” as he grappled with a way to harmonize the Greek past with the demands of the first-century Roman Empire. Lives, he insisted, illuminate moral virtues and vices. They function as didactic mirrors into which we, his readers, gaze as we shape who we are and hope to become. Histories, by contrast, explain what happened in the past as well as how and why it did. Lives capture often entirely private choices indicative of character. Histories revolve around great battles and public matters of governance. I’ve written this book with the intention of dissolving the boundary between “lives” and “histories.” Like Plutarch, I have paired lives. My story, however, is about intersecting, not parallel, lives. Nellie and Muriel were mirrors for one another: each came to understand herself better as they labored with and loved the other. Muriel, in particular, insisted that private choices about apparently trivial matters of quotidian conduct—the stuff of Plutarch’s Lives—were inextricably entwined with large historical structures. In other words, she rejected the distinction between a private ethical domain and a public political one. Lives made history; history made lives.

  Methodologically, this book borrows from both micro-and macrohistories while challenging the distinctions between them.22 It sometimes mobilizes the slightest shard of evidence such as Nellie’s documented arrival in Wellington, New Zealand to move from the very small—her work filling matchboxes for R. Bell and Company—to the very big—British global capitalism and imperial trade policies at the turn of the century. It uses the tools and techniques of biography in reconstituting Nellie and Muriel’s lives, apart and together. Its central questions and problems, however, are historical. Shelves groan from the weight of books about women like Muriel Lester—wealthy, well educated, ethically alert, committed to social and political service to humanity.23 We have none about very poor women like Nellie who spent years in Poor Law institutions and harsh factory settings.24 The Match Girl and the Heiress argues that Nellie and Muriel’s historical importance consists both in their achievements as individuals and in what they did—and tried to do—as partners.

  Overdetermined serendipity has shaped this book. It explains the utter improbability that Muriel and Nellie would meet and the deep structures that made it quite normal for young, well-to-do Nonconformist ladies to befriend factory girls at the turn of the twentieth century. It also captures the predictable frisson of archival discovery that fueled my research: how and why I found traces of Nellie in the records of Marner Street and Forest Gate schools, the Poplar and Stepney Poor Law Infirmary, the Whitechapel Poor Law lunatic ward, London Hospital, and the passenger lists of the Waiwera that carried her to Wellington and the Papanui, which took her back to London three years later. Working from addresses in the Dowell family census data, I made informed guesses about the educational, medical, and social welfare institutions and agencies to which the Dowell family likely resorted in times of dire need. State policy makers and bureaucrats mapped my path of archival discovery more than a century ago. My job was to think like one of them. This task was made easier by the stability of the British state at all levels—from central government to vestries—and its penchant for keeping close tabs on the poorest of the poor, documenting and preserving each of their encounters. Finding Nellie in the archives felt like the hand of providence, but it was more likely the invisible hand of bureaucratic logic and my own perseverance. Seek and ye shall find.

  Nellie’s and Muriel’s relationship was reciprocal, unequal, and asymmetrical. Muriel had access to wealth, substantial social and cultural capital, and a first-rate education at one of Britain’s leading “public schools” for the intellectually agile daughters of the well-to-do. Like every other woman in turn-of-the-century Britain, she suffered the legal disabilities of her sex. She did, however, enjoy a great deal of personal freedom and power. Nellie was poor, perceived as a social problem (first as a Poor
Law “orphan” then as a “match girl” and “pauper lunatic”) and endured an education that even school officials confessed favored discipline and rote memorization over critical thought and creativity. Like Muriel, she benefitted from a loving and supportive family network to which she was devoted and which proved to be a tremendous asset to both of them in their community-centered work. It was extreme poverty, not a lack of family love that made Nellie Dowell a half-orphan ward of the state in the eyes of Poor Law officials.

  As best as I can tell, Muriel and Nellie’s love was also reciprocal and asymmetrical. Muriel adored and admired Nellie. She depended heavily upon Nellie’s knowledge, wit, tact, and diplomacy in building the networks of human relationships upon which their Christian revolutionary project was founded. Nellie looked to Muriel to guide her political and intellectual development as they studied Tolstoy and other Christian revolutionary texts together. Her letters suggest that she also received material assistance from Muriel, though the precise form and quantity I cannot say. Nellie also longed for a deeper and more exclusive intimacy than Muriel would—and could—give her or anyone else. Love may have animated their vision of radical egalitarianism and Christian revolution, but it forced each of them, in quite different ways, to confront her own emotional and intellectual limits. Love, like the Christian revolution of which it was a part, proved both exhilarating and challenging.

  My sources accentuate these asymmetries. Fleeting traces of Nellie’s life history are scattered in the archives of Poor Law institutions and other “public” records. For some periods of her life, my account is necessarily speculative. By contrast, Muriel has left behind copious records. She mastered the art of telling her life story in print and in the endless rounds of speeches that she delivered throughout the world from the 1920s to the early ’60s. It was part and parcel of the appeal that she made on behalf of the many causes she championed. She published two full-scale autobiographies and drafted several others; she preserved many of her diaries along with the weekly letters she wrote from India—and elsewhere—that she circulated among her friends and followers.25 We even have a 1931 Pathé film clip that captures her elegant vigorous body movements and precise upper-class diction as she takes viewers on a tour of Kingsley Hall in anticipation of Gandhi’s residence there.26