by Seth Koven
CHAPTER ONE
Victorian Childhoods and Two Victorian Children
HERE IS ONE OF MANY WAYS to tell their story: Muriel Lester had a childhood and Nellie Dowell didn’t.
Henry and Rachel Lester doted on their three youngest children Muriel, Doris, and Kingsley. Romping and laughing on the sprawling grounds of Gainsborough Lodge, they bowled on their family green, rowed their full-scale toy boat across imaginary seas, strengthened their limbs in the gymnasium their parents had built for them, and mastered lawn tennis strokes on their well-manicured court. (See fig. 1.1.) Henry Lester even coated the bitter pill of Bible lessons with the irresistible sweetness of his playful paternal devotion. Every Sunday afternoon, the children eagerly awaited “Scripture Characters”—a form of charades Henry invented for them that was sufficiently pious to keep the Sabbath holy.1
Nellie briefly enjoyed a secure Cockney life in East London as the daughter of William Dowell, a mariner, and his wife Harriet. That changed when she was five. William Dowell died at sea in 1881, leaving behind five children. There were no safety nets to catch families like the Dowells. Even the most prudent home economist could not possibly save money on a mariner’s earnings to protect against future misfortunes in an uncertain world. And so the Dowells fell—slowly at first, then quickly, into the vast residuum of the poorest of the poor. The objects that made a dwelling into a home—pictures, furniture, even beds—disappeared as each made its way to the pawnshop, never to return. Then the family itself was ripped apart. Indifferent Poor Law officials carted off a weeping Nellie and her siblings, first to the workhouse and eventually to Victorian London’s most infamous “barrack” school orphanage at Forest Gate. Reared by uncaring strangers, Nellie saw her mother one Sunday each year.2
1.1. Muriel, Doris, and Kingsley Lester were born in Gainsborough Lodge in Leytonstone. A comfortable upper-middle-class suburban villa, it sat in a large garden surrounded by fields and playgrounds, which included a full-scale toy boat. Gainsborough Lodge, c. 1964. (Courtesy of Vestry House Museum, London Borough of Waltham Forest.)
Stories like this one abound in Victorian culture. Their implicit argument is simple. Childhood is a phase of life marked by pleasure and play, innocence and imagination.3 It depends upon financial security and two loving parents, different but complementary in their tutelary roles. Children of the possessing classes get childhood; the poor in general and poor orphans in particular do not.
Muriel’s narration of her own childhood and Nellie’s reproduced many of these assumptions. It is almost impossible to peek behind the curtain of the Lester family domestic idyll to detect traces of struggle, conflict, and disappointment. By contrast, Nellie’s stolen childhood outrages Muriel, all the more because the heroine of Muriel’s tale is not Nellie but her devoted, ingenious, loving mother. Harriett Dowell, like Herman Melville’s mothership the Rachel in Moby Dick, goes on her “winding, woeful way” seeking to reclaim her lost children. By telling Nellie’s young life in “From Birth to Death” (1923) mostly through Harriet’s eyes, Muriel took a strong stance. Contrary to the dominant view of policy makers, Nellie did have a family prepared to love and nurture her. Rather than demonize working-class mothers and families, Muriel squarely blames the Poor Law for taking away Nellie’s childhood. What Muriel does not seem to question is the conviction that a Cockney half-orphan ward of the state could not, almost by definition, have a childhood.
Can a child not have a childhood? Are there many different kinds of childhoods? I approach these twinned questions by exploring Nellie’s and Muriel’s lives in two ways. I reconstruct their early lives and schooling in rich historical particularity. At the same time, I interpret their histories through the many competing ways in which Victorians told—and historians still do tell—stories about “childhood.”4
Muriel and Doris Lester wrote copiously about childhood and their own childhoods. Their stories, particularly about working-class childhood, come ready-made with an elaborate political, social, and cultural apparatus.5 What Nellie thought about growing up mostly remains a mystery. Her views echo faintly in Muriel’s stories. Following the few factual crumbs Muriel drops about Nellie’s earliest years, I have sought and often found her—or perhaps more aptly, her trace—in the vast archive the British state assembled and preserved as it monitored and provided services for the poorest of its poor citizens. Abject social problems they may well have been, but paupers like Nellie were never invisible in official state records. The Dowell family’s decennial census data provides addresses, which in turn allows educated guesses about the most likely School Board of London school she attended. School admission and discharge registers and log books provide more addresses, dates, and curricular and classroom information, which in turn make it possible to guess the Poor Law Union to which Mrs. Dowell most likely turned in her desperate need. Poor Law Unions match closely with Poor Law infirmaries and orphanages, which maintained their own careful records of admissions, discharges, and much else. My archival trajectory in reconstructing Nellie’s childhood follows the overlapping networks and logic of the Victorian educational and social welfare system through which she moved as her family’s fortunes declined.
THE EDUCATION OF NELLIE DOWELL
A “Very Comfortable” Cockney Childhood
Nellie lived her earliest years among small shopkeepers and skilled artisans with steady employment and good wages. Not poor enough to satisfy journalists’ insatiable hunger for spectacles of misery and depravity but not nearly rich enough to govern and guide, such people fit uneasily into broad narratives of modern British history, except perhaps to explain why the late-Victorian proletariat never fulfilled its revolutionary destiny.6 When the sociologist and social surveyor Charles Booth and his team of investigators sought to measure what remained of the religious life of London in the late 1890s, they all too often found its pulse weak. They did find plenty of “respectable” families like the Dowells hovering somewhere between the “lower middle class” and the “upper working class” “with no very wide divergence amongst them.”7 A doctor attended Harriet Dowell at the birth of her daughter Nellie; a nurse provided home help in its aftermath while a neighbor was paid to clean house and take care of Nellie’s three older siblings, Florence, Alice, and William. These were fortunate material circumstances, enjoyed by few East Londoners. Muriel emphasized that the Dowell children basked in their mother’s “generous common sense,” keen awareness of their health and nutritional needs, “unfailing kindliness,” and watchful love.8
“From Birth to Death” may be about Nellie, but Mrs. Dowell occupies its moral center. We see Nellie through her mother’s eyes. Mrs. Dowell’s mother love makes her home but cannot preserve it from misfortunes outside her control. Muriel’s opening line foreshadows the family’s decline by specifying the temporal limits of the Dowell family’s domestic happiness: “For the first few years of her life Nellie was very comfortable.”9 As Muriel’s narrative unfolds, the full implications of this sentence become clear. Nellie had a childhood before she lost it, or rather, before the Poor Law took it from her.
Public records—census data, marriage, and death certificates—amply support Muriel’s account. In 1871, Nellie’s father, William Dowell (1844–c.1881), a mariner from Sunderland, Durham, and his wife, Harriet (1846–1931), lived at 9 Granada Terrace, a cluster of seventeen attached houses running along the north side of Commercial Road, one of East London’s main commercial arteries.10 A sprawling public house, the George Tavern, wrapped around the residential dwellings on Granada Terrace. A large patent rope factory and the Roman Catholic chapel St. Mary and St. Michael’s, serving the needs of London’s growing Irish population, dominated the south side of Commercial Road.11 From 7:30 a.m. until 11:40 p.m. trams ran every five minutes in both directions along Commercial Road connecting Aldgate—in medieval times the gate marking the easternmost boundary of the walled city of London—to Poplar, the India Docks, and the world’s commerce.12 In the 1840s, Commerc
ial Road had been the notorious haunt of coal whippers who lifted the coal out of the hold of ships; by the time the Dowells moved to Granada Terrace, rambunctious and colorful sailors strolled its length from the docks to the heart of the city of London.13 “The keen east wind seems to bear a kind of briny flavour” along Commercial Road, observed the writer for Dickens’s All the Year Round in 1881, and “the men who swarm up to the roof of the tramway-car display a cat-like agility in the process, that suggests the habit of going up aloft.” Jammed with cheap clothing marts and big emporia, along with humbler shops catering to nautical clientele, Commercial Road was bordered by “narrow slums and labyrinths of courts and alleys.”14
William Dowell traveled a well-worn path from the maritime industry of his native Sunderland, a port town dominated by the coastal transportation of Newcastle coal, to London’s docklands with its global shipping network.15 He entered the merchant marine in April 1858 as a “boy,” his official rank on the Newcastle-based ship, the Courier. At some point during his time as an apprentice from 1859 to 1861, he apparently found either shipboard life intolerable or the attractions of Shanghai irresistible. He temporarily deserted his ship while docked there. It must have been a tense, exciting time to be a young Englishman wandering Shanghai during the final stages of the Second Opium War (1856–60) between Britain and China. William Dowell spent most of the 1860s making his own small contribution to the rapid expansion of Britain’s free trade empire in Asia as he regularly sailed between London, Calcutta, and Hong Kong. During these years, he ascended the ranks as assistant bursar, third mate, and second mate. In February 1868, he achieved the rank of first mate in the Merchant Service. By early 1870, he had married Harriet Sloan, moved to Commercial Road in Whitechapel and had their first child, Florence.16
A mariner’s life was full of dangers and Dowell suffered some sort of mishap aboard the S.S. Chanonry in the Gulf of Lyons in 1873 en route from Cardiff to Livorno (Leghorn). He seems to have escaped injury but his first-mate certificate did not survive and he applied for a new copy that year. It was an eventful voyage because newspapers reported that three seamen aboard the SS Chanonry had been infected with the “mania” for desertion and faced harsh punishment back in England.17 William Dowell must have had colorful stories to tell his wife and young children about the people he had encountered and the places he had seen. No doubt his prolonged absences forced Nellie’s mother to rely heavily on her own kin for help raising their five children. Mariners like William Dowell and their families were simultaneously enmeshed in vast global networks of trade as well as intensely local and insular communities of family, friends, and neighbors in East London.
William Dowell earned a very respectable living: first mates received approximately 120 shillings per month in the year 1880 according to average wages published in a House of Commons report.18 Harriet’s kin lived with them: her Irish-born Protestant mother, Harriet Sloan (called “Granny” in Nellie’s letters and sometimes spelled Sloane), and two younger siblings, Caroline (Aunt Carry/Carrie in the letters) and David. Caroline (1849–1936), a milliner, and David, a clerk, no doubt contributed a portion of their earnings to the household that allowed the Dowells to occupy the entire Granada Terrace house free from lodgers.
Privacy was a luxury in East London and the Dowells enjoyed more of it than most. The structure of households on Granada Terrace resembled that of the Dowells: multigenerational families whose heads were drawn from that borderland of lower-middle-class clerks and proprietors of small shops and skilled artisans. Several dwellings served as both home and place of business. William Anderson, a bachelor watchmaker and jeweller at No. 11, employed a shopman and an errand boy, both of whom lived with him.
By Nellie’s birth on April 17, 1876, the Dowell family had moved to Lucas Street, just off the south side of Commercial Road.19 A few years later, they migrated to Harding Street, a small side street two blocks further east along Commercial Road. Nellie’s family no longer lived with Harriet’s adult siblings and hence lost their financial contributions. Nellie’s Uncle David married in 1876 and began his own family; Aunt Caroline remained with her mother, Harriet Sloan, after Hugh Sloan’s death in 1869. Nellie’s family occupied the second floor of a house they shared with a picture frame gilder, his wife, and their two children on still-respectable Harding Street. Unlike those on Granada Terrace, most wives on Harding Street had paid occupations, which suggest that male heads of households did not earn enough to support their families. While the Dowell family fortunes seemed to decline as its numbers grew, Nellie’s mother still enjoyed the good fortune of staying home with her children rather than seeking wages in the labor market.20
We first glimpse Nellie as a young “child,” doubly refracted through Muriel’s retelling of Mrs. Dowell’s stories. “From Birth to Death” narrates Nellie as exceptional, different not only from her siblings but from neighborhood children. Mrs. Dowell’s other children played vigorous games in the surrounding streets. Nellie is too “highly strung, nervous and delicate” for such rough-and-tumble activities. She takes easily to her bed when frightened. She prefers to remain indoors and cut out paper dolls.21 Like her dolls, Nellie is finely wrought. Muriel’s narrative locates Nellie inside the home, the proper place for the cultivation of a girl. It also safely removes her from the unsupervised, contaminating dangers of the street. Few disputed that streets necessarily were the playgrounds of most poor children, including Nellie’s brother and sisters. Where else could they play given the tight quarters of large families crammed into two-or three-room flats, the lack of neighborhood parks in East London, and the absence of private gardens? It was impossible not to see that poor children were remarkably adept at transforming whatever they could find—old boxes, string, and sticks—into toys for their play.22 But the location of these activities disqualified them from performing what most bourgeois reformers took to be the ethical-moral-imaginative function of “play” in promoting the development of a child.
Nellie’s written fluency may well have reflected not only her preference for sedentary activities but also the importance of literacy for the occupational fortunes of her mother’s family, the Sloans. Her maternal grandfather, Hugh Augustus Macullough (sometimes spelled Maculloch) Sloan (1810–1869), alternately called himself a “seaman,” “mariner,” “surveyor of customs,” revenue or custom house officer in census, baptismal, and wedding records. His oldest son, Nellie’s uncle David (1851–1920) began as a clerk before laboring in a wine distillery and ending his working life as an engine driver. The youngest son, Archibald Henry (1858–1925), was an insurance agent by 1880—a job he pursued for the rest of his life.23 All three must have been quite literate and numerate. Nellie’s grandparents, Hugh and Harriet Sloan, employed a widowed live-in servant in 1851, the same year their children David and Caroline were baptized together at Christ Church, St. George’s in the East. Nellie’s paternal grandparents, by contrast, were among the illiterate unskilled poor of Yorkshire. Jane Dowell could not sign her name on her son’s birth certificate, and her husband James was a common laborer in 1851 who, by the 1861, census listed his occupation as “waterman.”24
Nellie’s native aptitude and the success of Britain’s system of universal elementary education (mandated by the 1870 Forster Education Act) in producing a broadly literate urban working class also must have contributed to her gift for expressing ideas in writing.25 On April 2, 1883, she was received into the infant room of her local London Board school, the Marner Street School.26 By that time, William Dowell’s death had already compelled his wife to move with her five children much farther east to a house on Gurley Street in Bromley-by-Bow, adjacent to Marner Street School.27 This was a dreary neighborhood of quiet desperate poverty, a “bleak district … of treeless streets and miles of small two-storied tenements. Here dwell the workers and the workless, who settle in tens of thousands on the skirts of London’s arterial thoroughfares.” Marner Street and the surrounding blocks were full of “those who
are about to leave it or those who have failed to leave it,” interspersed by a few of the “godly and self-respecting poor.”28
Two months later, Nellie’s younger sister Rose, age four, joined her at Marner Street School. The state originally had no intention of providing child care for the poor, but mothers like Mrs. Dowell simply brought underaged children like Rose with them and left them at school along with those old enough to enroll. In response, some schools created reception rooms to provide rudimentary care for pre–school-aged children.29 The Forster Education Act made schooling mandatory, but it was not free in its first decades. Marner Street School charged two pence per week for each child, unlike nearby schools on Northey Street and Old Castle Street, which served even more impoverished populations and charged the state minimum of one pence per week per child. Even these small sums surpassed the financial ability of parents like Harriet Dowell and the state offered grants to make up the difference.30
In the decade after the implementation of the 1870 Act, the enthusiasm of educational reformers, “deluded in their cloudland of hopes and theories,” had been tempered by Board school teachers’ “hourly contact with ugly, commonplace sordid facts and difficulties.”31 Under pressure of “codes and formulas,” Board schools shut out children from “dreamland and poetry,” lamented the art critic John Ruskin.32 Certainly, teachers faced a daunting task as they sought to discipline unruly pupils, satisfy regulations intended to standardize education, and cope with impoverished parents for whom schooling was sometimes less a matter of opportunity than unwanted compulsion.33 The staff at Marner Street also had to make the most of scarce resources distributed across 1100 pupils, roughly 350 boys, 350 girls, and 450 infants.
Ruskin’s dreary assessment did not go unchallenged. Mrs. Westlake, an early member of the School Board of London and former teacher, praised board schoolteachers for enlivening their curriculum with “object lessons” which went beyond rote work of learning the three “R’s” by encouraging children to use their senses to observe the world around them. Open to experimental pedagogy, London teachers stimulated their pupils’ bodies with newly introduced “Swedish drill” techniques overseen by a “Swedish lady” who was one of the first holders of a diploma in physical education. They awakened students’ curiosity about their place in the world through geography lessons that led their charges from knowledge of “their own immediate locality” to London, England, and beyond.34
