The Match Girl and the Heiress

by Seth Koven

  What is so striking about Toil and Trust is just how much it is not a bildungsroman. We follow Patty from youth to middle age, but she never grows, changes, and matures as a character because from the moment we first meet her there is nothing childlike about her. She does not play, laugh, get into mischief, act impulsively, or utter an unkind word. As Balfour’s narrator explains, Patty’s “sufferings and privations, had robbed her of her childhood, her present exertions, seemed to put away her girlhood.”88

  What did it mean to be “robbed” of childhood in nineteenth-century Britain and what were its consequences? The Victorians not only fetishized childhood as a time of innocence and purity but manufactured a vast commodity culture around it as well. Novels like Toil and Trust and the proliferation of periodicals for and about children such as Little Folks participated in the burgeoning print capitalist marketplace in childhood. (We know that Muriel read Little Folks because her first publication at age 9½ appeared on its “Our Little Folks’ Own Puzzles” page, a feature of each issue.)89 Children paradoxically became “priceless” treasures even as poor children’s exploitation in industrial capitalist workplaces intensified. Julia Luard explained to readers of the Englishwoman’s Review in 1868 that childhood was a time of “open candour and softness of a pure heart and innocent thoughts” sadly incompatible with the daily lives of most young servant girls. An anonymous contributor to the British Mother’s Magazine in 1845 stressed “the freedom of childhood from the cares and troubles of riper years.” Most concurred with the author of the saccharine “Home Without a Mother” that a “mother lost in childhood” meant the loss of childhood’s “pleasures.” “No mother weeps over the young Ishmaels in the wilderness of the great city,” intoned the Reverend James Wells, “these are children robbed of their childhood, whom care and want have made little men and women before they have been boys and girls.” Narratives such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, hugely popular in Britain, offered readers conspicuous examples of the institutionalized and systematic theft of childhood from slavery’s offspring. And when Britons turned their gaze eastward, they were appalled to discover that child marriage in India systematically robbed girls of childhood’s freedoms and delights by the age of eight.90 For such children, childhood was at best fragile and fleeting. Child labor, not childhood, came cheaply in Victorian Britain.

  The soft-spoken leader of the Conservative opposition, Sir Stafford Northcote, elaborated the dire consequences for those “robbed” of childhood in an 1881 speech supporting “Preventive Homes” rather than barrack schools for destitute children. His rhetoric is saturated with negations, absences, and lacks.91 The homes of all poor children, he lamented, possessed “none of the enjoyment, none of the playfulness, none of the cheerfulness … none of the innocent prattle” that defined a “real home.” This bad situation was only aggravated for those unfortunates whose parents had died or were too poor or too immoral to care for them. He asked his listeners to try to conceive “what a life must be out of which childhood had been taken?” Nothing, he insisted, could ever be done to heal such a wound: “no after advantages can make up for those lost years of childhood.”92

  The children of the poor were doubly disadvantaged in Northcote’s formulation. Robbed of childhood, they sustained an irreparable injury, which precluded full adult maturity. Within the deep structure of liberal political thought in Britain from John Locke onward, the educative function of childhood was vital to producing the morally autonomous adult who was capable of exercising the duties and privileges of citizenship. In yet another perverse twist in the developmental logic of childhood in nineteenth-century culture, those groups robbed of bourgeois childhoods—the poor at home and the “childlike” people of color in the empire—were often rhetorically characterized as permanently childlike in their moral and intellectual limitations. Because they were never truly children, they could not become mature adults and citizens in the political nation.

  Northcote made no attempt to reconcile his exaltation of parental love and the family home with his deep suspicion that poor parents could provide neither. It was precisely such views that emboldened so-called child rescuers from the 1860s onwards like Dr. Barnardo and Annie Macpherson to send some poor children to Canada as “apprentice” farm laborers without the consent of their parents. At such moments, “stolen childhoods” collided violently with poor parents’ indignant wrath about their “stolen children,” all the more so when the rescuers were Protestant and the children Catholic. Rescue and abduction could be and were two names for the same thing.93

  Muriel’s narration of Nellie’s childhood does not exactly make this argument. She does make clear that Nellie’s removal to Forest Gate ended her childhood, stripped Mrs. Dowell of her right to mother her children, and violated the very laws of nature by frustrating her maternal “instinct” to love and serve them. Muriel’s choice of the word “instinct” carried strong political connotations by 1923. Leading child welfare advocates like the eugenicist Caleb Saleeby had enshrined “maternal instinct” as the socio-biological foundation for maternalist arguments to expand social provision for poor mothers while returning them to their rightful places within the home.94 Muriel’s extensive revisions and cross-outs in “From Birth to Death” make visible her struggle to get right this crucial part of her story and argument.

  The burden of Her jealousy of the women who were paid to give a perfunctory care to her children and hundreds of others became positively painful never lessened became positively painful. She watched the attendants narrowly. It seemed monstrous to her that as they glanced round upon the occupants of the visiting room, their eyes never softened when they fell upon her children. The burden of her anguish grew heavier each year. There is no telling what Mrs Dowell suffered in those years.95

  We can be absolutely certain that she would not have harkened back to the words of the amiable civil service reformer Lord Northcote. Nonetheless, Northcote and Muriel Lester did share one passionate conviction: the education provided by schools like Forest Gate was inimical to the best interests of children and society because it offered neither love nor nurturance. Harriet Dowell acknowledged that Forest Gate cared for the outside of the Dowell children: it fed, clothed, and educated them. But Forest Gate actively discouraged the cultivation of its pupils’ spiritual depth and intellectual curiosity.

  Forest Gate’s endemic failures vexed Henrietta Barnett, the school’s most celebrated school manager during Nellie’s years there. Henrietta and her husband Reverend Samuel Barnett moved to Whitechapel in 1873 when Samuel became Vicar of St. Jude’s. To the dismay of their very poor parishioners, they promptly introduced principles of scientific charity, which eliminated “cash and kind” relief “outside” the doors of the workhouse. To the dismay of traditional Anglicans, they inaugurated an ambitious program of cultural philanthropy with free fine art exhibitions and founded Toynbee Hall university settlement on a nondenominational basis.96 A disciple of both Jane Nassau Senior and the housing reformer Octavia Hill, Henrietta played a leading role in schemes such as the Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants (MABYS) and the Children’s Country Holiday Fund.97 An outspoken and energetic manager of Forest Gate from 1876 to 1896, she abhorred housing poor children in institutions tainted by association with the Poor Law and pauperism. Committed to a program of “practicable socialism,” she accepted the burden and challenge of reforming the barrack school system from within while criticizing its philosophical underpinnings. In her unpublished autobiographical memoir, Barnett took credit for implementing several of Nassau Senior’s proposed reforms at Forest Gate during Nellie’s time there. She founded a lending library for the school; she organized games and seaside excursions to expose the children to the joys of the world outside Forest Gate and stimulate their imaginations. It marked a considerable triumph in asserting the individual humanity of each child, Barnett believed, when she convinced the inaptly named head matron, Miss Perfect, to address each girl by her Christian name
rather than the generic “child.”98

  1.5. Forest Gate School was an immense and imposing institution. The top image underscores it as a well-ordered institution and source of civic pride as men and women promenade on the pathway in front of it. The lower two images highlight the horrific losses caused by the New Year’s Eve fire by showing the interiors of the dormitories where “the Children were Suffocated.” “Fire at Forest Gate,” Illustrated London News, January 11, 1890, 56.

  Barnett’s pleadings had no impact on the broader policies governing barrack school education until disaster struck Forest Gate a year after Nellie’s departure. On December 31, 1889, a fire killed twenty-six children in a ward that had been improperly locked shut. The local press condemned mismanagement but ultimately the staff was cleared of any formal charges of negligence. (See fig. 1.5.)

  Four years later, Forest Gate once again grabbed headlines and inspired the indignant wrath of East Londoners when several children died of food poisoning. Barnett used these tragedies to mobilize support for and serve on the Departmental Committee on Poor Law Schools (1894–96) chaired by Anthony Mundella. The Committee’s well-publicized and controversial findings—based on fifty sessions over two years—reflected Barnett’s deep frustration with the impersonality of the school she managed, which lacked utterly the domesticating touch of a mother.99 The Committee heard over seventy witnesses—Poor Law officials, leaders of child welfare organizations as well as superintendents, matrons and managers of residential schools like Forest Gate. Unlike dozens of similar parliamentary commissions about the lives and labors of the poor from the 1830s onwards, those most affected by the proposed reforms literally had no say in the proceedings. Not a single parent or former inmate of a Poor Law school was called to testify, though witnesses like Maria Poole, longtime secretary of MABYS, spent hours anatomizing their “special failings.” Poole produced an ersatz ethnographic guide to London’s barrack schoolgirls, all too reminiscent of colonial typologies linking geography, race, and native “character.” Poplar girls like Nellie were “dirty, untruthful, frequently dishonest and fond of change,” Poole informed the Mundella Committee; St. Pancras girls, by contrast, displayed “restlessness, desire for freedom, and fear to be alone at night.” If these girls possessed special virtues, Poole passed over them in silence.100 (See fig. 1.6.)

  The Mundella report marked the triumph of bourgeois expertise over working-class experience. Only one member of the Mundella Committee—the conservative educationist Sir John Gorst—seemed to grasp the illogical cruelty of exalting the family as the cradle of citizenship while refusing to provide resources for loving and able mothers like Harriett Dowell to raise their own children. “Do you think,” he asked with considerable pique, “that the treatment of these widows by the State is just? I mean, do you approve of the system by which a widow woman with a large family is made to work day and night, with the impossibility of earning enough to feed and clothe” her children?101 The Committee refused to consider paying poor widows to raise their own children for fear of pauperizing them and depressing women’s already-low wages. The Report called for a root-and-branch overhaul in the education and care of Poor Law children by boarding them with families or establishing small-scale residential units, cottage homes clustered into villages, each with its resident matron.102 Newspapers as far away as New Zealand joined the chorus of critics who condemned the “disgraceful state of affairs” laid bare by the Mundella report.103

  1.6. Controversial for its harsh condemnation of large impersonal schools like Forest Gate, the so-called Mundella Report was filled with condescending testimony from expert witnesses like Miss Maria Poole from the Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants. This redrawn chart is based on the chart included in Maria Poole’s testimony, December 5, 1894, Report of the Metropolitan Poor Law Schools Committee, Minutes of Evidence, vol. 2 (London, 1896), 150.

  One of the Barnetts’ longtime associates at Toynbee Hall, Henry Woodd Nevinson, was an acerbic critic of pauper boarding schools like Forest Gate. His refusal to be bound by bourgeois proprieties in his heterodox private life was matched by his intolerance for injustice: from the mistreatment of London Poor Law orphans to the plight of “slaves” in Portuguese Angola.104 His 1896 socio-fiction, “Scenes in a Barrack School,” reflected his knowledge of the Forest Gate tragedies as well as public policy debates about barrack schools. He narrated the swift cruel descent into poverty of Mrs. Reeve, a respectable East London mother and her four children after the death of her cabinetmaker husband. Like Lester’s “From Birth to Death,” “Scenes” told the story of the barrack school from the perspective of a poor mother and her children. As hunger and destitution approach, Mrs. Reeves struggles, as we know Harriet Dowell did, to decide which of her children to keep and which to hand over to Poor Law officials. Like Mrs. Dowell, she tries to diminish the psychological violence of her involuntary choice by focusing on the material security the barrack school promises her children (metal-spring beds, ample food, schooling, the latest hygienic fixtures for bathing and ventilation). Like Lester, Nevinson emphasized the unthinking cruelty of Poor Law officials and staff for whom family tragedies were the invisible backdrop to the mechanical performance of their day-to-day routines. The story ends with Nevinson’s assessment of the dreary devastation caused by the school. Mrs. Reeve’s son emerges as a “machine-made” man condemned to push an oil truck on the Isle of Dogs; his sister, inept at domestic service, may eventually yield to the insatiable global demand for “pretty girls” like her. Nevinson’s conclusions are all the more disturbing because he eschews sensation, moralizing, and melodrama in favor of closely observed detail and irony.105

  Given the increasingly public character of Barnett’s condemnation of Forest Gate, she resigned as school manager in 1896. Two fiery East London Labour leaders, George Lansbury and Will Crooks, immediately joined the Management Committee.106 Their arrival marked a revolution in the school’s history, one in which local working-class residents rather than bourgeois social reformers and shopkeepers assumed leadership. Lansbury continued to serve as a manager of Forest Gate for the next three decades. By the time Muriel, Doris, and Nellie established the first Kingsley Hall in 1915, Lansbury was their most vocal and powerful ally in East London. Dowell and Lansbury must have swapped stories about Forest Gate School.

  Frustrated by a system she could not transform from within, Henrietta Barnett devised a system to make up for some of Forest Gate School’s egregious failings. She purchased Harrow Cottage, facing the White Stone Pond on Hampstead Heath, where she installed Mrs. Moore, the beloved nurse who had reared her—along with three hand-picked fourteen-year-old girls from Forest Gate School. Each Forest Gate girl stayed at Harrow Cottage for three months (to be replaced by another) to receive training in domestic service along with the love and personal attention of Henrietta and her staff.107 It was from among these girls that Henrietta recruited servants for Toynbee Hall, the world-renowned outpost of social investigation and welfare that she and Samuel established in Whitechapel in 1884. These servant girls formed a direct bridge between her Poor Law and settlement house work. According to the superintendent’s logbook, Mrs. Barnett selected Nellie’s older sister Alice to join several other Forest Gate girls at Harrow Cottage on September 12, 1887.108 Given Henrietta’s close relationship with Forest Gate, her deep knowledge of case work methodology from her days as a member of the Charity Organisation Society, and her care in selecting appropriate girls to train at Harrow Cottage, she must have known Alice, Nellie and their family history rather well. Nor was this the first time that the Barnetts’ and the Dowells’ lives had intersected. Samuel Barnett had officiated at the wedding of Nellie’s uncle, Archibald Henry Sloan, on Christmas day 1880.109

  Henrietta Barnett’s ambivalent relationship to Forest Gate School as its leading manager and most outspoken critic captures well just how deeply divided Victorians were about working-class childhood, the state’s duties toward poor chil
dren and its execution of them. When we view publicly funded institutions like Marner Street School and Forest Gate from the inside—from the perspective of teachers, administrators, school managers and staff—we find ample evidence of devotion, creativity, good intentions, and even some laudable results. As much as Harriet Dowell despised the child welfare system that compelled her to give up her children, she acknowledged that it did provide better material conditions for them than she could. But even those who worked inside these institutions felt constrained by a system that favored efficiency and economies of scale above individuality and initiative. Everyone seemed to concur that it was a great misfortune that so many poor children were “robbed” of their childhoods through no fault of their own. For most, such lost childhoods were unavoidable and acceptable casualties. Better for poor children to lose their childhood than to demoralize their parents and bankrupt ratepayers by providing sufficient “outdoor relief” (cash payments) for mothers like Harriet Dowell to retain custody of their children.

  Did Nellie Dowell have a childhood or was she, like the fictional workhouse girl Patty, “robbed” of her childhood? For men and women like Sir Stafford Northcote, the answer seems clear. Nellie did not have a childhood because she did not grow up surrounded by the love of her parents. Those associated with Forest Gate offer a more complicated answer. Henrietta Barnett came to repudiate its impersonality and the lack of family-like relationships among staff and children, which she believed cheated children of childhood. The staff at Forest Gate and in the educational bureaucracy seemed well aware of the school’s deficiencies. What is most notable is the extent to which they sought to give children the sorts of pleasures associated with prevailing bourgeois ideas about “childhood” as a time of innocence and play. Forest Gate provided its charges with what might best be called a “Poor Law childhood”—one marked by routines at odds with the cultivation of individuality. Institutions like Forest Gate sought to equip their pupils with low-level occupational skills. Officials’ careful tracking of students’ working lives reveals a great deal about Poor Law childhood: they measured success by the extent to which their former charges supported themselves without resort to poor relief.