by Seth Koven
For Muriel, working-class children did, can, and should have childhoods. Nellie’s early life before her father’s death demonstrated this to her. Mrs. Dowell cultivated Nellie’s intellect and nurtured her individuality. The problem, from Muriel’s perspective, is that all too often poor children did not have childhoods. Muriel implicitly argues that the proper role of the state and voluntary charities is to support, rather than sever, the bonds connecting family members. The state violates, rather than protects, its most vulnerable wards. In Muriel’s telling of Nellie’s life, the outrage to Nellie’s person betokened by her shorn curls is merely the outward sign of the systemic outrage against the intellectual, moral, spiritual, and social life of the poor. The apparatus of the state, Muriel insists, serves its own deformed imperative by seeking to make working-class children into docile laborers and patriotic foot soldiers for its imperial wars. The state ought to be the guarantor of childhood for all. What exactly does this mean? Muriel’s ideas about the sort of childhood girls like Nellie deserved were shaped by how she understood her own childhood. The figure of the slum child haunted middle-class childhood as both its abject outside—everything it was not—and as the object of bourgeois children’s benevolent attentions.
THE APPRENTICESHIP OF MURIEL LESTER
Muriel Lester was an expert at telling her life story. No matter what the topic—poverty in East London, economic imperialism and global peace, the struggle for Indian independence, drug traffic in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, Christ’s message of universal love, women’s rights and wrongs—Muriel’s own story leaked into what she said and wrote. This was not a case of rampant narcissism. Her autobiographical impulse had deep roots within the genre of British Protestant spiritual autobiography, which charted the individual Christian’s perilous earthly journey to grace. Nineteenth-century Christian philanthropists invariably used life writing to demonstrate not only their path to God but the means by which they discovered their vocation serving the outcast and downtrodden. The fin-de-siècle French sociologist Émile Durkheim imagined a homo-duplex who struggled to reconcile the insatiable egoistic desires of the individual self with the regulative claims of the altruistic social self. Christian do-gooders, including Muriel, resolved this tension by producing narratives in which the making of the “ethical” self hinged upon caring for others.110
Childhood played a crucial part in the process of forging—and narrating the formation of—ethical subjects. It was the period in the individual’s development that provided the foundation for “proper” moral, intellectual, and spiritual adulthood. When Victorians decried the stolen childhoods of the poor, they also surreptitiously smuggled in justification for excluding the poor from the full rights and privileges of citizenship. Muriel understood this only too well. In her many versions of her childhood, she stressed moments that anticipated and propelled her toward her calling as a pacifist, feminist, Christian revolutionary. She entitled a draft chapter of her first published autobiography, “A nineteenth century child”—suggesting that her story was both her own as well as the story of nineteenth-century childhood itself. Because she devoted her life to educating poor children, Doris Lester was even more keenly aware than Muriel of how her own childhood related to “childhood” writ large as well as to the lives of poor children such as Nellie Dowell, who shadowed—or perhaps more aptly illuminated—Muriel and Doris Lester’s prolific writings about childhood and their shared lives as children.
Waifs and Dolls, Sisters and Servants
It would be hard to imagine a more congenial late-Victorian childhood than that of Muriel Lester. By her birth in December 1883, her father, Henry Lester, had long since recovered from a crushing financial debacle in the 1850s as well as the loss of his first two wives in childbirth. He had happily married Muriel’s mother, Rachel Goodwin, a widow twenty years his junior. Together they formed what Muriel called a “conglomeration” of families with nine children. Eight of them “owned” father; six “owned” mother; Gertrude, Kathleen, Muriel, Doris, and Kingsley “owned” both parents. We know nothing about how their parents and four oldest siblings coped with grief over their lost spouses and parents. Nor did Muriel and Doris offer even the slightest hint that the Lesters may have faced challenges combining different families into one. No lady visitor came into their home to evaluate their manners, morals, or fitness to care for their children. In It Occurred to Me (1937), Muriel conspicuously refused to take up literary modernists’ program of anatomizing the hypocrisies, secrets, and subtle psychic terrors of family life.111 What is clear is that Muriel, Doris, and Kingsley forged an inseparable trio, a kind of nuclear family within their larger family. Apparently several of their siblings impinged so little on their carefree lives that they remain unnamed in Muriel and Doris’s autobiographies.
Their father, Henry Lester, was a self-made man. While he never bragged about his achievements or made a show of his wealth, he readily acknowledged his humble origins. He knew that he owed his wealth to his employees’ hard labor and tried to repay them as best he could. “Father never for an instant forgot and never let us forget the lot of the Victorian poor,” Muriel recalled. One of eleven children of an East London carpenter, Henry made his fortune as a shipwright in the dockland economy. He secured several patents and his firm, Perkins and Lester, flourished in the 1860s. By the 1880s, his years of financial worry and striving were behind him. He had secured all the trappings of an affluent, civic-minded Christian gentleman. He was now a wealthy shipbuilder, prominent member of his Baptist church, and elected member of West Ham’s first school board. For Henry Lester, benevolence marked, but did not cloak, his social ascent. A figure of local significance, he chaired the West Ham school board in 1892 and served as President of the Essex Baptist Union. He was part of a steady migration of Cockneys-made-good who built spacious homes in Essex, to the east of East London.112 Muriel spent her childhood at Gainsborough Lodge in Leytonstone, a prosperous leafy suburb peopled by substantial businessmen and managers of rising fortunes with social aspirations. The Lesters’ neighbors included a corn merchant, newspaper proprietor, surgeon, news advertising contractor, and confectionary manufacturer. Several, like Henry, grew up in poor neighborhoods such as St. George’s in the East and Spitalfields.113
The Lester household combined high spirits with strong moral convictions about godliness and benevolence. Religion and play were woven tightly into the fabric of day-to-day life. Reading a chapter of the Bible before going to sleep each night was as natural as brushing hair and teeth. So too vigorous games and prayer—both in private and as a family—were simply part of the “day’s pattern.” The Lesters maintained three different charity boxes in their home into which they—along with friends and visitors—were expected to place small-denomination coins each week. Muriel had charge of foreign missions; Kingsley, the book-shaped Bible Society box; and Doris, one for the local poor. These three boxes capture perfectly the domestic and global ambitions of the late-Victorian Nonconformist conscience with its elaborate missionary machinery serving the poor at home and heathens abroad. Undoubtedly, Doris also mentioned these details because they foreshadowed her own and her siblings’ future interests. Kingsley would become a clergyman, Muriel would make the world her parish, and Doris would remain deeply attached to the people of Bow as founder and head of her experimental nursery school, Children’s House.114
Sundays were “red letter days” in the Lester household, full of rituals that celebrated godliness and domestic joys. Their mother Rachel brightened the Sabbath by purchasing chocolates for Henry to distribute to each child. Before eating their ample Sunday roast, Henry insisted that the children bring the first plate of food, hot from the table, to the crossing sweeper stationed nearby. This was a more personal kind of charity than asking the cook or scullery maid to distribute scraps of leftovers to the local poor, but it still was unmistakably old-fashioned noblesse oblige. While Muriel and Doris generally enjoyed the children’s sermons delivered by the pastor of
Fillebrooke Chapel, Muriel makes clear that she was no spiritual prodigy. She gratefully recalled that her mother allowed the younger children to daydream and play silent games during the interminable adult sermon. Every Sunday, each member of the family selected a line from Scripture, duly entered into a beautiful leather-bound family writing album, and shared a few thoughts about it.115 (See fig. 1.7.)
1.7. Muriel’s first entry into the Lester Family writing album was “Looking Unto Jesus.” Servants shared Sunday morning family prayers with the Lesters but never entered their names or Bible passages into the album. Lester Family Writing Album. (Courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute.)
In an undated vignette that Muriel scribbled into a red leather diary decades after Henry Lester’s death, she recalled that “every morning of the week after 7:30 breakfast the servants would be summoned by a whistle down the tube to the basement and we would all sit quiet while Father read from the Bible. Then we knelt while he gave a short prayer in his own words and we all joined in the ‘Our Father.’ ”116 Muriel betrays no disapproving irony at the many possible meanings of “Our Father” in the context of a ritual that so powerfully affirmed Henry Lester’s patriarchal authority. She narrates a scene of Christian unity and household solidarity that inscribes servants as integral to, but also apart from, the family. Called to ascend from below stairs to join the family in prayer, none entered a Scripture line in the family writing album. This was a privilege reserved exclusively for family and visiting friends. Hierarchy went hand in hand with intimacy in well-to-do households like the Lesters’. Muriel’s refusal to criticize her father’s class-and gender-based performance as Christian paterfamilias—even long after his death—was a measure of her love and devotion to him. It also required her to set aside the feminist, Christian egalitarian and socialist principles upon which she had based her own life’s work.
Henry Lester could not abide by the angry, punishing God of sin and salvation of his devout father who had held Henry’s finger above a flame to feel the hellish torments awaiting sinners. Nor did he hew to the narrow sectarianism that divided many Nonconformists from one another. Although Baptists, the Lesters also worshipped at Congregationalist and Methodist chapels and even felt comfortable in the Church of England. No one Protestant denomination had a monopoly on God and godliness. Closely engaged in rearing his youngest children, Henry invented games like “Bible Arithmetic” to hone their knowledge of the Bible.117 Best of all, Henry fostered his children’s love of God by stimulating their imaginations through his weekly “dream” stories in which he and they became characters in Bible stories. In this way, the Bible was much less a record of a distant past than a deeply meaningful story that continued to unfold in the present. God’s love was a real presence in their daily lives.118
God had plenty of company in the Lester nursery over which their beloved nurse, “Tannie” presided. (Fannie Lilley was her actual name.)119 Waifs and dolls figured importantly in Muriel and Doris’s roseate stories of their nursery world of play and imagination, freedom, and Christian duty. Just Children, Doris’s privately published set of essays on childhood, explicitly connects these two preoccupations with one another and with her work with poor children in Bow in the first decades of the twentieth century. Just Children starts with chapters about “east end youngsters” and concludes with Doris’s memories of her own childhood. In her pedagogical politics, all children play, act, think, and make decisions for themselves. There is a subtle note of self-congratulation in her opening vignette: her work as a nursery school educator ensures that no children are “robbed” of their childhood. Just Children begins with Bill, “hurtling down the street” toward the big green door of Children’s House “with his home-made chariot, an orange box with one creaky wheel and a piece of wood for a pusher;” we watch a “group of little girls … undressing, bathing and putting to bed a large unbreakable doll” in Doris’s Montessori-inspired nursery school. Doris lightheartedly claimed that she had begun to collect her own “international family” of children long before she opened her nursery school in the cramped back garden of 58–60 Bow Road. Her most beloved “child” was Cosy, a limbless “flat-faced” “plain” Dutch doll who was “part of my very life” and from whom Doris could not bear to be separated.120
Muriel’s relationship with her favorite doll, the beautiful Iris Riversmere, was no less engrossing and psychologically complex. Fearful that her admiration for Iris, “my beloved companion of the rich brown curls, big eyes, and ever-placid face,” had turned into idolatry, a panicked Muriel once literally “knocked” Iris down from her “exalted position” perched on her knees. Doris, in a slyly surreptitious commentary about her sister’s lordly demeanor, observed that while Cosy, was “very ordinary,” Iris was the daughter of rather grand aristocrats. (Apparently, Iris even enjoyed the comforts of a handmade, inlaid mahogany bed.)121 This was clearly a case of “our dolls, ourselves.” Throughout their life-long loving partnership as sisters and fellow workers, Doris saw herself as the “plain” and “ordinary” toiler in the shadow of her commanding older sister. Bow people who remembered the sisters frequently echoed this comparison.
Doris’s passion for Cosy matched the intensity of her fascination for poor children. Imagination and empathy mingle in her recounting of the literary origins of her awakening to the suffering of waifs, which she attributed to discovering Little Orphans among their nursery books. The physical appearance of the orphaned protagonists echoes Doris’s descriptions of Cosy and Iris, herself and Muriel.
[T]he story was of plain Ann, the ordinary orphan, and Ermintrude, the bewitchingly attractive one. Suddenly I awoke to realize there were lots of Anns and Ermintrudes in the world. So I started a pretend boarding school of my own. I invented the children, I chose their names, their ages, their appearances, I clothed them and planned their rooms. Each had her own room decorated in a special colour. I not only housed and fed them, but I educated them also; the only feature of the scheme that I remember is that all prizes were books bound in rich leather to match the colour scheme of the individual room.122
Doris’s “imagined orphans” enjoy the privileges of daughters of the well-to-do professional classes. They get sent to a nice boarding school—not Forest Gate School—where each enjoys a room and a color of her own. She rewards their achievements—much as girls like Muriel and Doris were rewarded—with leather-bound prize books.
Late-Victorian school mistresses regularly presented the novels and poems of didactic children’s writer Elizabeth Anna Hart as prize books because they so often and so directly addressed the obligations of middle-class girls to their less fortunate sisters. Hart’s novel Clare Linton’s Friend (first serialized in 1884) offers an exemplary guide to the social and moral education of late-Victorian middle-class girls. Books just like it lined the shelves of the Lesters’ nursery library. The copy that I own was given to Alice Jackson, a pupil at Christ Church Girls’ School in February 1905 in recognition of her “diligence and proficiency.” (See fig. 1.8.)
If Balfour’s Toil and Trust taught poor girls their proper place in the world, Clare Linton’s Friend, originally serialized in Little Folks, instructed middle-class girls how to feel, think, and act toward their downtrodden sisters. Pampered but kind Clare stumbles over orphaned Polly on her snow-covered doorstep and insists on sheltering her for the night. Clare instantly attaches herself to Polly as her benevolent rescuer and petulant owner. Her aggressive affection mimics girls’ intense relationships with their dolls as sisters and servants. “ ‘Papa,’ ” she cried, ‘Hester [the maid] has locked my Polly up, and won’t give me the key …’ ‘Your Polly, Clare! Who gave her to you, I wonder?’ ”123
Indeed: who “gave” girl waifs and orphans to fictional little girls like Clare Linton and her flesh-and-blood counterparts is the question raised and answered by the novel. We know that poor mothers like Harriet Dowell did not voluntarily give away children to become girl waifs for bourgeois children. One answer is that writ
ers like Mrs. Hart did so repeatedly in short stories, novels, poems, and essays published in children’s magazines. Take, for example, “A Child’s Thought” (1868), one of Hart’s popular poems written twenty-five years before Clare Linton’s Friend. Identification between the bourgeois child narrator and “little beggar children, with your little ragged dresses” quickly turns into an occasion for refining the child narrator’s own moral sensibilities and differentiating her happiness from their misery. The “child” ponders everything beggar children presumably lack: “joys,” “caresses,” “homes,” and “kisses.” The vagrant “wanderings” of the beggar children prompt a round of questions about whether “love makes bright your homes at night, your misery to soften; and do you ever, ever play, you helpless little creatures … and have you any teachers?” Posed as questions, we never doubt that the answer to each is a sad resounding “no.”
