The Match Girl and the Heiress

by Seth Koven

  Muriel’s autobiographical writing offered no commentary on the heated debates surrounding the virtues and vices of her own education. She extolled St. Leonard’s for nurturing her gifts as a thinker and leader. Her formidable housemistress of Bishopshall West, the aristocratic Alice de Natorp, taught piano to her girls—one of Muriel’s many accomplishments—and nightly read aloud novels by the nineteenth-century’s leading women writers: Austen, Gaskell, and Eliot. This was a curriculum designed to encourage girls to ask questions, seek answers for themselves, and lead. On her own, Muriel found time to explore the biographies of two great religious figures, both masters of self-abnegation and spiritual purity: she read the hugely controversial Protestant recasting of St. Francis’s story, Paul Sabatier’s Life of St Francis of Assisi (1893) and Edwin Arnold’s poetic rendering of the life of Buddha in Light of Asia (1879). Muriel flourished at St. Leonard’s. A proficient athlete, she was head girl of Bishopshall West in her final year and her housemistress would remain a generous supporter of the Lesters’ work in Bow in the years ahead.

  Doris’s experience at St. Leonard’s could not have been more different. She always felt academically and socially out of her depth and burdened by her teachers’ expectation that she would be Muriel’s equal. Attuned to the new psychological vocabulary of the interwar period, she retrospectively diagnosed herself as suffering from an “inferiority complex,” the term made famous by Austrian psychoanalyst Alfred Adler. Muriel did little to assuage Doris’s self-doubt, perhaps because she was not all that eager to share St. Leonard’s with her. In It Occurred to Me, she never mentioned how, when, or why Doris joined her at school. Near the end of Muriel’s chapter on her school days, Doris simply appears out of nowhere as Muriel’s companion.157 Doris’s unpublished autobiography and Muriel’s diary fill in the gaps. According to Doris, a place opened unexpectedly at St. Leonard’s in midyear and her parents, without much forethought and consultation, trundled her off to Scotland. Muriel noted Doris’s arrival in a very short diary entry: “Dor is here with me. pip pip.” A short time later, she reflected on her relationship with her younger sister. No doubt signaling heightened anxiety and guilt, Muriel marked these entries in bold capitals, “PRIVATE.” “I feel I have a huge field to work in,” she opined. “Think of Dor instead of behaving like an absolute dog to Dor as I did yesterday. (I mean in grumpiness).” Doris was the one of many “huge fields” in which Muriel chose to direct her missionary zeal; she was also the first person who required Muriel to reckon with the complexities of negotiating a reciprocal but unequal relationship. Muriel resolved that the sisters should “form each others characters,” and assigned Dor the job of ridding Muriel of her “surliness” and her selfish pursuit of popularity.158

  When Muriel graduated from St. Leonard’s, she returned home to the Grange with no certain plan about her future. She and her parents decided against the Cambridge women’s college, Girton, though she had passed the entrance examination. A lively, highly educated and attractive young woman from a well-to-do family, she immersed herself in the conventional rituals of day-to-day bourgeois sociability: lawn tennis and teas, parties and foreign travel. The unstated goal of all these activities was to meet and marry an appropriate young man with good prospects and family. What is most remarkable about Muriel’s account of this brief period in her life is that apparently no one thought it strange that neither she nor Doris exhibited interest in opposite-sex courtship and romance.159 In a cryptic diary entry on New Year’s Day 1905, Muriel confided her fear for the time when K (presumably her brother Kingsley) “may imagine himself in love. I mt. prevent it, by never imagining myself.” Nor did any one appear to question Muriel and Doris’s refusal to perform what should have been the paramount task before them: finding a husband. Rachel and Henry Lester put no pressure on their youngest daughters to conform to social expectations about love and marriage. Their older children, married with their own children, had already done the work of reproducing Lester family life.

  CONCLUSIONS: THE CHALLENGES OF UNLEARNING

  Clara Balfour rightly observed that it was a “great mistake” to assume that schools and schoolmasters monopolized the education of children. “Every place is a school where we learn anything, and every person is a schoolmaster or mistress who teaches us anything.”160 Perhaps the hardest challenge that Muriel Lester and Nellie Dowell faced was unlearning the lessons of and about childhood that so many different teachers—including those who wrote poems and novels, delivered sermons, and produced visual images—had taught them. These teachers urged girls like Muriel to befriend orphans and waifs while expecting poor children like Nellie to express gratitude and deference to their betters. Such lessons constitute one of the deep structures of thought and feeling that eventually brought Muriel and Nellie together. In this respect, the fictional relationship between Clare Linton and Polly, who lost her last name along with her mother, father, and grandmother, is exemplary. When Clare asks her benevolent banker father if Polly can accompany her to “learn lessons,” he replies “Certainly not, Clare.” “Instead of yes, I say No, most emphatically.” Polly’s proper schoolroom that day is the kitchen where Papa sends her to keep warm. Nor does Polly aspire to Clare’s tuition. She longs for altogether different kinds of lessons. Mrs. Hart puts words into her mouth calculated to gratify the deepest wishes of middle-class readers: “ ‘May they teach me to be a servant, please, sir? … I want to learn to be a servant that I may serve little Miss Clare, sir.’ ”161 My point here is not that poor girls from the slums of London actually said such words, but that well-to-do girls like Muriel were taught to hope and expect that they would. And Nellie was taught to think and say them.

  In all sorts of ways, Muriel enjoyed a heterodox education. It equipped her with potent resources to use as she pondered works like Clare Linton’s Friend, which consolidated prevailing understandings of class and gender, power and poverty. Not only was she trained to question, critique, and lead, she also read compelling works of literature and Christian thought that acted like solvents upon the cultural, social, and economic foundations of late-industrial capitalism. Muriel’s self-directed curriculum at the turn of the century included Olive Schreiner’s Dreams (1888) with its impassioned analysis of the sins committed by well-intentioned “ladies” whose spotless purity depended upon the existence of an impure class of prostitutes. Schreiner’s Dreams, Muriel later remarked, had awakened thousands like her to feel “shame rather than pride in possession of riches.”162 According to Schreiner, it was not enough for the altruistic bourgeois narrator of the tenth “dream”—“I Thought I Stood”—to sympathize with her fallen sister. She can only claim genuine moral authority and receive spiritual grace after she lies down in the filthy streets and rises up mud-spattered with the abstracted character Woman. Schreiner calls for a transformation of sympathy, predicated on class distance, into a new and deeper form of identification in which all women join together in the messy struggle against the gender and class formations that produce prostitutes and prostitution. Such an approach to cross-class sisterhood anticipated Muriel’s later embrace of the practice of identifying with the dispossessed, to which Rosa Waugh introduced her when Rosa joined May Hughes as Kingsley Hall’s first two residents in 1915.163

  Nellie always faced a much-harder challenge than Muriel. Her experiences at Forest Gate drilled into her the necessity of deference and hard work, while teaching her that remaining free from the Poor Law was the single most important thing she could do. She knew only too well the human costs of becoming a dependent pauper ward of the state. For the next twenty years of her life, Nellie had to find a way to secure her financial independence and help support her mother while mustering the wherewithal to critique the social, economic, political, and gender formations upon which her day-to-day life was built. This proved to be a formidable—and ultimately, unfinished—task in her life. If she retained the rebellious streak of the little girl who initially bucked Forest Gate’s regulations, she
also became a woman highly adept at accommodating existing power relations to preserve her independence under difficult circumstances.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Capitalism, from Below and Down Under

  THE GLOBAL TRAFFIC IN MATCHES AND MATCH GIRLS

  ALICE AND NELLIE DOWELL DID NOT—could not—resume the childhoods they had so abruptly and involuntarily left behind five years earlier when they had been dispatched to Forest Gate School on the easternmost outskirts of the metropolis. By the time she left Forest Gate in November 1888, Nellie had spent nearly half her life as a Poor Law ward of the state. Not yet adults but no longer children, the Dowell sisters promptly joined the paid workforce. Alice (identified as “A.D.”), “a dear little girl” according to the benevolent lady assigned to look out for her, entered the vast army of female domestics, never to marry or live with her own family.1 Fair-haired little Nellie followed an altogether different path. Too independent for service, she returned to her devoted mother Harriet Dowell and a dense network of kin in Bromley-by-Bow, including her maternal grandmother and aunt, Harriet Sloan and Caroline Sloan, and her sisters, Rose and Florence. Nellie and her mother took jobs nearby in the lucifer match and wax vesta industry, one of the largest employers of female labor in London. Nellie Dowell, the Poor Law half-orphan, had turned into yet another troubling incarnation of the “social problem”: a poor little match girl.

  A.D. (Poplar), age in 1888—15; time in School, 4 ½ years. Report—Very satisfactory. Particulars—Sent to service from Mrs. Barnett’s Cottage Home. A dear little girl.

  Match girls mattered to the Victorians. Hans Christian Andersen’s popular short morality tale, “The Little Match Girl” (1847), marks the starting point of her career as an iconic figure of urban life and endangered girlhood. The Victorians asked the match girl to perform weighty cultural work for them as she moved across literary genres and cultural venues. Labor conflicts in the match industry in the late 1880s transformed who a match girl was and what she meant. In early July 1888, factory workers at Britain’s largest match manufacturer, Bryant and May’s in Bow, launched a strike that changed the course of modern British labor history by showing that “unskilled” women workers could discipline themselves into an effective trade union.2 Nellie and her mother did not participate in the Bryant and May strike, but it radicalized their neighborhood.3 Bow became a choice destination for philanthropic do-gooders like Muriel Lester, eager to befriend the notoriously rough match factory girls. Overnight, match girls like Nellie turned into the darlings of “new journalists” seeking copy for stories about East London life and labor.4

  Nellie worked for Bryant and May’s chief competitor, R. Bell and Company. Britain’s oldest match manufacturer, R. Bell was soon to be embroiled in its own acrimonious strike in 1893–94. The Bell’s strike, along with massive restructuring of the global match industry, prompted Nellie’s employers to seek new markets and manufacturing sites in Britain’s antipodean empire. R. Bell and Co. sent Nellie to its factories in New Zealand and later to Sweden. Nellie remained a minuscule, proletarian cog in the firm’s global workforce, but her travels also made her into a Cockney cosmopolitan. Her arrival as an unwelcome “London girl” in Wellington precipitated a major political crisis for the ruling Liberal ministry and provoked New Zealanders to debate the politico–moral economy of the global traffic in matches and match girls.

  Nellie’s laboring life in the match industry from 1888 to 1909 makes it possible to tell an intimate history of global capitalism from “down under” and “below” from the vantage point of a mobile, poor, unmarried female factory worker. R. Bell and Co. may have been a profit-hungry firm with little regard for workers’ rights and workplace justice. For a smart, hardworking young woman like Nellie Dowell, capitalism and global expansion could and did create opportunities for economic independence, greater political power, and fun.

  What follows is not the story that I expected—or perhaps wanted—to write about a heroic workingwoman who defied avaricious employers to demand justice for herself and her fellow workers. Such an account would offer a ready-made explanation for why Nellie later joined Muriel in advancing their feminist, socialist, and Christian revolutionary projects in Bow on the eve of World War I. Nellie worked in one of the most politicized female-dominated, class-conscious industries in Victorian Britain, ergo she became a radical. This is not what happened. Nellie, like the silent majority of women workers in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain, harbored neither trade unionist nor radical political aspirations for most of her working life. Rather than focusing on class consciousness (or its absence), we might learn more by asking why most workers like Nellie put job security before socialism and trade unionism.5 My account reconstructs the linkages between local and global geographies, between large-scale political economic structures and individual choices, between work and family, between fine-grained attention to the formation of subjectivity and the broad strokes of global history.6

  THE WORK OF THE MATCH GIRL IN VICTORIAN CULTURE

  Pulsing with pedestrians and livestock, cabs and carriages, lorries laden with merchandise and omnibuses crammed with passengers, London’s streets were ever-changing marketplaces for the sale of goods, services, and sometimes people.7 Few figures in this cityscape attracted greater sympathy, while yet generating more cultural anxiety, than poor girls who wandered the streets selling flowers, cress, and matches far from the watchful eyes of their parents. In an 1873 manifesto, Benjamin Waugh, Rosa Waugh Hobhouse’s father and founder of the National Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children, pinpointed what was so troubling about such girls’ promiscuously unsupervised access to public space. “[T]he street is the State nursery, to its delinquents she stands in loco parentis.”8 Girl vendors necessarily chatted with passing strangers—including adult men—who negotiated for their wares. Such girls caught the eye of the mid-century journalist-cum-street-ethnographer Henry Mayhew, who noted that they often combined trade with begging, commerce with the pursuit of benevolent donations. Some possessed “immoral characters” and their parents sent them to “make out a livelihood by prostitution.”9 (See fig. 2.1.) At once dangerous and endangered, innocent and knowing, these girls embodied a host of social problems and preoccupations: urban poverty, child labor, prostitution, and the pathological condition of working-class family life in which parents exploited rather than nurtured their children.10 It was not always easy to distinguish buying goods from such girls from simply buying the girls themselves.

  2.1. Girl vendors of lucifers who wandered the streets without parental supervision preoccupied Victorian observers; however, Mayhew’s written account of the trade focused more on “old men and women out of employ” than the young girl depicted in the illustration. “Lucifer Match Girl” from a daguerreotype by Beard in Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, A Cyclopaedia of the Condition and Earnings of Those That will Work, Those That Cannot Work, And Those that Will Not Work (London, 1851), verso p. 432.

  Only a few years before Mayhew’s celebrated investigations for the Morning Chronicle, the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen published his short morality tale of child suffering and deliverance from earthly pains about “the little girl with the matchsticks” (1845). Its Anglo-American life began in 1847 with the Bentley’s Miscellany publication of “The Little Match Girl” as a “Christmas Story.”11 Mary Howitt’s translation of Andersen’s The True Story of My Life: A Sketch (published earlier that same year) as well as Andersen’s well-publicized visits to Britain in the 1850s made him into something of a literary celebrity and helped to ensure the ready availability of his tales to English readers. “The Little Match Girl” narrates the final pathetic night of a barefooted, fair-haired young match girl sent by her heartless parents onto the snow-covered streets to sell her bundle of matches on New Year’s Eve or return home to face a certain beating from her father. The near-frozen girl, unable to sell a single match, finds solace by striking some of them. Their brilliance mome
ntarily allows her to imagine delights she will never enjoy—a steaming roast goose stuffed with apples and plums, as well as a Christmas tree. The final matches bring her dead grandmother before her. The grandmother lovingly escorts her to God and liberates her from cold and hunger.

  The tale provokes acute sympathy for the helpless match girl, whose parents abuse rather than love her. Readers glimpse the cozy pleasures of bourgeois family life through her longing eyes but the tale offers no critique of the economic and social inequalities that produce child poverty. In fact, the narrator deflects such uncomfortable considerations by insisting that those who stumbled upon her corpse the next day could not know “what beautiful things she had seen” and the “splendor and gladness … she had entered into New Year’s joys.”12 Her Christian death marks the apotheosis of her life—recompense for her innocent suffering, which dissipates the outraged sympathy the tale conjures. Unlike humanitarian narratives so beloved by child rescuers, the story allows readers to feel intense sympathy for the match girl but does not call them to act.13 Whatever guilt readers may have felt about her death turns into relief that God has rewarded her with eternal salvation. (See fig. 2.2.)

  Salvation was neither the most practical nor the only solution to the problem of child labor, although religious conviction motivated politicians like the Tory evangelical Lord Shaftesbury to demand that the state shield children from egregious abuses of industrial capitalism. Even ardent defenders of the free market recognized children’s special claims to protection, while socialists condemned child labor as symptomatic of the irremediable evils of capitalism. Parliament did pass various forms of protective labor legislation including Factory Acts, which limited children’s hours of labor, mandated schooling, and excluded them from workplaces on the grounds of both age and the dangerous character of the employment.14 The state provided no compensation for children’s lost wages to families, so the poor bore the heaviest burden of subsidizing the state’s paternalistic interventions. It was a much trickier matter to regulate the labor of child street vendors like match girls since their parents employed them and they had no regular place of work subject to official inspection. At best, truancy officers employed by school boards (and later county councils) from the 1870s onwards could cajole, threaten, fine, and punish parents for failing to comply with school attendance regulations.15