by Seth Koven
2.2. The dramatic moment when town dwellers first discover the dead body of the little match girl on the snowy street was a favorite subject of illustrators. Andersen’s story emphasized the girl’s heavenly reward. Illustrations like these compelled readers to confront the emotional impact of Christians’ failures to protect her from exploitation. (Top) “The People Find the Little Match Girl,” A. W. Bayes, illustrator, Dalziel Brothers, Engravers from H. W. Dulcken, trans., Hans Christian Andersen’s Stories for the Household (London, 1866), 358. (Bottom) Magic Lantern Slide, “The Little Match Girl,” (1905) by Joseph Boggs Beale, Courtesy of Jack Judson Collection, Magic Lantern Castle Museum, San Antonio, Texas; copy of image produced by Ludwig Vogl-Bienek.
From mid-century onward, reformers increasingly differentiated children’s rights from the economic interests of their parents: children of the laboring classes, within this social policy framework, required protection from their own parents, whose need for money trumped concern for their offspring’s well-being. This perspective undergirded the argument—to the extent that Andersen’s story offered one—explaining his Match Girl’s fate. Hers was a tale about bad parents, not an immoral political economy. Andersen’s tale contributed to the emerging mid-century consensus that poor children needed to be protected not just from avaricious employers but from their own parents. As Marx bitterly observed, humanitarian movements proclaiming the “rights” of the child stemmed from “the capitalistic mode of exploitation which, by sweeping away the economic basis of parental authority, made its exercise degenerate into a mischievous misuse of power.”16
The instant success of Andersen’s tale ensured that visual and literary representations of match girls were as ubiquitous as the girls themselves in the metropolis. Edifying children’s fiction such as Mattie’s Home; or, the Little MatchGirl and Her Friends (1873) and Little Fan; or, the Life and Fortunes of a London MatchGirl (1874) amplified Andersen’s portrayal of drunken and abusive parents, while providing readers with models of philanthropic action. “Gentlemen” befriend and rescue the eponymous heroines Mattie and Little Fan before placing them in safe “homes.”17 The Pall Mall Gazette, ever watchful for injustice and eager for scandal, incited readers to associate ten-year-old Susan Quinn’s unlawful abduction in April 1886 with the fate of her fictive counterpart. The story “Only a Little MatchGirl, Not Ten Years Old” detailed the child’s kidnapping from the streets where her mother, Mrs. Eunice Quinn, had sent her to sell matches. Stephen Lawry, a twenty-three-year-old private in the West Yorkshire Regiment, lured her with the promise of a present to a nearby lodging house in one of East London’s most notorious streets for a night of debauchery.18 The Gazette’s crusading evangelical editor, W. T. Stead, had good reason to expect readers to connect Susan Quinn’s sad story with his own highly publicized abduction and “rescue” of a “white slave” girl less than a year earlier. Stead had by turns horrified and titillated readers by “purchasing” Eliza Armstrong from her mother to expose the “ghastly and infernal traffic” in “maidens” of the poor, sacrificed nightly to satisfy the sexual lusts of men. No amount of wishful glossing could transform Susan Quinn’s story into an uplifting tale of Christian suffering and salvation. Sexual danger, not sentiment, animates this recasting of the Match Girl in the service of Stead’s controversial campaign to outlaw child prostitution. Stead went to jail for his theatrical antics, but the Criminal Law Amendment Act in August 1885 raised the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen years old.19
Little Match Girls like Susan Quinn appeared in many guises and locations in art and literature in the years preceding the strike, and with even greater frequency in its aftermath. The Match Girl circulated widely in popular cheap editions of Andersen’s tales adapted for use by school children.20 She was the subject of fine art in K. M. Skeating’s painting, The Little Match Girl, exhibited at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery in September 1886. She entertained and instructed ragged boys at a Christmas gathering of the Ragged School Union in December 1886. Presumably, the match girl’s pathetic fate amplified the good fortune of the destitute boys, so recently rescued from the streets themselves, as they feasted on plum puddings.21 She was the recipient of the unbounded selflessness of Oscar Wilde’s eponymous “Happy Prince” (May 1888), who gives the match girl his one remaining sapphire eye—and thus blinds himself—so that “her father will not beat her.”22 The Match Girl was the star of the tableau vivant performed at the Anglo-Danish Exhibition staged in May 1888 to raise money for the British Home for Incurables. The Era enthusiastically reported that a choir of boy voices, concealed behind the scenes, sang the Christmas carol “Good King Wenceslas” to accentuate the pathos of the Match Girl’s lonely death on the snow-covered street.23 Victorian philanthropists demanded that the match girl, denied Christian benevolence in her own life, reenact her death over and over in fundraising performances on behalf of child rescue agencies while reformers lobbied the state to protect poor children from unscrupulous employers and abusive parents.24
HOW MATCH FACTORY WOMEN BECAME MATCH GIRLS
Performances like the May tableau vivant at the Anglo-Danish Exhibition prepared the British public for an even more dramatic spectacle in Bow a few weeks later. Workers at Bryant and May’s match factory went out on strike during the first week of July 1888. The strike emerged out of employees’ discontent with workplace conditions as well as socialists’ and journalists’ determination to expose abuses at the firm and turn them into political and print capital. Punitive labor practices exacerbated low wages—ranging from four to thirteen shillings per week—to fuel growing shop floor tensions at Bryant and May in the late spring of 1888: the lack of a separate and safe place for workers to consume meals; inadequate concern for workers’ occupational health, especially exposure to poisonous phosphorous; disciplinary fines for inevitable accidents associated with the work. While Bryant and May did nothing to protect workers from phosphorous-laden dust, it penalized them three pence per infraction for dirty feet and untidy workspaces. Management locked out and fined girls who arrived late. Bryant and May pressured employees to remain silent about their afflictions in exchange for company-provided medical and dental care. The introduction of new machinery incited fear that wages would go down while demands for productivity increased.25
Trade unionist Clementina Black brought these conditions to the attention of her fellow Fabian Society members, including Annie Besant. On June 23, 1888, Besant published a scathing exposé of Bryant and May, “White Slavery in London,” in The Link, a weekly penny periodical she edited with W. T. Stead. Subtitled “A Journal for the Servants of Man,” The Link sought to unite fellow workers across the religious, political, and social spectrum on a platform based upon “great moral ideals” and “common faith in Freedom and in Justice.” It championed a wide range of global and local causes, from Irish Home Rule and free speech to the failure of London cardboard manufacturer English and Co. to provide adequate meal breaks for its five overworked boy laborers.26
Few could rival Annie Besant’s combination of political and journalistic savvy. (See fig. 2.3.) The middle-class wife of a clergyman, Besant burst into notoriety in the 1870s when she joined forces with the leading secularist politician and neo-Malthusian Charles Bradlaugh to provide contraceptive knowledge so that workers could limit family size and control their economic fortunes. The campaign cost Besant her marriage and custody of her children, but it also thrust her into the limelight as one of Victorian Britain’s most stirring and controversial platform speakers. By 1888, Besant had migrated toward Fabianism, a middle-class brand of evolutionary socialism. Fabians identified capitalism as the root cause of exploitation but preferred to “permeate” the state (rather than overthrow it) as leading policy makers and civil servants and transform it into an engine for social and economic progress.27 A self-described atheist in early 1888, Besant had already begun to flirt with Theosophy, a religious philosophy committed to the betterment of humanity that combined teachings f
rom Eastern and Western religious traditions.
“White Slavery” cannily combined sensational journalism with gendered political-economic argument. It juxtaposed Bryant and May’s “monstrous” shareholder profits (dividends ranging from twenty-three to thirty-eight percent on investment) with the workers’ starvation wages. The firm’s treatment of its workers smacked of “tyranny,” Besant thundered—a provocative term widely used in the 1880s to denounce all forms of arbitrary un-English subjugation of workers at home and colonial subjects abroad. Besant likened women workers at Bryant and May to “white slaves”—a phrase those seeking repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act had deployed effectively to defend working girls and women from unregulated and exploitative male lust.28 Besant updated the familiar argument that wage slavery under capitalism was harsher and more profitable than chattel bondage and blasted manufacturer Theodore Bryant’s ostensible contributions to civic betterment—erecting “statues” and “parks” in East London—as a flimsy cover for greed. She used neither “match girls” nor “match factory women” but instead called the workers “girls” to underscore their status as youthful innocent victims of capitalist greed.29 A few weeks later, workers at Bryant and May took matters into their own hands and went on strike. Several newspapers, which fancied themselves righteous defenders of the “people,” took up their cause.
2.3. One of the most forceful and articulate platform speakers in Victorian Britain, Annie Besant attracted substantial media attention as her political, intellectual, and religious commitments shifted in the 1880s from secularism to Fabianism to Theosophy. “Annie Besant, 1889,” from Annie Besant: An Autobiography (Adyar Deluxe Indian reprint edition, 1939), 441.
From the outset, the Bryant and May strike unfolded on two distinct but connected planes. As historian Louise Raw has shown, match factory women, many daughters of recent Irish immigrants, initiated and led the strike. However, it was also a media event that attracted a glittering cast of middle-class socialists and radical allies, themselves gifted journalists, writers, and self-promoters. The strike marked the convergence of the New Unionism with the New Journalism of the 1880s, with its emphasis on shocking revelations of social abuses.
Who, then, were these factory workers? Press accounts reported that approximately 1,400 workers at Bryant and May went on strike, although only 712 received payments according to the Strike Register. Some were boys and men—ostentatiously not “match girls.” The vast majority were young women. Women’s work at Bryant and May—like most forms of female manual labor in the nineteenth century—was classified and compensated as “unskilled” regardless of the actual level of dexterity demanded.30 Women and girls in the match industry performed many different jobs, including minding the machines that turned miles of cotton and jute into the tapers used for wax vestas; filling frames or mechanized coils; cutting tapers (this was Harriet Dowell’s job); and putting matches or vestas into boxes (this was Nellie’s task). Men always dipped the splints or tapers into trays containing a phosphorous mixture. Dipping was the most dangerous part of the production process because it required sustained and direct exposure to white phosphorous, known to cause phossy jaw, a disfiguring and sometimes fatal necrosis of the bones. All workers were exposed to the poisonous fumes of wet matches and tapers as well as poisonous dust that settled onto their food. No Bryant and May strikers engaged in labor previously associated with “match girls.” Not one sold matches like Andersen’s Little Match Girl.31 One might well then ask: by what rhetorical sleight of hand did match factory women come to be known to contemporaries and posterity as “match girls”?
Journalists turned match factory workers into match girls. They initially tested different names for the mostly female strikers, including “wood match girls” and “match factory workers.” But within two weeks “match girl,” with its suggestion of innocent suffering and passivity, vanquished its rivals because it proved so attractive to the strikers’ foes and friends alike.32 Opponents of the strike depicted the “match girls” as helpless “victims” of “insane” socialist “instigators,” “pests of the modern world.”33 The Star, under the editorship of the Irish Home Ruler MP, T. P. O’Connor, also represented the “girls” as victims, but not of socialist outsiders. It blasted Bryant and May for exploiting the “girls” and celebrated the heroism of “the match girls’ strike” on July 9.34 In the war of words surrounding the Bryant and May strike, “match girl” was the undisputed victor. During the month of July 1888, “match girls” went from girls selling matches on streets to any female worker associated with the match industry.
Funds poured into the Link from across Britain and its empire to support the match girls: the Arts and Crafts bookbinder T. J. Cobden Sanderson donated ten pounds; an “Illiterate House-painter” one shilling. The names of contributors to the strike fund constitute a “Who’s Who” of radical and progressive London. It included Fabians Sidney Webb and Graham Wallas; the Christian socialist founder of the Guild of St. Matthew and defender of music halls, Stewart Headlam; his arch nemesis, the social purity campaigner Mrs. Ormiston Chant; “glorified spinster” New Women Margaret Harkness, Amy Levy, and Clementina Black; leading suffrage campaigners Mr. and Mrs. Pankhurst; socialists William Morris and Edward Carpenter, as well as a panoply of Liberal, Radical, and Socialist clubs and societies.35 George Bernard Shaw and several fellow Fabians, including Besant, journeyed to Bow to meet the girls and distribute strike funds to them. The match girls’ strike at Bryant and May captured the public’s imagination and made it into the favorite cause of the great and good of bohemian and radical London in the summer of 1888.
Led by “sturdy respectable” match factory workers, the strike ironically consolidated their public image as “match girls.” (See fig. 2.4.) Journalists gave them this name—a kind of fiction that subsequently became its own fact through persistent use. Calling them match girls stimulated sympathy by playing upon deeply embedded cultural perceptions of childhood innocence and vulnerability at the height of Christian evangelical campaigns to gain parliamentary protection for poor children. At the same time, press accounts stressed the self-discipline, comradeship, independence, and determination of the “girls” in the face of their many hardships. Agency and passivity reinforced rather than contradicted one another in this discursive knot.
The Match Girls’ Strike was never an end in itself for Besant and her fellow Fabians. It was but one of many ongoing skirmishes—some in workhouses, others in police precincts, still others in School Board schools and sweated workshops—in a much larger struggle to bring justice to the poor and challenge the free market logic of industrial capitalism. For all Besant’s social and political radicalism, her views about the incapacity of workers to speak for themselves reflected the prejudices of her middle-class upbringing. As she reminded readers in the chapter she devoted to the “Matchgirls Strike” in her 1893 autobiography, she and Stead had founded the Link as a mouthpiece to speak for the “dumb and voiceless poor.”36 She began with the assumption that poor workers could neither speak nor act on their own behalf. Who better to play the part of the rescued victim than a match girl? Who better to tell her story than a sympathetic middle-class lady, albeit one who whose politics and personal life had led her far from conventional bourgeois domesticity?
2.4. Photographs and graphic images of East London’s match factory girls in the 1880s and ’90s suggest that most adopted a distinctive style of self-presentation: hair pulled back with fringe or bangs resting above their eyebrows, a tiered hat sometimes dressed with feathers, an overcoat atop a long work apron with a simply tied kerchief at the neck. Annie Besant: An Autobiography (London, 1908).
Besant and Herbert Burrows served as the first secretary and treasurer of the Matchmakers Union, established as part of the union’s victorious settlement with Bryant and May. Besant soon turned from Fabianism and trade unionism to Theosophy and its mystical high priestess, Madame Blavatsky.37 She did, however, leave the match girls a partin
g gift, funded by a large anonymous donation to Blavatsky: a match girls’ “drawing room” and club. Located on the north side of Bow Road just across from St. Mary-le-Bow church, the club was an Elizabethan-era structure that had once housed “street arabs” rescued by Dr. Barnardo. “It will want a piano, tables for papers, for games, for light literature,” Besant breezily informed readers, “so that it may offer a bright homelike refuge to these girls, who now have no real homes, no playground save the street.” While she insisted that the club would not enforce “prim behaviour” and would nurture “cordial comradeship and self-respecting freedom,” Besant clearly set out to domesticate the unruly girls—with “no real homes”—whom she had come to admire.38 Notices about the club appeared in the 1890 volume of Lucifer, the too-aptly named “Theosophical Magazine designed to ‘bring to light the hidden things of darkness.’” Madame Blavatsky herself graced the club’s gala opening on August 16, 1890. Fifty appreciative girls enjoyed tea, singing, dancing, and brief speeches by Besant and Burrows.39 According to the Women’s Penny Paper, Besant hailed the union as a “tower of strength,” but she could not resist administering a dose of bourgeois moralizing. If the club took the girls off the streets and out of public houses, it would have done its work.40
