by Seth Koven
What she finds at the factory girls’ party that first evening around 1902 overturns her preconceptions about slums and slum dwellers. In an unpublished draft of It Occurred to Me, she described herself as falling in love with the girls and their world. “I went, they conquered,” she pithily summarized. The girls are both more and less like her than she expected.
The party marked an epoch for me. These girls, who danced with me, entertained me, made conversation to set me at my ease and plied me with refreshments, were just like myself some of them, the same age, nineteen years old. Yet how experienced they seemed! How assured! What natural dignity! They were much more mature and independent than I. Why were some of them pale, others thin, with bent shoulders? Compared with them, I was a pampered, sheltered, ignorant idler. Why should they go on working, producing pleasure and ease for such as I?75
For the next decade, she sought to answer this question. Dutiful daughter of the bourgeoisie, Muriel had long been trained to shape herself in relation to helpless poor girls. Muriel inverts the patron-client relationship: the capable benevolent factory girls bestow upon her—rather than receive from her—kindness and wisdom. Their pale bent bodies bear the burden of their labor and Muriel’s pleasures. She is their dependent, a member of a dangerous social class, the undeserving rich.
At the turn of the century, there was nothing unusual about a young lady visiting the London slums. Armies of philanthropic women descended on poor districts throughout Europe and the United States as parish workers for the local vicar, health and friendly visitors, rent collectors for progressive housing schemes, settlement house residents, school care committee members, and social workers. It was almost de rigueur for a New Woman to test her mettle by venturing into a London slum, at least in the countless novels about her dangerous exploits.76 During Muriel’s time at St. Leonard’s, a woman settlement house worker from South London had urged the privileged female scholars to see for themselves how the poor lived and to better the lives of poor girls.77 Many, like Muriel and Doris, answered this call to personal service.78
Lady visitors were encouraged to extend their relationships beyond the clubroom and penetrate the private domestic interiors of girls’ slum dwellings. The Hon. S. Lyttleton exhorted the girls’ club worker to “try and get to know her girls in every relation of life, and for this a sympathetic plan of visiting their homes will be found most useful. The girls will probably be out at work, but there will be an opportunity for a talk with the mother and the other sisters at any rate.”79 This was just what Muriel intended to do.
With the eagerness of an anthropologist gone slumming, Muriel recalled how “avid” she was “to find out about these people.” She set out to learn their “etiquette,” the “syntax” of their speech, and the “secret” of their “perfect unhurried manners.” Immersion in the culture of Bow would, she hoped, give her access to residents’ ideas, feelings, and homes. Muriel’s opportunity came soon enough, when a “dear old woman in a long-skirted black dress with a white crocheted collar told her daughter to ‘bring the new young lady in for a nice cup of cocoa before she sets on that long journey to Loughton, being as ’ow this ’ouse is close to the club, and it’s that cold in them trains.’”80
Her hostess that memorable evening in 1902 was Eliza Pryke, whose daughter Beatrice (1877–1911) was Muriel’s first beloved friend in Bow. Eliza and her husband, Walter, a smith and farrier from Sudbury in Suffolk, lived in Bow on Albert Terrace, a small one-block street just off the south side of Bow Road next to the factory girls’ club that Muriel first visited. They shared the house with a German butcher and his English wife. The Prykes, with their five children and a lodger, occupied the second floor. By the time Muriel met them Walter had died. Mrs. Pryke paid the rent with help from boarders, like the milk carrier Alfred Wood, and the earnings of her nephew, Alfred, a machinist, along with contributions from two of her children, Walter and Beatrice. Walter and Beatrice worked at the Berger Patented Rice Starch works just a short distance away founded by one of East London’s most philanthropic evangelicals, William Thomas Berger.
Beatrice (whom Muriel called by her nickname Beattie) was a revelation for Muriel and, in so many ways Nellie’s precursor in Muriel’s affections and imagination. With bent shoulders, spectacles, and a “bronchitic wheezing” that rattled in her throat, the gaunt Beattie Pryke had “not beauty of feature or garment to make her desirable.” All the same, Muriel likened her to G. B. Shaw’s charismatic maiden warrior, St. Joan, beatified by the Catholic church in 1909. “She had delicate consideration for others, integrity, fineness of judgment, courage.” Muriel also marveled at the Pryke home, its “triumph of home economics not only in marketing, cooking and serving, but in the disposal of human bodies.” Muriel knew only too well how often Ladies Bountiful and friendly visitors had recorded their shocked views of East Londoners’ unmade beds and slovenly housekeeping. She would have none of their condescension.81
The Prykes enraptured Muriel. But what did they think about their young, wealthy, inquisitive visitor, so intent to befriend them? Only one of Beatrice’s letters to Muriel, written the year before her death in 1911, has survived. It suggests both genuine trust and intimate inequality between them. Beattie’s letter to “Dear Miss Lester” mingled profound gratitude for Muriel’s faith in her goodness with a keen sense of her unworthiness: “you do prais [sic] me in letter much more than im worth.” “I have God to thank for you that Sunday night some time ago when your farther [sic] came up in the [Albert] terrace from that time I tryed to lead a different life but often done wrong.” (See fig. 3.5.) Beattie adds an important detail omitted from Muriel’s story. Apparently, Henry Lester was by her side as she threaded her way through Bow’s dark streets.
Beattie’s letter shows how Muriel went about “being” a Christian by making “everyone want to copy me”—the goal she had set for herself nearly ten years earlier. She remains Beattie’s moral guide and superior, who implicitly condemns her for enjoying a beer at the pub. “I made up my mind to leave off my bad habits drinking beer,” she confesses. “I got so that I would go and have a glass in the public house and thought nothing of it have you to thank for it all” Beattie uses extra blank space on the page instead of periods to signal the end of one thought or sentence and the beginning of the next. She rhetorically enacts and deflects her shame, confusion, and self-consciousness at the boldness of her own admission: “please don’t let any one see this letter it makes one ashame of them selfs.” Shame betrays the strain of bettering herself by securing Muriel’s approval. She concludes on much safer territory: their mutual care and concern for one another’s family members. “thank you for coming in it cheer mother up hopeing your brother is improveing with best love from Beatrice Pryke.”
3.5. Beatrice Pryke to Muriel Lester, 1910, Lester 2/5/, Lester Papers. (Courtesy of the Bishopsgate Institute.)
Beattie constructs a dynamic of praise and shame in which Muriel’s encouragement metamorphoses into a subtle form of discipline, a reminder to Beattie of the need for vigilant moral self-regulation. Beattie equates the gift of Muriel’s praise with “worth”: too much praise leads to excess or false valuation. Under the force of new ideas unleashed by her reading of Tolstoy, Muriel had embarked on the long process of rejecting the “gift” relationship as a Victorian vestige of social and economic inequalities. Beattie, like most poor East Londoners, had no other way to understand Muriel’s “friendship” except as a form of charity. The gift of Muriel’s love cannot be separated from the psychological burdens it exacted on the laboring men and women who apparently were eager to receive it.82 Beattie wanted approval and friendship, not equality, with Muriel. Muriel used praise to push Beattie to internalize Muriel’s own values—in this case, temperance. Intimacy, didacticism, and inequality coexist within this epistolary trace of Muriel’s pursuit of radical Christian egalitarianism.
Beattie Pryke’s affectionate, self-critical letter strikes a recurring theme in Muriel’s rel
ations with her closest working-class friends. East Londoners insisted on Muriel’s fundamental difference—and apartness—from them. To emulate Muriel, Beattie had insisted in her letter, was to “lead a different life.” Muriel’s friends in Bow had far too much at stake to allow her to become one of them. After all, the status derived from their association with her depended upon her not being one of them. In assuming the right to praise and judge women like Beattie, she reproduced class-based prerogatives in the very act of rejecting them. Beattie’s letter crystallizes an ethical dilemma Muriel faced throughout her life: Would it be possible to convince the poor and the powerless with whom she sought solidarity to rethink their own ideas about who she was and what she represented? Could she uproot her own assumptions about the poor and relinquish her deeply engrained bourgeois privileges?
The burden of Muriel’s encouragement also weighed heavily on George Bowtle (1892–1931). A bricklayer’s son, George and his lifelong friend Ben Platten (1893–1941) were members of Doris Lester’s Loughton Sunday school primary class and later Muriel’s junior class. For the next three decades, the two men remained stalwart supporters of Doris and Muriel’s joint ventures in Loughton and Bow. Ben eventually served as a leading Trustee of Kingsley Hall. The Bowtles lived on Smarts Lane, Loughton’s poorest quarter of dilapidated ancient cottages. One turn-of-the-century resident recalled that it seemed “transplanted from a London East End street” overrun with “drunks, wife-beaters and barefooted urchins.”83 George apprenticed to a maker of tennis bats and hockey sticks; Ben was studying to become a teacher and eventually worked as an accountant. The two friends joined Muriel and Doris as teachers on the Sunday School Committee in 1911.84
3.6. The impressive neoclassical facade of the Loughton Union Church signified the wealth and self-confidence of its members’ recent social ascent into the ranks of the comfortable upper middle class. The small building in the foreground, the Lodge, served as Sunday school where Muriel and Doris taught. Loughton District Historical Society Photographic Collection (Courtesy of Chris Pond and LDHS).
In the summer of 1914, Muriel invited George to become leader of the Junior Club at the Loughton Sunday school. (See fig. 3.6.) Bowtle felt overwhelmed by his unworthiness of this sacred trust. Apparently, he had done something that he considered profoundly sinful, which, in his own eyes, disqualified him from teaching innocent students. To Muriel, he explained that he appreciated her “earnest spirit” and confidence in him. She had commended him for striving “nobly.” She had assured him that “we are all unworthy” and that it was “good” to be “dissatisfied with ourselves.” He was not convinced. Her praise pained him. He wanted her to understand his real position. Two years ago, he had failed in his duty as a Christian and it “loom[ed]” and “darken[ed]” his life. She saw only his “polished side,” not his true “everyday life.” It wasn’t just that he lacked “courage to figure in Christ’s work.” He “shudder[ed]” when he “imagine[d] myself sitting in Junior [Sunday School], amongst those innocent children as an example of Christ.” Overwhelmed by his own unnamed sins, he could not bear to become a “Stumbling Block to God’s little ones.”
In an extended postscript, George demonstrated how much he had—and had not—learned from the Lesters’ Sunday school lessons. He took as his text Luke 12:1–5 when Jesus warns his disciples and the “innumerable multitude” around him about the dangers of hypocrisy. All-hearing God knows even those secrets we have “spoken in darkness [and] in the ear in closets.” Jesus admonishes his listeners to fear only him who “hath power to cast into hell.” To accept Muriel’s offer would be hypocrisy. God knew George’s “everyday” sins even if Muriel did not. Like Muriel in 1905, he found Bible passages that spoke directly to his disturbed spiritual condition. He found no comfort in them. There was a “real living Satan within each of us,” George lamented, against whom he had to remain perpetually vigilant. Did Muriel ever share with George her own fears about Satan’s “snares” and “tricks”? His letter suggests that she had spoken in generalities rather than specifics. She had told him, “we are all unworthy;” she had not said, “I too am unworthy but still do God’s work.” Muriel’s friendship with George empowered him and expanded his sense of possibilities. At this particular moment in his spiritual life, it also stymied him. He could not achieve the goodness that Muriel seemed to embody and to which she entreated him to aspire. Like Beattie, he had tried to lead a Christian life. He too had “often done wrong.”
George Bowtle’s sin-saturated Christianity was utterly at odds with the instruction on offer in the Lesters’ Sunday school classroom and Doris’s evening club.85 Their teaching increasingly revolved around Matthew 5 (the “Sermon on the Mount”) not Luke 12. Doris had banished Satan from her Sunday school curriculum in favor of Tolstoy’s loving God of justice. Under Doris’s tutelage, George and Ben and the other boys had studied Tolstoy’s critique of Kaiser Wilhelm’s 1890 speech to military recruits. Doris had worked hard to make her classroom into a laboratory for exploring ideas and practices of democratic freedom. She had thrown her weight against traditional teaching methods to “get out of the blasphemous S[unday] S[chool] routine by which [the boys] kept an exemplary silence during the Saintly old Superintendent’s ten-minutes-long prayer.” Play, touch, movement, and imagination animated her lessons with the goal of encouraging students to engage in critical independent thought. George Bowtle’s exegesis of Luke 12 demonstrates that he had certainly learned how to think for himself. He had found the devil within, not Tolstoy’s Kingdom of Heaven. This could not have pleased Muriel or Doris.
The Lesters’ Sunday school teaching in Loughton left them ample time for lawn tennis and garden parties while extending their philanthropic work in Bow. They followed well-established networks of Nonconformist benevolence linking families like theirs in posh Essex suburbs with the slums of Bow. For example, the minister of the Lesters’ former Baptist chapel on Fillebrook Road in Leytonstone, Reverend W. Knight Chaplin, also served as pastor of the Poplar and Bromley Tabernacle on Brunswick Road, not far from Nellie’s grandmother Harriet Sloan.86 The family of soap manufacturer Booth Harris was very involved in the Loughton Union Church; one daughter, Louisa, volunteered at the Bow Mission along with the Lester sisters; another, Mildred Harris, was among the first “workers” at Kingsley Hall in 1915. Suburban grandees like Henry Lester (born in Poplar) and Booth Harris (born in Bethnal Green) gave back to the communities they had left behind as their businesses prospered.
Around 1907–8, Doris convinced Muriel to accept an invitation to lead a women’s meeting connected to the Bruce Road Congregational Church in Bromley-by-Bow under the leadership of its new minister, John Earle Morrell. (See fig. 3.7.) The Welsh-born Morrell had started life as an “artistic decorator,” and became a “portrait painter” by the time he moved with his parents to Marylebone in London in the mid-1890s. A lifelong bachelor, he “lived a solitary life in lodgings” with two middle-aged widows and their children in Bow.87 Muriel was struck by his “passionate devotion” and “complete sincerity of spirit.” So too were nearby residents. Widowed Mrs. Richardson confidentially informed Muriel, in tones of admiration mingled with surprise, “ ‘D’you know, I believe he’s [Rev. Morrell] a Christian.’ ”88 This was Muriel’s fondest hope for herself.
3.7. By 1900, Bruce Road Congregational Church was surrounded by densely packed two-story slum houses, a far cry from the open suburban landscape depicted in this 1860s’ image. Bruce Road Congregational Church, 1867. (Courtesy of Tower Hamlet’s Local History Library.)
By Bow standards, Bruce Road was distinctly respectable: the Congregational Church flanked the southeastern corner of the block, a Methodist church occupied the southwestern corner, with a smattering of regular wage earners and even a doctor inhabiting the two-story terraced houses on the north side of the street. Working-class respectability did not translate into religious vitality, however. Bruce Road was spiritually moribund in the years before Morrell’s arri
val. The deep comfortable galleries of Bruce Road Congregational Church swallowed up the fifty odd middle-class women and girls, none from the neighborhood, attending Sunday services and left the church “very bare.” A mere dozen adults graced the services at Bruce Road Methodist church, which looked “perfectly dead and deserted.”89 Bruce Road Congregational had failed to keep up with most slum churches, which sponsored soup kitchens, girls’ and boys’ clubs, crèches, teetotal recreation for adults, mothers’ meetings, and penny savings clubs. Church-connected programs constituted a faith-based system of welfare, free from the stigma of the Poor Law, that East Londoners, including Nellie, used as best they could. “The churches of those days [the early 1900s],” recalled one lifelong resident of Poplar, “were doing exactly the same as Social Security today. The Methodist Church would have bread tickets, boot tickets, coal tickets, meat, milk.”90 Morrell’s invitation to Muriel signaled his commitment to reinvigorating his church and expanding its outreach to the working-class men, women, and children living in its shadow.91
It’s not clear whether it was Reverend Morrell or Muriel who called the group on Bruce Road a “Women’s Meeting” rather than the more traditional name for such gatherings, “Mothers’ Meetings.” Clubs for adult women like Muriel’s were strategically essential to the success of churches, settlement houses, and home missions as they faced the challenges of the new century. The first suffragan Bishop of East London gushed that their “astonishingly rapid rise and progress” in the early 1880s was proof enough of their value.92 They anchored social and religious institutions because poor mothers controlled access to children, husbands, and families. As the Superintendent of the Bow Methodist Mission readily acknowledged, “we could hope to do little until the women were our allies.”93 The Daily News’s religious census of 1902–3 noted that women vastly outnumbered men, “conspicuous by their absence,” at church services in London’s poorest neighborhoods including Bow and Poplar. Only churches engaged in “active, aggressive social work” predicated on the “universal brotherhood of man” would contribute to national life.94
