by Seth Koven
I wanted all parsons to perform their proper function, to be prophets, to speak out the truth so that no one could go on contentedly talking about Europe as though it were Christian, and honouring crowned heads as though some were not murderers, and priding themselves on carrying the white man’s burden of civilization when we were torturing Africa with our callousness and greed.124
In Muriel’s account of her ethical growth, this was a key turning point. The bodies of Congo’s victims exposed Europe’s civilizing and Christianizing claims as hypocritical fictions. God emphatically no longer loved empire.
Muriel took herself from Pastor Hayes in Bow to suburban Enfield where she went to R. J. Campbell’s home to implore him to use his bully pulpit on behalf of the Congo’s innocent victims.125 Her journey makes visible links, forged on the common ground of global humanitarianism, between two theologically warring groups within Edwardian Nonconformity: religious modernism and missionary evangelicalism. When they set aside their differences, they could—and did—help give the Liberal Party a mandate to enact an ambitious social reform program including the Feeding of Necessitous School Children (free school meals for poor children) and Old Age Pensions. Muriel’s journey also makes visible unresolved tensions within her own theological thinking between missionary and modernist impulses.
FROM PAUPERS TO CITIZENS
Muriel did not need to look as far as Africa to find systematic injustice against blameless men, women and children. Bitter personal experience convinced many in Bow and Poplar that the Poor Law sanctioned state violence against the most sacred and important human institution: the family. Stories like Nellie’s abounded in East London: young families ripped apart by the state because the male breadwinner’s untimely disablement or death left his survivors impoverished. What infused these stories with explosive political and emotional capital in the early twentieth century was the fact that once helpless children, erstwhile Poor Law wards of the state, were now in positions to shape policy and make laws as members of Parliament, Borough Councils, and Boards of Guardians. One such man was Will Crooks, Poplar’s genial MP. He could neither forget nor forgive the Poor Law officials who had sent him and his siblings off to the Poor Law Barrack School at Sutton after their father, a ship’s stoker, lost his arm at work. Like Harriet Dowell, Mrs. Crooks had wept over her sleeping children as she worked late into the night in an unsuccessful effort to hold her family together. Separated from his terrified and confused younger brother once they arrived at the school, Crooks still seethed with indignation decades later.126
Loathed by the poor since its passage in 1834, the New Poor Law’s punitive principles remained intact despite dozens of amendments and administrative modifications over the decades.127 On the eve of their electoral trouncing by the Liberals in January 1906, the Conservative government of the urbane philosopher-turned-politician A. J. Balfour convened a Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and Relief of Distress. The commissioners’ task was to investigate the Poor Law and offer recommendations about how best to modify it in light of twentieth-century conditions. After years of deliberation, the majority report affirmed key elements of the status quo, condemned outdoor relief, and revived Victorian rhetoric identifying poverty with moral failing. The 716-page minority report, penned mostly by Fabian sociologist Beatrice Potter Webb with help from her husband Sidney, demanded that the state ensure a “national minimum of civilized life” for its citizens. It emphasized the deep structural causes of poverty and sought the wholesale reorganization of poor relief. It called for the abolition of Poor Law schools like Forest Gate and the absorption of their students into local schools. It demanded a unified medical service to care for all citizens, regardless of their ability to pay.128 By May, the Webbs had launched a national out-of-doors campaign to gather popular support for the minority report, the National Committee for the Break-up of the Poor Law. The Committee had 300 members in June 1909; by November 1910, it numbered over 30,000.129 Muriel was among them. She was so enamored by the minority report and the National Committee’s educational campaign that she secured a private interview with Beatrice Webb.
One of the four signatories of the controversial and much discussed minority report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws was Bow’s favorite son and Muriel’s inspirational mentor in local politics, George Lansbury. In allying themselves with Lansbury, the Lester sisters gained a formidable backer as well as ready-made group of enemies. Highly critical of bourgeois philanthropy as self-serving and condescending, Lansbury praised “Muriel Lester and her sister” as among the handful of great women like Annie Besant and Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor “who treated the workers as equals and worked to ensure not mere acquiescence in their Socialist teaching but active intelligent cooperation.”130 (His homage to and erasure of Doris is symptomatic of just how much Muriel overshadowed her sister.)
Few combined Lansbury’s gift of ready laughter and warm commonsense with adamantine hatred of the Poor Law. “A hefty rough-looking handful,” he joined the Marxist Social Democratic Federation (SDF) in 1892 and quickly made a name for himself with his feisty plainspoken eloquence.131 In the 1890s, his rhetoric was uncompromising in its economic materialism: Liberals and Conservatives were much the same, he argued, because both consigned “my class” to be “the wage slaves of those who own the means and instruments of production, distribution, and exchange.”132 Even during this most secular phase of his career, he likened his SDF branch meetings—held in Annie Besant’s Theosophical Match Girls club in Bow—to “revivalist gatherings.” The SDF left room in its ranks for those who could not and would not cast off either belief in some kind of Christian God or the forms and structures of organized religious life.133 The former domestic servant and SDF activist in South London, Mary Gray, established Socialist Sunday schools in Battersea in the 1890s that flourished in the early twentieth century.134
When Muriel first met Lansbury in Bow, he had recently returned to the Church (in 1904), after long detours among secularists and several years sending his own children to be educated by the Ethical Society of East London.135 His language, like that of Keir Hardie and so many members of the Independent Labour Party, was deeply and sincerely Christian.136 West Indian writer and radical Claude McKay was not convinced: Lansbury was “symbolic of all that was simon-pure, pious and self-righteous in the British Labour movement.”137 Lansbury was determined to do nothing less than “Smash up the Poor Law.” He sought to replace it with a humane system of state welfare that preserved, rather than dismantled, families by providing weekly cash payments (called “outdoor relief”) to poor widows like Nellie’s grandmother and mother, Harriet Sloan and Harriet Dowell. Men in Poplar wanted work, not doles. Lansbury aimed to give it to them. In the 1890s, he and Crooks had used their positions on the Poplar Board of Guardians and the Management Committee of Nellie’s Poor Law orphanage at Forest Gate to shift the terms of poor relief in Poplar. (See fig. 3.11.) They banished the ugly coarse blue serge workhouse uniforms that Nellie had been forced to wear and replaced them with regular clothing at the same cost to ratepayers. They improved and varied the food; they offered unemployed men paid agricultural work in Labour colonies as an alternative to incarceration in Poor Houses.138
3.11. Religion played a crucial role in the early twentieth-century Labour movement and in the lives of two of East London’s most beloved politicians, Will Crooks and George Lansbury. (Left)“Mr. Will Crooks on Piety at Home,” and (right) “Mr. George Lansbury, L.C.C., on The Power that Remakes Men” from Labour and Religion by Ten Labour Members (London, 1910), 56, 68.
In response to Crooks and Lansbury’s efforts, local businessmen formed the Poplar Municipal Alliance. The Alliance lambasted them for skyrocketing rates of poor relief, accused them of maladministration, and impugned their integrity as public servants before the 1906 Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry convened by J. S. Davy, the Chief Inspector for the Local Government Board to investigate the Poplar Board of Guardians. A respected Comm
ittee member on the Royal Commission (1905–9), Lansbury was also chief witness and whipping boy of Davy’s inquiry. No detail of Poplar’s supposed maladministration of the Poor Law proved too minute for Inspector Davy. Did Lansbury and Crooks know that Guardians had supposedly consumed beer in the workhouse cellar while “hobnobbing with the paupers over salmon and oysters”?139 Why had they sanctioned the purchase of Irish cambric handkerchiefs at 3d a piece? Had Guardians purchased them for their own delicate noses? With rising indignation, Lansbury explained that the Guardians placed six handkerchiefs in the box of each Poor Law girl going out to domestic service. Crooks wondered whether the chief inspector thought it would be more economical for the girls to use their cuffs.140
The point that stuck for the Lesters was this: nothing less than the best was good enough for the poor children of Bow and Poplar and their parents. In this regard, the Lesters demanded much more for their neighbors than the Webbs and the Fabian Society, who more pragmatically hoped that the state would satisfy its citizens’ minimum needs. Human dignity always trumped economy for Crooks, Lansbury, and the Lesters. These were crucial lessons that the various Edwardian controversies over Poor Law reform and relief along with their growing networks of friends in Bow and Poplar like Beatrice Pryke taught Muriel. It was part of a process of beginning to see the world through the eyes of her poor friends and neighbors. It meant seeing the poor not as downtrodden subjects with duties, but as rights-bearing citizens.
CONCLUSIONS
“Religious ideas have the fate of melodies,” George Eliot’s narrator observed in Scenes of Clerical Life (1858), “which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments….”141 Muriel was eager to be such an instrument, not just of religious ideas but of God’s loving will. Her self-directed reading of Christian thinkers such as Tolstoy and Harnack, her social work in Bow, her friendships with poor women and men, and her encounters with dynamic religious leaders including R. J. Campbell and Pastor Hayes in Bow did not suddenly turn her into a Christian revolutionary. There was, in fact, no single moment of transformation. These ideas and experiences were part of her “road of personal development” toward free religion in the name of human freedom.142 They wore away her inherited Liberalism and pushed her toward a new social justice gospel founded on God’s love. They were part of a process of ethical remaking that heightened her sensitivity to how structural inequalities in power and resources between people across the globe produced day-to-day violence incompatible with her “God is Love” theological thinking. A good life, Muriel increasingly recognized by 1910, meant subordinating the enjoyment of worldly goods to fostering the social good. This was the key to “being a Christian” in Edwardian Britain.
Scholars of Victorian and Edwardian religion have not written about “God is Love” as the cornerstone of a discrete theology or theological position or even a theological tendency in the early twentieth century. When we shift focus from systematic theology to “lived theology,” to Henry Lester’s democratic understanding of theology as the discourse that flows from the everyday thinking, writing, and talking of men and women about God—we find “God is Love” theology broadcast widely across late-Victorian and Edwardian culture. Its distinctly unsystematic basis gave it broad purchase and versatility among a range of progressive Christians at the turn of the 20th century who, like Muriel, were intent to live ethically.
It’s no surprise that Muriel was appalled by Congo atrocities and aligned with The New Theology by 1910. However, I was not prepared to find her dutifully in charge of the Baptist Zenana Mission’s sweet stall at the Loughton Union Church in 1908–9 raising money to help “oppressed” Indian women held “captive” in the zenana—the exclusively female quarters within South Asian households.143 Established by Baptist women in the mid-nineteenth century to uplift their benighted dark sisters in India, the Baptist Zenana Mission was an old-fashioned evangelical Christian charity, the sort rightly associated with missionary imperialism.144 It’s not where a vegetarian, Tolstoyan, New Woman-in-the-slums, religious modernist ought to be. Or at least, so I thought. But Muriel was. Why?
Let me offer two possible explanations. First, her sweet stall work speaks to the persistence of her divided life, her two worlds. She may have been an independent woman in Bow, but, in Loughton, she remained the dutiful spinster daughter doing what such women did. She helped at charity bazaars; taught Sunday school; and accompanied her wealthy parents on elegant holidays to fancy Riviera hotels. She does not appear to have participated in the broader networks of bohemian sociability that so often sustained Edwardians who shared her religious and social commitments. If she dined at London’s vegetarian restaurants and mingled with their crankish sandal-wearing patrons, she has left no record of these outings.
Second, despite the profound theological and doctrinal differences separating Campbell’s religious modernism from the evangelical Christianity of the Grattan Guinness missionary empire and the Zenana Mission, these groups sometimes could and did make common cause. To an extent that Muriel never acknowledged, she remained immersed in both evangelical and modernist Christianity—in Loughton as well as in Bow. Despite its cultural condescension, the Baptist Zenana Mission was part of a century-old Baptist missionary project that believed fervently in the spiritual equality of all people, black and white, before God.145 New Theology and evangelical global benevolence encouraged Muriel to act on her understanding that being a Christian meant caring for the souls and bodies of the outcast poor at home and abroad.146 Between 1902 and 1910, Muriel had repeatedly asked herself the question: could she live ethically in a world riddled with inequality and injustice? “God is Love” theology affirmed for her that she could.
CHAPTER FOUR
Body Biographies in War and Peace
NELLIE AND MURIEL FORGED THEIR PARTNERSHIP through illness. Each endured incapacitating pain during the years of their deepest collaboration from 1910 until Nellie’s death on January 31, 1923. In March 1910, a disastrous bout of rheumatic fever left Nellie in a catatonic stupor. It forced her out of industrial waged labor while freeing her to devote herself to her work with Muriel and Doris in Bow. For the next decade, Nellie’s physical world contracted as her political and intellectual horizons expanded. Her breathing and movements grew increasingly labored until she could no longer leave her small row home next door to the Lesters on Bruce Road.1 From approximately 1910 to 1917, Muriel’s physical and mental health was so precarious that she often broke down and required Nellie’s care. Tending to her aging parents in Loughton as well as her public work as a pacifist, socialist, and feminist during World War I proved a daunting debilitating task. In 1916–17, Muriel too experienced a complete collapse. It clarified her understanding of the vital links between mind and body so crucial to her religious, spiritual, and somatic life for the next five decades.
Nellie and Muriel shared illness. It was one ground on which they produced their intimacy. In caring for one another’s broken bodies, Nellie and Muriel fashioned a set of practices and a language of love between women. Muriel’s “God is Love” theology and social politics had led her first to Bow and then to Nellie. Drawn to morally uplifting Christian organizations like Night Schools and church-sponsored factory girls’ clubs, Nellie had a long history of friendships with philanthropic ladies before she met Muriel. Their infirmities, however, cemented and transformed their relationship.
Profound illness broke down their self-sufficient bodies along with the boundaries guarding them from the hands of others. It led them to probe their innermost selves. It also opened up emotional space for them to love one another while touching, writing, and talking about their two bodies in ways that were acceptable to their families, friends, neighbors, and most of all, to them. Each inhabited her body through what medical anthropologists call “the lived experience of the body-self.” They also always had “social bodies” constituted through and by representation. The quite different medical and caring resources available to r
ich and poor in the early twentieth century shaped Nellie and Muriel’s body biographies.2 Their bodies, in sickness and in health, provide sites where the “latent socioeconomic, physical, cultural, and moral planes” of their society explicitly intersected.3 In reconstructing the histories of their two bodies, I move across scales of analysis, from the minutiae of Nellie’s body temperature on a given day to the structure of the modern scientific research hospital and global concepts of spirituality.
The first decades of the new century gave rise to new understandings of human interiority as well as unprecedented levels of state-sanctioned violence against bodies.4 These two developments conspicuously came together in the rehabilitation of some white British soldiers whose bodies were put back together by orthopedists and whose minds were probed by psychiatrists.5 Such fractured men often stand in for the “shock” of modernity and its traumatic birth.6 Muriel and Nellie’s body biographies offer a way to reorient the histories of these epochal developments from men to women, from the western front to the home front, from the violence of guns and bombs to the traumas of industrial capitalism and oppositional politics. Muriel and Nellie’s embodied life histories unfolded against the backdrop of a wide range of fragile male and female bodies in the early twentieth century including suffragettes, conscientious objectors, Christian Scientists, and disabled soldiers.
Nellie and Muriel’s loving friendship and their embodied histories throw into relief several central concerns about modernity—from the supposed triumph of science and bureaucratic efficiency to the trauma of world war and the healing balm of psychology. Religion and science vied with another in their claims to cure the sick body by knowing its workings from the inside out and the outside in. Nellie’s and Muriel’s bodies in war and peace provide a way to explore how the entangled global histories of religion and spirituality, the human and medical sciences, produced competing and overlapping understandings of human insideness. Illness and love came before and enabled the full development of their Christian revolutionary politics, labors, and institution building in Bow. That comes next.
