by Seth Koven
Muriel must have felt proud of Platten and terribly responsible for him. As he informed the Appeal Tribunal in Loughton, “before the war he had learned the Sermon on the Mount so well that when the war started he had no hesitation in taking such an attitude.”111 In his original application for complete exemption from military service, he outlined his reasoning. War was inconsistent with Christ’s principles. He could undertake no labor that would bolster the warfare state. War, he explained, could only be eradicated by the recognition of the “Brotherhood of Man.” To the Secretary of the Committee on Employment of Conscientious Objectors, he later elaborated “the only sure basis on which society can be built is Love as expressed in the life and death of Jesus Christ.”112 These were the core lessons Muriel and Doris had taught him.
A local Essex newspaper hints at just how accountable Muriel and Doris must have felt for Platten. It reported that Platten submitted a letter vouching for his conscientious objections to war from none other than Henry Lester along with the new minister of Loughton Union Church, Dr. Wicks. Nor was Muriel immune from the sting of local gossip about who had led young Loughton men like Platten to lose their “souls,” “honour” and “manhood.” The “Loughtoniana” column of a local newspaper provocatively asked, “Who is behind these Loughton conscientious objectors, teaching them their new gospel? If what we hear be true, someone is doing a grave disservice to the country.”113 What part such vicious insinuations played in Muriel’s collapse is impossible to say, but they surely exacerbated her frayed nerves.
Platten, like most conscientious objectors, kept vigilant tabs on his own body and wrote a detailed manuscript about his three months in Maidstone prison and Wormwood Scrubs prison. (He published a short version of this in 1920 for Kingsley Hall’s periodical The Gleam.) Producing such narratives were a form a resistance and part of conscientious objectors’ collective strategy to cultivate public sympathy. Young and healthy, Platten apparently had no problem adjusting to the scant diet and harsh discipline of prison life before his release to undertake civilian work building roads in Scotland for the duration of the war. By his own reckoning, he managed rather well. Platten’s ease in withstanding the state’s bodily work demonstrated the efficacy of his ethics and his manly fortitude.
Such was not the case for conscientious objector Stephen Hobhouse, scion of a great Somerset landed gentry family. Hobhouse had married Muriel’s friend and co-worker at Kingsley Hall, Rosa Waugh, in the late spring of 1915. This was a union of “Eminent Victorian” families in the name of Christian social justice. Rosa’s father Benjamin was the founder of the Society for Prevention to Cruelty to Children and her brother-in-law, Sir William Clarke Hall, the leading force behind the Children’s Charter of 1908. Hobhouses—from John Cam to Emily and L. T.—had dotted the landscape of radical political culture for the better part of a century. Doris and Muriel Lester and Rosa and Stephen Hobhouse supported one another’s daring experiments in Christian ethics for the rest of their long lives.
Muriel had known about Stephen for years. Mutual friends had even urged him to court Muriel. High-strung, often depressed and inclined to excessive introspection, he had a long history of nervous breakdowns since his Tolstoy-inspired renunciation of his family estate more than a decade earlier. He, like Muriel, had also moved into a small slum flat in East London, the better to do God’s work. Successive imprisonments as a conscientious objector in 1916–17 left him badly weakened in mind and body. Surviving his ordeal endowed Stephen with an aura of moral purity, but it was far from a masculine victory.
Stephen Hobhouse’s prison letters to his wife Rosa excruciatingly detailed his bodily functions and deprivations as well as his own self-imposed mortifications.114 Rosa, one of Kingsley Hall’s first two residents, was Nellie and Muriel’s close comrade and interlocutor during these years. She circulated Stephen’s letters widely and even published sections of them. Stephen’s able exceptionally well-connected mother Margaret Potter Hobhouse (Beatrice Webb’s sister) shared a distilled version of them with the entire world in her best-selling chronicle of the unjust treatment of conscientious objectors, I Appeal unto Caesar. Mrs. Hobhouse also broadcast news about Stephen’s afflictions at the hands of the state in hundreds of private letters to leaders of church and state, many of whom were family friends.115 By 1917, Stephen Hobhouse was Britain’s best known and most controversial conscientious objector. His selfless labors on behalf of the outcast poor before the war challenged public perceptions of conscientious objectors as selfish shirkers. This did not please leaders of the war effort like his godfather, Lord Alfred Milner, and the Prime Minister Lloyd George.116
Reports about conscientious objectors’ bodily sufferings—their beatings and abuse by soldiers and prison guards, the horrendous conditions of their incarceration and restricted diets—were a staple of pacifist papers like the Tribunal and the New Crusader. (See fig. 4.11.) They were the stuff of daily conversation among Muriel’s friends and fellow travelers. Such tales produced an updated Protestant martyrology of suffering in the name of Christ, which abetted conscientious objectors’ claims to the moral authority of victims of state violence. They had two other crucial functions. For the British state, conscientious objectors’ suffering in prison after an initial refusal of exemption became the only acceptable proof that an objector’s conscience was genuine. Denial of conscience and subsequent willingness to endure repeated punishments perversely proved that a man had always—already—possessed one. Second, objectors’ bodily disablement in the name of conscience functioned as a de facto rebuttal of those who frequently contrasted conscientious objectors’ selfish desire for comfort with their soldier-hero brothers’ unspeakable hardships and deprivations.
Did Muriel think about her breakdown as a somatic, psychological, and distinctly female response to her principled stance as a pacifist? Was it the only way she—as a woman—could participate in the War’s masculine moral economy of embodied suffering? She does not say but I suspect that she did. While Muriel’s health troubles predated the war, her nervous breakdown in 1916–17 made manifest the war raging within her. Nellie was determined to do her part to get Muriel better even as she longed for Muriel to return to Kingsley Hall, to Bow, and above all, to her.
4.11. This cartoon reflects the centrality of body politics to debates around conscientious objectors, their popular representation, and their experience of imprisonment. “What a CO Feels Like,” The News Sheet 13 (1917): 8. (Courtesy of Swarthmore College, Peace Collection.)
GRAMMARS OF DIFFERENCE, EROTICS OF ILLNESS IN NELLIE’S LETTERS TO MURIEL
Muriel’s many illnesses from 1910 to 1917 ensured that she was often convalescing far from Bow and Nellie. Her physical absence from Bow instigated Nellie’s letter writing and Muriel’s. Letter writing gave Nellie a way—physically, intellectually, and psychologically—to connect with Muriel, to collapse the distances between them. Nellie’s letters were one means by which she articulated who she was in relation to Muriel. They convey words, ideas, and feelings. They are also objects, literally ink on paper. Muriel held, read, reread, and ultimately archived them for herself and posterity. They bear Nellie’s trace as their author and Muriel’s as their recipient.
Nellie’s letters enunciate and constrain several sets of intertwined dynamics between distance and desire, presence and absence, hierarchy and equality. They are full of chatty details about mutual friends and neighbors, Muriel and Nellie’s efforts to live by their own rigorously ethical creed, the ravages of war on the homefront, and Nellie’s unsatisfiable longing to be close to Muriel. Throughout all the letters, Nellie discusses her health and Muriel’s. Love and illness are the master tropes of her letters. Their rhythms and patterns approximate spoken rather than standard written English. Written in “informal” prose with little regard to rules of grammar and syntax, they burst with conviction and freshness.117 Their immediacy is one rhetorical effect of her writing, a way that Nellie demanded Muriel’s attention and affecti
on. The speaker implied by a pronoun, the “I” or “you,” shifts without warning in mid-sentence. Thoughts sometimes follow a logic of feeling and association rather than sequential argument.
Nellie’s letters bear striking resemblance to Gertrude Stein’s daring World War I modernist texts. Comparing them challenges entrenched hierarchies of literary value: Stein’s writing is literature, Nellie’s letters aren’t. It also encourages the kind of careful analysis of form and language that we take for granted in reading Stein. Listen to these snippets of dialogue from Stein’s wartime “Do Let Us Go Away, A Play” (1918) and then to a passage from one of Nellie’s wartime letters to Muriel:
(The lawyer.) I went often to see you and every day I said I love you better I do love you better. That’s it.
They were together and they said John are you going. He said something.
They were altogether. I often think about it.
And this second passage:
(Paul) Thunder. It will not rain yet. It usually does not at this season. I hope that a war will come. I would like to be interpreter.
Here is Nellie’s description of an early winter evening in wartime Bow (see fig. 4.12):
I think now the nights are drawing in more will come Kingsley Hall will look like your lovely Hall at Loughton but how can it, that looks to clean only fit for Sunday clothes don’ touch but ours is come in don’t go home & change come & be happy (nice cup of tea a) Dough Nut or a cocanut Bar ask Miss Harris about a nice cup of tea lovely. two bites & the Dough Nuts gone its pouring of rain & our lodger is coming home to tea I think she is happy118
4.12. Nellie Dowell to Muriel Lester, n.d., Nellie Dowell Letters. (Courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute.)
Nellie wittily evokes the upper-middle-class tidiness and scolding formality of the Grange (“your lovely Hall at Loughton”) as “only fit for Sunday clothes don’ touch.” She captures without judgment and without benefit of the ponderous compound verb—“are gone”—just how quickly hungry people eat free doughnuts: “two bites & the Dough Nuts gone.” Her use of the present tense makes her palpable—as if she were standing directly before Muriel. There is a delightful disconnection in the successive clauses “its pouring of rain and our lodger is coming home to tea I think she is happy” that creates the effect of taking us into her mind, almost as each thought enters it. Nellie does not explain that perhaps her lodger will come home because it is raining outside and she needs the comfort of tea and Nellie’s company. Nor does Paul in Stein’s text explain that the sound of thunder prompts him to think about the arrival of rain, which leads him to anticipate the coming of war; and with war, the part he hopes to play in it as an interpreter. With remarkable compressed economy, both women convey meaning without needing to fill up the spaces between each clause.
Stein critics call her use of such techniques “auditory consciousness” and laud her daring attempt to reproduce the mind’s “associational paths” as part of her representation of human interiority.119 Stein herself characterized it as writing “the movement of the words spoken by someone who lately I have been hearing sound like my writing feels to me as I am writing.”120 Nellie, unlike Stein, did not set out to revolutionize literary forms and conventions. She wrote letters to engage and manipulate Muriel’s feelings, not intervene in the domain of “literature.” There is, however, more than a morphological resemblance between Nellie’s and Stein’s prose. The speech patterns of working-class moderns like Nellie provided the audible archive upon which Stein, the literary modernist, drew in her writings. How Nellie used language—not just the information contained in her letters—is historically significant. Her language, like Stein’s, cannily represented inner feelings, desires, and longings. Her literary practices must be counted among the many border crossings that motivated and sustained her relationship with Muriel.
To read Nellie’s letters is to imagine hearing her clear strong voice. However, they emphatically do not offer direct access to some authentic naïve proletarian. They are deceptively candid epistolary performances. Nellie calls attention to the moment and scene of her writing as well as the impact of her prose on Muriel. She sought Muriel’s approval for her literary efforts even as she excused her grammatical shortcomings by reminding Muriel that she lacked a room of her own in which to write. In the midst of her nephew Will’s disruptive antics—he “dressed the cat up and bandaged his paw”—Nellie averred that
this is a funny
letter all I can hear is Aunt
Nell so how do you think I
am writing to you with these
monkey’s round me121
The letter leaps from critical self-reflection about her compositional abilities to the social conditions of her writing to direct conversation with Muriel.
Nellie knew that her own grammar rhetorically enacted difference even as she reflected on how difference structured her relationship with Muriel. At the end of a letter about Muriel’s role as her teacher and moral guide, Nellie imagines Muriel as a critical reader of her letter. The letter metamorphoses into a schoolgirl exercise, scrutinized by the teacher for “mistakes.”
You will see my mistakes you
know you are going to give me
lessons in writing letters some
day, I hope for you are my teacher
in every thing so please tell me
my mistakes & if you have time
& not catch cold later on give
me some more chapters122
Such expressions remind us that Nellie toiled over these letters and recognized their significance. Her eloquence redounds to Muriel’s credit. Her “mistakes” create opportunities for more private “lessons,” which included reading and discussing chapters of books together such as a volume of Tolstoy’s Christian writings.
Nellie’s nonconforming prose underscored her status as that elusively desirable object of bourgeois benevolence, the Cockney factory girl. She invites Muriel to spend more time with her by appealing to Muriel’s pedagogical and missionary impulse to improve her skills as a writer. If Muriel lovingly encouraged Nellie to want to be more like her, Nellie mastered the art of reminding Muriel of her obligations to Bow and to Nellie. Nellie’s letters show her using difference to serve her own needs. As with so many of Nellie’s expressions of love, illness hovers close on the horizon. Her request for “more chapters” is accompanied by the caveat that Muriel “not catch cold later.”
Letter writing was an expression of love and a form of labor, which required Nellie to draw upon the cultural and intellectual resources available to her. Health and illness are recurring themes in them. For example, she informed Muriel that her mother, Harriet Dowell, was too sick to leave the house and her nephew Willie had broken his leg and was hopping around her tiny flat. Nellie also frequently discussed her own precarious health. After her hospitalization and confinement, she understandably distrusted doctors even as her broken body required ever more vigilant care. Instead of returning either to London Hospital or the Poplar and Stepney Poor Law Asylum hospital, she decided to take advantage of her close proximity to the Christian evangelical medical mission, Berger Hall, established by the Grattan Guinness’s Regions Beyond Inland Mission in South Bromley. (See fig. 4.13.) Nellie confided to Muriel that “Mother [Harriet Dowell] and I are both going under Dr. Macrae at Bergar Hall he has done the Scout [Harriet] a lot of good I have lost all faith in Drs but I ll give him a trial.”123
Nellie and Muriel played the part of nurse and patient for one another. These roles created opportunities for substantial physical and emotional intimacy between them even as it allowed them to negotiate—and renegotiate—relations of power and authority across their differences. This is evident in an early letter Nellie wrote soon after she returned home after spending a month recuperating with Muriel and her parents. Nellie recalls a scene of great intimacy with Muriel that is all the more stunning when contextualized. Henry and Rachel Lester must have invited Nellie to join them—and share a bedroo
m with Muriel—on a family holiday in pursuit of good health. It’s hard to imagine what their servants thought about this witty Cockney ex-factory worker sharing such close quarters with the elegant educated Miss Lester. “I hope I shall always know you for you don’t know how I love you, for all you have done for me I can never repay you, but if I ever stop with you again I’ll brush your hair off for it was a pleasure I don’t often get and sleeping in your room and keeping you awake to talk to me.”124 (See fig. 4.14.) Nellie invokes tropes of exchange, debt, and delight.125 She claims she can “never repay” Muriel but then immediately suggests that brushing Muriel’s hair is one way she already has. This form of repayment produces intense pleasure for Muriel and Nellie. Gratitude for Muriel’s part in restoring Nellie’s health cannot be separated from the pleasures of their shared bedroom.
4.13. Called the “Church of the People,” MacKenzie Medical Clinic attached to Berger Hall issued tickets to poor men and women like Nellie granting them access to low-cost medical care outside the Poor Law asylum and hospital. Large numbers of people from Nellie’s South Bromley neighborhood, including Dowell family members, came to see Dr. McRae and his staff on clinic days. Sources: (Top) Charles Booth Papers, B/176. (Courtesy of the Library of the London School of Economics and Political Science.) (Bottom) People outside Berger Hall’s MacKenzie Clinic, Dr. Harry Guinness Clinic, Not Unto Us, A Record of 21 Years Missionary Service (London, 1908), 60–61.
