by Seth Koven
Nellie captured the importance of illness to their relationship in a letter she wrote to Muriel in 1916:
I have not gone off
I will when you get better
for I feel I have got
something to do with your
illness126
Nellie’s phrase that she had “something to do with [Muriel’s] illness,” did not mean that she had caused Muriel to be sick but rather that Muriel’s illness gave her something to do. Her self-chosen job was to make “my patient” Muriel strong so that they could do their joint work of waging peace in war-mad East London.127
On Valentine’s Day 1912, Nellie diagnosed Muriel’s work for their Bow neighbors as the root cause of Muriel’s illness: she toiled too hard on behalf of others.128 This was a diagnosis that Muriel herself came to endorse. Nellie conceived of her labor to care for Muriel as vital to Muriel’s efforts on behalf of Bow. Muriel’s physical exhaustion leveled the playing field between them by giving Nellie a chance to “beat” Muriel at her own game of nurturing others:
are you really better I have
thought about you, & was so
sorry for I know you won’t
give in & rest & look after
every one else I think I
can beat you, now you always
think you are strong, but I
4.14. Nellie Dowell to Muriel Lester, 1916, Nellie Dowell Letters. (Courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute).
know now & when you come
home & do your Tramping
round Bow, I shall have to
look after you129
As Muriel’s nurse, Nellie claims to know her patient better than she knows herself. Her phrase, “but I know now” implies that she possesses insights that Muriel lacks. After all, Muriel “thinks” she is strong but Nellie “knows” that she is not. Muriel needs Nellie to “look after” her. From Nellie’s perspective, Muriel equates “rest” with a kind of submission, a “giv[ing] in.” Nellie’s admiration for Muriel’s devotion to Bow vies with her faint disapproval of Muriel’s “tramping round Bow.” Nursing Muriel bolstered Nellie’s sense of her own authority but it also risked repositioning her as the bourgeois invalid’s servant.130
Christian prayer was no substitute for Nellie’s ministrations during Muriel’s catastrophic breakdown. As Nellie explained in an undated letter probably written in the autumn of 1916, when zeppelin attacks and gunfire were fairly common over Bow:
I am so glad you are better
I don’t want you to go away now
you have got me well to look after
you, I know what you have gone
through with ear ache poor little
Arthur has been laid up a week
with it & he looks so frail and white
I hope you don’t look like that131
Illness bound them together in a complex web of reciprocity (“now you have got me well to look after you”) even as discussing their neighbors infirmities (Arthur’s ear ache) affirmed their shared world of interests and community-based labors. The word “now” functions as a syntactically ambiguous bridge between two separate but linked thoughts. Nellie does not want Muriel to go away “now”; at the same time, Nellie is “now” well and thus able to take care of Muriel. As this letter makes clear, Muriel’s ill health gave Nellie permission to write and talk about Muriel’s body even as she imagines Muriel’s physical condition by describing “poor little Arthur’s” frailty. Illness offered Nellie and Muriel a socially legible and acceptable explanation for their deepening physical and emotional intimacy.
Nellie’s letters chronicled her physical ailments and Muriel’s decisive role in taking care of her. Nellie believed that Muriel’s interventions had literally saved her life: “You have been a true friend to us & I shall never forget you for it, I might have been with poor Annie by now if you had not looked after me & told me things for my own good.”132 On March 24, 1912 she was
thankful to say I feel
alright so you see that my
change with you done me
a lot of good & built me
up for the rest of the
winter133
Illness let Nellie integrate herself into the Lester family. Nellie closed virtually all her letters to Muriel by sending her best wishes and affection to Henry and Rachel Lester. Muriel reciprocated by writing her prose narrative “From Birth to Death” through Harriet Dowell’s eyes. Loving one another’s families affirmed their own love. It also permitted them to see one another as family members—a form of fictive kinship with one another.
Nellie’s preoccupation with health—her own and Muriel’s—needs interpreting against the backdrop of her traumatic incapacity to engage in traditional waged labor and her identification of illness with the workhouse and its humiliating loss of independence. She daily witnessed the devastating impact of sickness on working-class families and households. In a rare moment of self-pity, she lamented to Muriel that she “got sacked” from everything she did—everything, that is, except from her “work” with Muriel. Aware of her own physical and economic vulnerability, Nellie fretted and thought of “all sorts of things, I ought not to worry over my future but I thought I had to go & earn something you did not tell me anything before you went & I got worried I hope never to live on my Mother or anyone.”
I suspect that Muriel left Nellie money without seeking or receiving Nellie’s assent. Nellie’s gratitude does not alter the fact that Muriel may well have acted within a philanthropic gift economy predicated upon class and economic inequality. It also hints at how essential Muriel and Doris were for Nellie’s economic survival. Did they regularly help pay the rent of Nellie and Harriet Dowell’s flat directly next door to them on Bruce Road? My guess is that they did. Nellie devoted her days and nights to sustaining the sisters’ many projects in Bow. She could not have had time to do much else, besides taking care of her many nieces and nephews who move in and out of her letters. If the Lesters gave Nellie money, she certainly did more than her share of community-centered labor to earn it. Such an interpretation gestures at the possibility that Nellie and Muriel created an economy that rewarded care giving as ethically and socially valuable work.
However much Nellie wished to be with Muriel, she also protectively wanted Muriel to be away from the health-endangering demands and dirtiness of life in Bow. Nellie enacted her ambivalence on the level of syntax, which literally mimics the free associative rhythm of spoken English as conflicted feelings flow into one another:
Just a little note to you
so glad you are having a
lazy time & out of dirty
bow at present, but I wish
you were here so many
would be glad to see you
poor little Emma West
is so very ill with Rheumatic
fever, but I am pleased to
say she is a little better134
The end of the line of writing on the page sometimes substituted for punctuation and suggests that her literary production was partially shaped by a visual spatial relationship of words on the page rather than the regulatory abstractions of formal grammar.
On the level of content, Nellie transmuted her individual longing to be with Muriel—her “wish you were here”—into a collective desire for her return—“so many would be glad to see you.” This gladness functioned as a subtle reminder, one that does not quite rise to the level of rebuke, that Muriel is having a “lazy time” and not doing the work of caring for their mutual friends and neighbors in Bow. Nellie literally did Muriel’s work for her by devoting her attentions to Emma West: “today I go round and sit with her to give her Mother a little time downstairs to look after the rest of her family I know she [Emma West] is a favourite of yours.” She concluded this train of thought by claiming that she does not “want to write and tell you any troubles” though this is precisely what she has just done by informing Muriel that one of her favorites is “so very ill with Rheumatic
fever.” This sentence carried powerful resonance since Muriel knew only too well that her foremost favorite, Nellie, had almost lost her life and sanity to rheumatic fever. Nellie’s phrase, “she is a favourite of yours,” [my italics] suggests that Nellie may have seen herself as one of many especially beloved girls and women in Bow vying for Muriel’s love.
Nellie used illness and bodily infirmity to produce an intimate argot, her own language of love. In caring for Muriel’s sick body and being cared for by Muriel, Nellie found a way to rhetorically enact mobile relations of reciprocity across the vast class divide that separated them. She also produced a version of herself as an embodied desiring proletarian subject, albeit one whose desire to have and “belong to” Muriel could never be satisfied; and whose body was unfit for factory labor. In a rare moment of witty self-affirmation in 1922, Nellie allowed herself to acknowledge just how much she meant to Muriel: “bless your old gums you do love your old fashion Nell sometimes not so clever, but such a warm spot for such friends.”135
Nellie never confused reciprocity for equality. Nor did she want to be Muriel’s equal. Muriel’s clean white hands were always part of what made her so attractive to Nellie. As she poignantly explained to Muriel, “I do hope some time I can do something for you you see if you was one of us & wanted help it is easier for us to give help but you of course are different.” Nellie cherished Muriel’s “difference” even as she struggled within herself to allow Muriel to be like her and tramp through the dirty streets of East London as they engaged in social, religious, and political work.136 Nellie was acutely aware of her nonconforming grammar. She liked to imagine Muriel looking over her shoulder as she engaged in her epistolary exercises, commenting, correcting, applauding her efforts. Nellie enacted and thematized a grammar of difference that playfully recognized difference itself.
“WHY IT IS I DON’T KNOW”
What sort of friendship was Muriel and Nellie’s? A body of brilliant feminist and queer scholarship on women’s friendships provides a broad range of interpretive strategies by which to make sense of the surviving fragments of their remarkable partnership. Scholars now recognize the social and cultural centrality of white middle-class women’s “romantic friendships” to nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Anglo-American domesticity. Spanning a continuum from chaste to fully sexual relationships, such friendships nested comfortably within and complemented marriages to men.137 Other women forged “erotically charged” “intimate friendships” that were much less congenial to patriarchy even as they borrowed the spousal language of opposite-sex conjugality. Martha Vicinus’s nuanced cultural anthropology of such partnerships emphasizes “the intricate interplay between the spirit and the body” in women’s language of amity and exchanges of Bibles, prayers, and locks of hair. Some preferred the “erotic pleasure of unfulfilled, idealized love” to physical consummation; others, like Mary Benson, wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury, enjoyed sexual relationships with her female spiritual soulmates. For Benson, religion and erotic love between women were “inextricably twined cords.”138 Vicinus ushers “intimate friends” into the ranks of lesbians. Such an approach presumes rather than asks whether these women had a sexual identity at all. It is far from clear that either Muriel or Nellie understood herself through and with her sexuality. What happens when we shift focus from sexual identity (was she a lesbian?) to explore the conceptual space between “the sexual” and “the erotic”?
Cogently critiquing the blurry inclusivity of the continuum paradigm, Sharon Marcus defines “the sexual” as “genital arousal” while situating “the erotic” in the expansive and labile domain of desire and pleasure. Armed with this distinction, she offers precise historically informed procedures by which to differentiate friendship, erotic obsession, and sexual partnership while acknowledging that sometimes extant evidence makes this impossible. “We can distinguish female friends from female lovers,” she avers, “only by situating [their] words in the fullest possible context.” “In iterated, cumulative, private language and mutual dependence, we can locate a tipping point that separated Victorian women’s ardent friendships from the sexual relationships they also formed with one another.”139
Can such a “tipping point” be found in Nellie’s “private language” of love? In what ways did Muriel and Nellie’s cross-class loving partnership reproduce or part ways with the well-delineated rituals of middle-class women’s friendships? We know a great deal about how elite men like Oscar Wilde eroticized working-class men, the “rough trade” with whom they had sex. About how class difference may—or may not—have structured female same-sex desire and sex, we know far too little. Nellie’s and Muriel’s partnership promises a way to open up this field of inquiry.
As Nellie struggled to reclaim her personhood after her release from Whitechapel’s Poor Law lunatic ward, she and Muriel turned to God to heal her psychic wounds and bind them closer together. Sometime in November 1910, Muriel left Nellie a Bible. Nellie
wondered where it [the Bible] came from
& looking inside saw your name
dated the 21 that is our special
date to remember our first
loving each other
but I am ashamed to say it is
new & put away it will be the
only one I shall use now140
Nellie narrated a moment in which Christian faith and love cross, overlap, and merge. Muriel introduced Nellie to a well-established ritual in which the gift of a Bible betokened God’s love as well as Christian love between giver and receiver. (See fig. 4.15.)
Guiding a beloved friend to God was a well-trodden pathway by which women heightened their intimacy with one another. In the seventeenth century, “seraphic friendships” untainted by sexual desire helped women (and even some men and women) lead one another toward mystical union with God. Letters served as ideal vehicles for such friendships by reducing the temptations of fleshly pollution. Physical presence mattered less than spiritual intimacy.141 Eighteenth-century female Methodists sustained an “erotics of friendship” in which “romantic gestures and emotions … were consciously cultivated as an aid to spiritual progress.”142 For middle-class women like Muriel, Bibles, along with locks of hair and rings, were among the most important objects of exchange within a female gift economy of Christian love. Not so for Cockney factory women in early twentieth-century Bow like Nellie who could not afford such gifts. Laboring women pooled their money to help out their “mates” in times of crisis. Those in steady employment sometimes “clubbed” funds to help each other make specific purchases. But I suspect that none of Nellie’s relatives or friends in Bow had ever received the gift of a Bible, much less one from a woman as fine as Muriel. Nellie and Muriel began with vastly different cultural frames by which to interpret the meaning of Muriel’s gift and love. What was familiar to Muriel was probably quite unfamiliar and extraordinary for Nellie.
4.15. Nellie Dowell to Muriel Lester, 1910, Nellie Dowell Letters. (Courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute.)
Nellie’s Bible, like the declaration of their feelings, remained “new.” Her delight in finding it mingled with shame. Syntactically, her confession of shame follows directly after “our first loving each other.” She has disappointed Muriel, or so Nellie imagined, because she has not immediately begun to study, read, and handle the Bible. She has kept it too new. This will change, she promises: “it will be the only one I shall use now.” Nellie expressed her desire to have and be with Muriel by desiring to be like Muriel and gain her approval. By inscribing Nellie’s Bible with her name and the date of their “first loving each other,” Muriel sacralized and commemorated their loving partnership. Nellie’s Bible must have been the most precious thing that she ever owned: God’s word literally touched by her beloved friend’s hand.
We will never know what Muriel and Nellie said on the twenty-first but it marked one of the many transformations of love that Muriel hoped would flow from her “God is Love” theology. The year 1910 was
a pivotal moment in Nellie and Muriel’s lives. From Muriel’s perspective, “our special date to remember our first loving each other” may well have inaugurated a new phase in her lifelong project to use God’s love to remake the world, one soul at a time. From 1910 until her death in 1923, Nellie joined Doris as Muriel’s indispensable partner in bringing Christian revolution to Bow. Love was the engine and goal of this revolution in everyday life. It proved exhilarating, confusing, and challenging for Nellie and Muriel.
Nellie’s letters consistently lament Muriel’s many absences from Bow and express her longing for a greater and more exclusive intimacy than Muriel seemed willing to sanction. Muriel seems to have understood the power of absence. She did not physically hand Nellie her Bible but left if for her to discover on her own. Perhaps she felt too shy to witness Nellie reading her loving inscription. When Nellie was with Muriel, she suffered the pangs of a schoolgirl crush and found herself shy and tongue-tied.
I do miss you
why it is I don’t know
every time is worse to me but
I always feel shy of you when
you come home
so don’t take notice of me
& think I don’t love you.143
