by Seth Koven
18. There are many notable examples of “double biographies” that use paired lives to advances important historical arguments. Two that have particularly influenced my own approach include Sybil Oldfield’s beautiful Spinsters of This Parish: The Life and Times of F.M. Major and Mary Sheepshanks (London, 1984) and Patrick Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1994).
19. See Geoff Eley’s meditation on the relationship between 1960s’ social history and cultural historical approaches of the 1980s and ’90s, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to a History of Society (Ann Arbor, MI, 2005).
20. See feminist historical geographer Gillian Rose’s work on Doris Lester, Children’s House and Bromley-by-Bow, “The Struggle for Political Democracy: Emancipation, Gender, and Geography,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 8:4 (1990): 395–408.
21. Historians have increasingly turned to biography in analyzing “transnational” and global lives. For compelling examples, see Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (New York, 2007) and Martha Hodes, The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 2006); see also Angela Woollacott, Desley Deacon, and Penny Russell, eds., Transnational Lives: Biographies of Global Modernity, 1700-Present (New York, 2010) and Clare Anderson, Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–1920 (Cambridge, 2012). See also Antoinette Burton’s exemplary use of “lives” to illuminate global itineraries and large scale developments, At the Heart of the Empire: Indians, and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain (Berkeley, 1998) and Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India (New York, 2003), and The Postcolonial Careers of Santha Rama Rau (Durham, 2007).
22. For a witty probing analysis of these methodological issues, see Jill Lepore, “Historians Who Love too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography,” Journal of American History 88:1 (June 2001).
23. See, for example, useful biographies about Muriel’s contemporary and founder of Save the Children, Eglantyne Jebb: Clare Mulley, The Woman Who Saved the Children: A Biography of Eglantyne Jebb, Founder of Save the Children (Oxford, 2009) and Linda Mahood’s explicitly feminist theoretical interpretation, “Eglantyne Jebb: Remembering, Representing, and Writing a Rebel Daughter,” Women’s History Review 17:1 (February 2008): 1–20 and Feminism and Voluntary Action: Eglantyne Jebb and Save the Children, 1876–1928 (Basingstoke, 2009). Microhistories centered on the life of the humble and obscure have mostly remained in the province of early modern historians, who accentuate the deep gulf separating their readers from the mentalité of their historical actors while also offering lessons for the present. Notable masters of this form of historical writing include Carlo Ginzburg, Natalie Davis, and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. Historians of modern Europe have largely not undertaken similar full-scale reconstructions of the mental, social, economic, affective, and political lives of the very poor.
24. By the turn of the century, there was demand for “lives” of poor workingwomen, but it was filled mostly by writers of sociofictions. See Autobiography of a Charwoman as Chronicled by Annie Wakeman (London, 1900).
25. Muriel published two full-scale autobiographies, It Occurred to Me (London, 1937) and It So Happened (New York, 1947). Several other books are largely autobiographical and include My Host the Hindu (London, 1931), Entertaining Gandhi (London, 1932) and Kill or Cure (Nashville, 1937).
26. This film clip is freely available on the World Wide Web through several locations including Youtube.com.
27. See Muriel Lester Files, India Office Records and Private Papers, IOR/LPJ/12/445, File 214/32, British Library.
28. Ruth Harris Comfort to Christopher Pond, October 3, 1997, letter in private hands. Alex Comfort married his mistress, who was also his wife’s close friend, soon after the publication of his best-selling Joy of Sex.
29. See A. O. Bell and A. McNeillie, eds., The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume 3, 1925–1930 (London, 1981), 241. On Miss Kilman, see Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (London, 1925, 2012), 13.
30. For a brilliant analysis of Woolf’s relationship with Boxall, see Alison Light, Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury (London, 2008).
31. See Muriel Lester, “The Salt of the Earth,” Adventures in Fellowship, Being the Eighth Annual Report of Kingsley Hall (London, 1923), 15–17, hereafter cited as Lester, “The Salt of the Earth,” (1923).
32. Ibid.
33. The two drafts of “From Birth to Death” are key sources, which I cite frequently. I refer to the first draft, with the name Dowell crossed out, as Lester, “From Birth to Death, 1.” It is now catalogued under “Early Correspondence, From Birth to Death: Life of Nellie Dowell, Lester/2/5, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate Institute. I refer to the second draft, which uses only the name Short, as Lester, “From Birth to Death, 2.” It is now catalogued under “Published and unpublished articles,” Lester/2/15, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate Institute.
34. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh (London, 1831), 108.
35. Examples of this vast influential literature include David Roberts, The Victorian Origins of the British Welfare State (New Haven, 1960); Peter Mandler, ‘The Making of the New Poor Law Redivivus’’, Past and Present: 117 (1987): 131–57; Hugh Heclo, Modern Social Politics in Britain and Sweden (New Haven, 1974); and James Vernon, “The Ethics of Hunger and the Assembly of Society: The Techno-Politics of the School Meal in Modern Britain,” American Historical Review 110:3 (2005). Indispensable accounts of the intellectual and political arguments buttressing state welfare development include José Harris, “Political Thought and the Welfare State, 1870–1940: An Intellectual Framework for British Social Policy,” Past and Present 135 (May 1992); on working-class pressure and political mobilization, see Pat Thane, “The Working Class and State ‘Welfare’ in Britain, 1880–1914,” Historical Journal 27:4 (1984). On the impact of feminist politics on welfare policy development, see Susan Pedersen, Family, Dependence and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914–1945 (Cambridge, 1993).
36. See “Borderlands: Women, Voluntary Action and Child Welfare in Great Britain 1840–1914,” in Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, eds., Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (New York, 1993).
37. See Michael Katz’s landmark In the Shadow of the Poor House: A Social History of Welfare in America (New York, 1986).
38. On these boundaries, see Geoffrey Finlayson, “A Moving Frontier: Voluntarism and the State in British Social Welfare,” Twentieth Century British History I:2 (1990): 183–206. See also Jane Lewis, The Voluntary Sector, the State and Social Work in Britain (Aldershot, 1995) and Elizabeth Macadam, The New Philanthropy: A Study of the Relations between Statutory and Voluntary Services (London, 1934). See also Michael Katz and Christoph Sachsse, eds., The Mixed Economy of Social Welfare (Baden-Baden, 1996). For work demonstrating the variety and vitality of interwar voluntary social action, see Kate Bradley, Poverty, Philanthropy and the State: Charities and the Working Classes in London 1918–79 (Manchester, 2008) and Frank Prochaska’s many books, including The Voluntary Impulse: Philanthropy in Modern Britain (London, 1988), and Christianity and Social Service in Modern Britain (Oxford, 2008).
39. For a path-breaking analysis of laboring women who mobilized in their neighborhoods around “female consciousness” and a commitment to the existing sexual division of productive and caring labor, see Temma Kaplan, “Female Consciousness and Collective Action: The Case of Barcelona, 1910–1918,” Signs 7:3 (Spring 1982). Like Kaplan’s, my analysis emphasizes everyday life and neighborhood as a site for women’s revolutionary activities and ideas.
40. Gareth Stedman Jones, “Working Class Culture, Working Class Politics in London, 1870–1900: Notes on the Remaking of a Working Class,” Journal of Social History 7:4 (Summer 1974).
42. See Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London, 1991); Richard Overy, The Morbid Age: Britain between the Wars (London, 2009); Susan Kingsley Kent, After Shocks: Politics and Trauma in Britain, 1918–1931 (Basingstoke, 2009); and Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, The Long Weekend: A Social History of Great Britain, 1918–1939 (London, 1940). For a synthetic account that balances new forms of leisure such as motoring, the pursuit of domestic pleasures, and the impact of economic reorganization with politics, see Martin Pugh’s optimistic assessment of the interwar years, We Danced All Night: A Social History of Britain Between the Wars (London, 2008).
43. Jay Winter, Dreams of Peace and Freedom: Utopian Moments in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, 2008).
44. See Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (New York, 1936), 192, 199, 210. Mannheim’s model cannot accommodate the distinctly Christian and spiritual basis of Kingsley Hall’s socialism.
Chapter One. Victorian Childhoods and Two Victorian Children
1. “Victorian Sunday,” interview with Kathleen Lester Hogg by Jean Yorke, BBC Radio Broadcast, June 5, 1960. Lester/2/1, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate.
2. See Lester, “From Birth to Death, 1.” Bishopsgate.
3. On the emergence of the cult of childhood innocence, see Viviana Zelizer’s hugely influential Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (New York, 1985).
4. On lives and names, stories and biography, see Kali Israel, Names and Stories: Emilia Dilke and Victorian Culture (Oxford, 1999); see also Carolyn Steedman, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780–1930 (Cambridge, MA, 1995); and Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (New Brunswick, NJ, 1987). On working-class childhood embedded within a Marxist interpretive frame intent to valorize the agency of poor children, see Steve Humphries, Hooligans or Rebels? Oral History of Working-Class Childhood and Youth, 1889–1939 (London, 1981). Humphries’s account emphasizes children’s multivalent forms of resistance to the practices of everyday bourgeois capitalist values and the disciplining force of adults.
5. Doris studied at Britain’s most advanced colleges and centers of early childhood education, including a degree course at Westhill College under Archibald Hamilton Brown and Emily Huntley that combined progressive politics, paternalist racism, and pedagogy with training in the emerging fields of psychology and child life. Westhill also put Doris in touch with many Quaker leaders of the student movement in prewar Britain with whom Muriel worked closely. On the early history of Westhill College, see Jack Priestly, “The Lumber Merchant and the Chocolate King: The Contributions of George Hamilton Archibald and George Cadbury to the Sunday School Movement in England and Wales,” in Stephen Orchard and J.HY. Briggs, eds., The Sunday School Movement: Studies in the Growth and Decline of Sunday Schools (Milton Keynes, 2007). For an example of paternalist racism, see Emily Huntley, The Book of Little Black Brother (London, 1911).
6. Scholars in the 1960s and ’70s paid considerable attention to the so-called “labour aristocracy” as they sought to explain why Britain, the first industrial capitalist nation, failed to produce a revolutionary working class. See R. Q. Gray, The Labour Aristocracy in Victorian Edinburgh (Oxford, 1976); Eric Hobsbawm, Labouring Men (London, 1964). However, such scholars saw a clear and strong line separating labor aristocrats from the lowest ranks of the middle class.
7. Charles Booth, “Sunday Walk to Visit churches, Poplar, Bromley.” January 26, 1902, B385, pp.191. Booth papers, BLPES. “Respectability” was a keyword in Victorian Britain—one of whose meanings derived from its opposition to the “unrespectable” even as the precise socioeconomic conditions it described varied. On flexible and overlapping definitions of respectability, see F.M.L. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain (Cambridge, MA, 1988).
8. Lester, “From Birth to Death, 1.” Bishopsgate.
9. Ibid.
10. Nellie’s parents may well have chosen to live in Granada Terrace because their next-door neighbor, Rebecca Middleton, like William Dowell, had migrated to London from Sunderland. My thanks to Christopher Lloyd, the learned and generous local history librarian, Tower Hamlets Local History Library, for figuring out the precise location of Granada Terrace; it does not exist in most maps because it was not a street per se.
11. According to the Kelly’s Post Office Directory for 1875, there were several fancy drapers on Granada Terrace along with a nearby bank. On the history of Commercial Road, see Sydney Maddocks, “Commercial Road,” The Copartnership Herald 2:21 (November 1932). There is a long line of authors who evoke the sounds and sights of East London including Walter Besant, East London (London, 1899); William Fishman, East End 1888: A Year in a London Borough Among the Labouring Poor (London, 1988), and John Marriott, Beyond the Tower: A History of East London (London, 2011).
12. See Cook’s Handbook for London (London, 1878), 18.
13. See J. Ewing Ritchie, Here and There in London (London, 1859), chap. 12.
14. “Sunday with the Sailors,” All the Year Round (June 18, 1881): 273.
15. In the 1871 census, all of the male Dowells living in Sunderland are listed as “seamen.”
16. I have reconstructed William Dowell’s seafaring life using his extant “Masters Certificates” of 1868 and 1873 for achieving the rank of First Mate. Issued by the Lords of the Committee of Privy Council For Trade and authorized by the Board of Trade, these forms document the applicant’s rank, dates of service on each ship, name of ship, and its point of origin. It also includes a list of testimonials, a column for special notations as well as date and place of birth, current residence, description of voyage, and reason for applying for a replacement copy of the certificate. Dowell’s First Mates’ certificates are Number 87677 for 1868 and Number 97748 for 1873. The originals are housed in the National Maritime Museum but I accessed them via Ancestry.com. Harriet and William married in early 1870 and their first child, Florence, was born later that year.
17. On the misfortunes of the S.S. Chanonry, see “District Intelligence,” Western Mail, January 28, 1873, 3. I have reconstructed William Dowell’s working life through two of his surviving certificate applications for qualifying as first mate.
18. See Mates and Petty Officers’ Wages, table 24, Parliamentary Papers, House of Commons and Command, vol. 87, 1895, C. 306, p. 42.
19. This is the dwelling in which Eleanor Dowell was born according to her birth certificate.
20. On these sorts of gender-based household choices and economies, see Jan DeVries, Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the present (New York, 2008).
21. Lester, “From Birth to Death, 1.” Bishopsgate.
22. See Anna Davin, Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street in London, 1870–1914 (London, 1996).
23. All of this information is derived from documents readily available on Ancestry. com. See birth certificate of Harriet Sloan (later Dowell). Archibald Henry Sloan was married to Elizabeth Morris by Rev. Samuel Barnett, Vicar of St. Judes, Whitechapel and future Warden of Toynbee Hall on Christ
mas Day, 1880. See marriage records, St. Judes, Whitechapel, December 1880.
24. Harriet Sloan (Dowell) was baptized at St. Mary, Whitechapel on January 28, 1846, accessed via Ancestry.com.
25. On working-class reading and cultures of literacy, see Jonathan Rose’s panoramic The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven, CT, 2001). See also David Mitch, The Rise of Popular Literacy in Victorian England: The Influence of Private Choice and Public Policy (Philadelphia, 1992).
26. April 2, 1883, Admission Register, Infants, Marner Street School, Bow, 1882–1888, LCC/EO/Div5/MAR1/AD/7, London Metropolitan Archive. Somewhat surprisingly, her deceased father William is still listed as her guardian, though Harriet is listed as guardian for her sister in another admission record. Perhaps this is because the form allows for either the father or the guardian. She transferred out of the school on June 23, 1884. Her birth date is listed as April 16, 1877 rather than her actual date of birth, April 17, 1876. It hardly seems possible that her mother had forgotten her age; perhaps Harriet Dowell sought to extend Nellie’s schooling.
27. Their house could not have been more than six years old, since the Metropolitan Board of Works only approved the cutting and laying of the street in 1877 and noted that the name of the street needed to be fixed on posts until the construction of houses on the street. See MBW/BA-24451, London Metropolitan Archives. The streets around Marner Street School (Marner, Empson, and Gurley Streets) remained an important center of Nellie’s family life for the next three decades.
