The Match Girl and the Heiress

by Seth Koven

  28. “Sunday in East London. Bow and Bromley,” Sunday At Home (1895): 389, 391.

  29. See Davin, Growing Up Poor. As Davin explains, the provision of any form of infant care was hotly contested by those who rightly feared the transformation of public education into a form of publicly funded childcare. Children were admitted to the infants’ room by age 4.

  30. Lone motherhood was, from the outset, a key criterion for remission of school fees by the London School Board. In 1883, requests for fee remission by poor widowed women like Mrs. Dowell were handled by the Charity Organisation, working in concert with the school board. See Gretchen Galbraith, Reading Lives: Reconstructing Childhood, Books, and Schools in Britain, 1870–1920 (New York, 1997), 92. School fees ranged from one pence in the poorest districts to six pence per week in the most well-to-do. See “Report of the School Management Committee for the Half-Year Ended on the 22 March, 1883,” School Board for London, (London, 1883). By 1892, the SBL largely eliminated school fees altogether—thus avoiding the time-consuming process of certifying each individual application for fee remission. On the history of single motherhood in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Pat Thane and Tanya Evans, Sinners? Scroungers? Saints?: Unmarried Motherhood in Twentieth-Century England (Oxford, 2012), especially chap.1.

  31. James Runciman, “The New Departure in Education,” Contemporary Review 54 (1888): 33.

  32. On Ruskin’s efforts to encourage pupil teachers to bring imagination to their instruction, see Christopher R. Bischof, “Making Good: British Elementary Teachers and the Social Landscape, 1846–1902,” PhD diss., Rutgers University, 2014, chapter 2.

  33. On school attendance, see David Rubenstein, School Attendance in London, 1870–1904: A Social History (Hull, 1969).

  34. Mrs. Westlake, “The London School Board,” Macmillan’s Magazine 41 (1879–80): 85. On board school and LCC geography lessons, see Christopher M. Bischof, “Making Good,” chapters 2 and 3.

  35. On Lyschinska, see “Preface,” The Kindergarten Principle, Its Educational Value and Chief Applications (London, 1880). For a detailed account of the infants’ room curriculum and its implementation, see M. J. Lyschinska’s “Report of the Superintendent of Method in Infants’ School, for the Half Year Ended 24th March 1882,” in “Report of the School Management Committee for the Half-Year Ended on the 24th March, 1882,” School Board for London (London, 1883), 173–77. See also Sarah Tooley, “According to Froebel, an Interview with Miss Mary Lyschinska,” The Woman’s Signal 69 (April 25, 1895): 258–59.

  36. On the history of the British kindergarten movement, see Kevin Brehony, “The Kindergarten in England, 1851 to 1918” in Roberta Wollons, ed., Kindergartens and Cultures, (New Haven, CT, 2000), 59–86. Kindergartens in continental Europe, especially Wilhelmine, Germany, had played important roles as centers of progressive social and political thought as well as key venues for women’s expanding roles in civil society. See Ann Taylor Allen’s path-breaking work on kindergartens and women’s politics, Feminism and Motherhood in Germany, 1800–1914 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1991). While Margaret McMillan, a prominent early childhood educational reformer connected her pioneering Deptford nursery with her work for the Independent Labour Party and her socialist politics, the British kindergarten movement as a whole was never identified with politics. See Carolyn Steedman, Childhood, Culture and Class in Britain Margaret McMillan, 1860–1931: (New Brunswick, NJ, 1990). On the work, aspirations, struggles, and achievements of London’s women’s schoolteachers, see Dina Copelman’s excellent Class Acts: London’s Women Schoolteachers, 1870–1930 (London, 1996).

  37. On Marx, the Ronges, and London kindergartens, see Rosemary Ashton, Victorian Bloomsbury (London, 2010), 274–80. See also Karl Marx, Heroes of the Exile (written in 1852, first published in 1930) for his comments on Ronge.

  38. See Logbook, Marner Street Evening Continuation Class for Males, LCC/EO/DIV05/MAR1/LB, London Metropolitan Archives. The surviving logbook details the rich array of educational and social activities of the class and the fortunes and successes of its students. There was overlap between the staff of the regular school and the continuation class. When the history of education of London is viewed from the vantage point of individual schools and staff, it is possible to see the limitations and constraints of both social control and Foucauldian models. While the educational system was certainly disciplinary and sought to reinforce values shaped by the needs of a bourgeois capitalist society, these institutions also genuinely strove to accommodate students’ needs and did provide means of gaining skills that offered students socioeconomic mobility.

  39. I should explain some of the problems surrounding my documentation of William Dowell’s death. Only one William Dowell died at sea in the 1880s, at least according to the official records of maritime deaths. Such deaths were recorded and preserved separately from the rest of the population. William Dowell’s death certificate indicates that he was a sailmaker who died of consumption on board the Rialto in the spring of 1881. There were two major ships called the Rialto in the 1880s: one was a Wilson Line steamer that carried passengers between Hull and New York. The other, operated by Albion Shipping Company, disembarked from the South West Docks in London on a global circuit. Given the family’s location nearby in East London, I feel certain that he worked on the ship operated by the Albion Shipping Company. (This information is based on the “Shipping News” columns of the London Times for the 1870s and ’80s.) I cannot square the information on this death certificate (which also has his age wrong) with the incontrovertible evidence that Nellie’s father had been a certified first mate since 1868. In “From Birth to Death,” Muriel even called Nellie’s father a ship captain. This is probably how Nellie remembered what she had been told about her father but it almost certainly was not true. Extant records for ship’s captains are quite complete; and captains’ names appear in all sorts of maritime publications indicating routes taken by ships. Muriel’s narrative describes the receipt of the letter from his employers, which informed his family that he had died at sea, but Muriel’s dates are wrong. She claims that Nellie enjoyed nine secure years with her family but we know that Poor Law officials sent Nellie to Forest Gate School when she was age seven.

  40. Lester, “From Birth to Death, 1,” Bishopsgate.

  41. On discourses of “lone motherhood” in nineteenth-century Britain, see Jean Carabine, “Constituting Sexuality through Social Policy: The Case of Lone Motherhood 1834 and Today,” Social Legal Studies 10, no. 3 (September 2001): 291–314; on the economics and job fortunes of widows like Mrs. Dowell, see Andrew August, Poor Women’s Lives: Gender, Work and Poverty in Late-Victorian London (Madison, NJ, 1999); for an overview of widowhood, see Joan Perkin, Victorian Women (London, 1993), chap. 7; on the diversity of forms of partnership and parenting arrangements outside strictly conjugal units, see John Gillis’s magisterial For Better and For Worse: British Marriages, 1600 to the Present (Oxford, 1985).

  42. On the history of Trinity House, see “The Trinity House,” The Penny Magazine (January 21, 1843): 22–24. See also, Ernest W. Low, “Trinity House: Its Origins and Its Work,” The Windsor Magazine (July-December 1895): 675–86.

  43. Unfortunately, the minutes and records of Trinity House’s charitable operations for the 1860s through 1890s were destroyed in the Blitz so I cannot reconstruct the conditions under which Harriet Dowell and her mother received their widows’ pensions.

  44. On motherhood and mothercraft, see Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London (New York, 1993), chap. 7; on the convergence of discourses of empire and mothering, see Anna Davin, “Imperialism and Motherhood,” History Workshop Journal (Spring 1978): 9–65. Among the many important contributions to this scholarship are Sylvia Schafer, Children in Moral Danger and the Problem of Government in Third Republic France (Princeton, 1997); Edward Ross Dickinson, The Politics of Child Welfare from the Empire to the Federal Republic (Cambridge, MA, 1996), chap.1–3.

  45. Henry D
rummond, Ascent of Man (New York, 1894), 336. On Drummond, see Thomas Dixon, The Invention of Altruism: Making Moral Meanings in Victorian Britain (Oxford, 2008), chap. 7.

  46. See House of Commons Papers, Reports from Committees, vol. 11 (February 11, 1890–August 18, 1890), Children’s Life Insurance, Appendix D (London, 1890), 230.

  47. See “The Modern Cornelia,” Punch (June 21, 1890): 299.

  48. Dendy, as reprinted in Ellen Ross, Slum Travelers: Ladies and London Poverty, 1860–1920 (Los Angeles, 2007), 70. For a sensitive analysis of poor mothers as both historical subjects and objects of policy makers, see Ross, Love and Toil.

  49. George Haw, From Workhouse to Westminster: The Life Story of Will Crooks, M.P. (London, 1907), 71.

  50. On the figure of the working-class mother in middle-class accounts of slum life, see Ross, Love and Toil. See also M. Loane, The Next Street But One (London: 1907), 67. The author M. Loane was probably an authorial composite of two sisters, one of whom was a nurse. See Susan Cohen and Clive Fleahy, introduction to M. Loane, The Queen’s Poor (London, 1905, reprint 1998).

  51. For two examples of homages to working-class motherhood in autobiographical writing, see Joe Williamson, Father Joe: The Autobiography of Joseph Williamson (London, 1963); Kingsley Royden, “A Friend in My Retreat: Family Life in Bromley St. Leonard between the Wars,” East London Record 1 (1978). See also David Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom (London, 1981).

  52. For analysis of the poor’s instrumental use of Poor Law institutions and services, see Lynn Hollen Lees, The Solidarities of Strangers: the English Poor Laws and the People, 1700–1948 (Cambridge, 1998).

  53. For this and many other details of the administration of the so called poor law barrack schools in London, see Lydia Murdoch’s persuasive account and analysis in Imagined Orphans: Poor Families, Child Welfare and Contested Citizenship in London (New Brunswick, NJ, 2006).

  54. On “ins and outs,” see findings of Mundella Report, The Education and Maintenance of Pauper Children in the Metropolis, vol. 2 (1896).

  55. Lester, “From Birth to Death, 1.” Bishopsgate.

  56. William Dowell, born in 1872, was discharged from the Exmouth on April 30, 1887 to the ship James Eleanor at 15s/month. For records of the Exmouth, see Poplar Training School, Forest Gate: Register of Children, Poplar Board of Guardians, POBG/214/1, London Metropolitan Archives.

  57. On the Marine Society, see James Stephen Taylor, Jonas Hanway, Founder of the Marine Society: Charity and Policy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, 1985).

  58. “The Blackwall Disaster, A List of Gallant Deeds,” Reynolds’s Newspaper, August 28, 1898, 5. The article indicates that Dowell was twenty-six in 1898; Nellie’s brother was born in 1872 and hence also twenty-six. It seems very likely that the William Dowell commended was her brother.

  59. My description of Leighton Buzzard at the time Nellie was sent there is based on the entry for the town in Kelly’s Directory of Bedfordshire, Hunts, and Northamptonshire (London, 1885), 70–75.

  60. See C. S. Loch, introduction to The Charities Register and Digest (London, 1890), 304.

  61. There is a large and excellent literature on child protection and abuse in Victorian England. See George K. Behlmer, The Child Protection Movement in England, 1860–1890 (Palo Alto, 1977); Child Abuse and Moral Reform in England, 1870–1908 (Palo Alto, 1982); Louise Jackson, Child Sexual Abuse in Victorian England (London, 2000); Roger Cooter, ed., In the Name of the Child (London, 1992); see also Harry Hendricks, Child Welfare: England 1872–1989 (London, 2003) for a compact and persuasive account of competing agendas of reformers and their perceptions of the dangers of childhood.

  62. Lylie Valentine lived in Bromley-by-Bow just around the corner from Kingsley Hall. She recalled that when her father died, Poor Law officials suggested her removal from her destitute mother who responded, “Over my dead body.” See Lylie Valentine, Two Sisters and the Cockney Kids (London, n.d.), 2. On poor families’ extraction of resources from and use of Poor Law institutions, see Lynn Hollen Lees, The Solidarities of Strangers: the English Poor Laws and the People, 1700–1948 (Cambridge, 1998).

  63. George Lansbury, My Life (London, 1931), 132.

  64. Because it combined children from several different Poor Law unions, it was called a “district” school. For an excellent summary of its administrative history, see Walter Monnington and Frederick Lampard, Our London Poor Law Schools: Comprising Descriptive Sketches of the Schools (London, 1898), 36–41.

  65. See Bridget Cherry, Charles O’Brien, and Nikolaus Pevsner, London 5, East: Buildings of England (London, 2005), 67.

  66. See Lydia Murdoch, “From Barrack Schools to Family Cottages: Creating Domestic Space for Late-Victorian Poor Children,” in Child Welfare and Social Action in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Jon Lawrence and Pat Starkey (Liverpool, 2001).

  67. Jane Nassau Senior was the sister of Tom Hughes of Tom Brown’s Schooldays and daughter-in-law of the wealthy political economist Nassau Senior.

  68. See Third Annual Report of the Local Government Board, 1873–1874 (London, 1874).

  69. See Sybil Oldfield, “The Government Inspector,” “Mrs. Senior’s Report,” “The Reception: 1874,” in Jeanie, an ‘Army of One’: Mrs Nassau Senior, 1828–1877, the First Woman in Whitehall (Sussex, 2008). On the relationship between women, social policy, and the private sector, see Seth Koven, “Borderlands,” in Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, eds., Mothers of a New World (London, 1993).

  70. The Young Women’s Christian Association organized similar schemes including the Factory Helpers’ Union and Girls’ Friendly Society by which “ladies” instructed and protected “our working sisters” from the dangers of a “nineteenth century spirit of restlessness and passion for liberty.” See Lady Laura Riding, “The Guardianship of Working Girls,” in The Official Report of the Church Congress, Held at Exeter, On October 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th, ed. Rev. C. Dunkley (London, 1894), 257–64. See also Louisa Twining, Recollections of Workhouse Visiting and Management during Twenty Years (London, 1880); Octavia Hill, Homes of the London Poor (London, 1875).

  71. The school, its surrounding buildings, and grounds, occupied twelve acres of land.

  72. On the disciplinary dynamics of poorhouses, see Felix Driver, Power and Pauperism: The Workhouse System, 1834–1884 (Cambridge, 1993). This account, unlike Driver’s, does seek to examine these dynamics from the perspective of one of its poorest and most vulnerable inmates, Nellie Dowell, as well as officials, teachers, and parents.

  73. Lester, “From Birth to Death, 1.” Bishopsgate.

  74. George Lansbury, My Life (London, 1928), 149. For a breezy journalistic defense of Forest Gate School with its happy girls clothed in “neat blue-serge dresses and white aprons” see “Forest Gate School,” All the Year Round, vol. 3 (1890), 204.

  75. Lansbury made this argument about workhouse diets for poor children in Cardiff in 1907. See Jonathan Schneer, George Lansbury (Manchester, 1990), 47.

  76. See Annual Reports for Forest Gate School, 1883–1888, FGSD/1, London Metropolitan Archives.

  77. Lester, “From Birth to Death, 1” Bishopsgate.

  78. Edmond Holmes, What is and What Might Be: A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular (London, 1911), 92–94.

  79. Superintendent’s Report and Journal, August 3, 1888, Forest Gate School District, 1887–1888, PoB.G.215/5, London Metropolitan Archives.

  80. Lester, “From Birth to Death, 1” Lester Papers, Bishopsgate. On this system of education, see Stephen Heathorn, For Home, Country, and Race: Constructing Gender, Class, and Englishness in the Elementary School, 1880–1914 (Toronto, 2000).

  81. Edmond Holmes, What Is and What Might Be, 116

  82. Wyndham Holgate, “Report for the Year 1885,” Fifteenth Annual Report of the Local Government Board (1885), 46.

  83. See Anna Davin, Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street in London 1870–1914 (London, 1996), 118, 114, 124–25.


  84. Clara E. Grant, Farthing Bundles (London, 1929, 1st ed.; 1933), 33.

  85. Grant also saw a useful place for the more economical and traditional method of collective classroom work done in unison under the direction of the teacher. Such exercises were cost-effective, demanded “communal activity,” and hence promoted “the social sense.” In detailing her own innovative methods of teaching and curriculum, Grant also effectively summarized the older methods of instructions used by Board School teachers when Nell was a student in the 1880s and 90s. See Clara Grant, The Teachers Book of Individual Occupations, with Occupations Based on the Montessori Ideal of Individual Work (London, n.d.), 5, 12.

  86. On Balfour, see Dawson Burns, Pen-Pictures of Some Temperance Notables (London, 1895), 96–103 and “The Band of Hope Jubilee,” Wings, March 1, 1897, 31. An 1883 article in the Englishwoman’s Review characterized her as “the first woman it was our lot to hear from a platform, and her quiet feminine manner, equally removed from insipidity or extravagance, her simple, well-chosen words, and her earnest purpose doubtless did much to reconcile the general public to the idea of a lady lecturer.” See “A Pioneer in Temperance Work,” The Englishwoman’s Review (February 15, 1883): 62. She gave a lecture on the “Influence of Women” at the Whittington club according to “Table Talk,” The Lady’s Newspaper, May 6, 1848, 363. Some of her work was wholly admonitory such as the “Victim” or an “Evening’s Amusement at the Vulture,” which showed the disastrous consequences of a woman’s misspent night at a gin palace. Others reclaimed the lives of admirable women such as Anna Barbault and Mary Somerville as examples of women’s ability to make important intellectual, social, and moral contributions to society. For scholarly assessment of Balfour, see Kristin Doern, “Equal Questions: the ‘Woman Question’ and the ‘Drink Question’ in the Writing of Clara Lucas Balfour, 1808–1878,” in Sue Morgan, ed., Women, Religion and Feminism in Britain, 1750–1900 (Basingstoke, 2002).