The Match Girl and the Heiress

by Seth Koven

  87. See the review of Balfour’s Morning Dew Drops in The Lady’s Newspaper, September 3, 1853, 134. John Maw Darton turned Balfour’s own life story, like those of her fictional heroines, into an example for young women to follow who wished to combine womanliness with commitment to bettering society. See John Darton, Famous Girls Who Have Become Illustrious Women of Our Time Forming Models of Imitation for the Young Women of England (London, 1880), 313–23.

  88. Clara Lucas Balfour, Toil and Trust: The Life Story of Patty the Workhouse Girl (London, 1860), 1, 14, 15, and 40.

  89. See Muriel Lester, (Aged 9 ½) Gainsborough Lodge, Leytonstone, Essex, “Metagrams,” Little Folks (1894).

  90. See Julia Luard, “On the Education of Young Servants,” Englishwoman’s Review (April 1, 1868): 407; James Wells, “The Outcast,” The Children’s Treasury and Advocate of the Homeless and Destitute (November 8, 1879): 220; “Home Without a Mother,” Liverpool Mercury (April 19, 1859). On the lost childhood of Tamil children, see “A Missionary’s Wife,” “Under the Palm Trees,” At Home and Abroad: A Wesleyan Missionary Magazine for Young Helpers in the Work (April 1, 1895): 64; on child marriage and childhood, see Annette Beveridge, “The Hindu Mahila Bidyalaya,” Englishwoman’s Review (February 1, 1876): 49. On stolen childhood and slave narratives, see Wilma King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America (Bloomington, IN, 2011).

  91. On discourses defining poor children by what they lack, see Shurlees Swain and Margo Hillel, Child, Nation, Race and Empire: Child Rescue Discourse, England, Canada and Australia, 1850–1915 (Manchester, 2010), 43.

  92. See Sir Stafford Northcote, “Preventive Homes,” Night and Day: A Monthly Record of Christian Missions and Practical Philanthropy (May 1, 1881): 119–20.

  93. For two excellent explorations of philanthropic “abduction” revolving around race, religion, and poverty, see Linda Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Cambridge, MA, 1999); and the “Save the Dublin Kiddies” Campaign of 1913, see Lucy McDiarmid, The Irish Art of Controversy (Ithaca, NY, 2005), chap. 4. On Barnardo’s role in sending slum children to Canada as indentured apprentices, see Joy Parr, Labouring Children: British Immigrant Apprentices to Canada, 1869–1924 (Montreal, 1980).

  94. See Caleb Saleeby, Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles (New York, 1911), chap. 12. On the intersection of eugenics, child welfare, and maternalism, see Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, “Womanly Duties: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, 1880–1920,” The American Historical Review 95:4 (October 1990): 1076–1108.

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

  96. See Seth Koven, “The Whitechapel Picture Exhibitions and the Politics of Seeing,” in Daniel Sherman and Irit Rogit, eds., Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles (Minnesota, 1994). On art as philanthropy, see Diana Maltz, British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes: Beauty for the People (Basingstoke, 2006).

  97. See Seth Koven, “Henrietta Barnett: The (Auto)biography of a Late-Victorian Marriage,” in Susan Pedersen and Peter Mandler, After the Victorians (New York, 1994). See also Micky Watkins, Henrietta Barnett in Whitechapel: Her First Fifty Years (London, 2005).

  98. Henrietta Barnett, “Befriending the Friendless,” Autobiography, chap. 5, LMA/4063/006, Henrietta Barnett Papers, London Metropolitan Archives.

  99. Henrietta published extensively about Forest Gate and left a detailed account of her work there in her two-volume biography of her husband. See Henrietta Rowland Barnett, Canon Barnett, His Life, Work and Friends, vol. 1, (Boston, 1919), chap. 11.

  100. See Maria Poole’s testimony, December 5, 1894, Report of the Metropolitan Poor Law Schools Committee, Minutes of Evidence, vol. 2 (London, 1896), 150.

  101. See John Gorst, Question to Miss Baker, November 23, 1894, Report of the Metropolitan Poor Law Schools Committee, Minutes of Evidence, vol. 2 (London, 1896), 95–96.

  102. The relative costs and advantages of small-scale cottages versus large-scale barrack schools remained a subject of debate throughout this period. In 1897, the Sheffield Guardians undertook a comparative cost analysis and concluded that they could provide cottages and small homes for pauper children at a weekly cost of 7s 10 1/2d versus 12s 2 1/2d at Forest Gate. See “Poor Law Experiments,” Times (London), December 25, 1897, 10. The report was subjected to withering criticisms and accusations of partiality and bias by workhouse officials. See Poor Law Schools: A Criticism of the Report of the Departmental Committee Ordered to be made by a Conference of Managers Representative of all the Metropolitan Board of Guardians, May 1896 (London, 1897). For an ardent defense of Poor Law boarding schools, see W. Chance, Children Under the Poor Law, Their Education and After-Care Together with A Criticism of the Departmental Committee on Metropolitan Poor Law Schools (London, 1897). The Whitechapel Union terminated its arrangement with Poplar—and ceased to send children to Forest Gate—in 1897 in favor of a cottage system. See Henrietta Barnett, Matters that Matter, (London, 1933), 152–55. No doubt it was this publicity that led Crooks and Lansbury to join its managing committee.

  103. “LONDON POOR LAW SCHOOLS,” Wanganui Herald, May 30, 1896, 3.

  104. See Angela John, The Life and Times of Henry W. Nevinson (New York, 2006); Angela John, Evelyn Sharp: Rebel Woman, 1869–1955 (Manchester, 2009). Nevinson penned many autobiographies including his three-volume autobiography Changes and Chances, More Changes More Chances, and Last Changes Last Chances, which Ellis Roberts abridged as Fire of Life (London, 1935).

  105. Henry Woodd Nevinson, “Scenes in a Barrack School,” Nineteenth Century (March 1896), 493–94. Nevinson incorporated many details, in particular a deadly fire soon after Christmas, to signal that Forest Gate was his model. One aspect of Nevinson’s story must have irritated Mrs. Barnett. He belittled the benevolent labors of “thoughtful and energetic” ladies, including Barnett, to protect pauper-girls-made-servants by befriending them. Catherine Scott, the secretary of MABYS, denounced Nevinson’s insinuation that workhouse girls were destined to become “white slaves.” She claimed to preserve the honor of workhouse girls who could not speak for themselves by citing published statistics proving that the vast majority led self-respecting and self-supporting lives. Apparently, it never occurred to Scott that former workhouse girls could speak for themselves. See Catherine Scott, “A Note on ‘Scenes in a Barrack School,’” Nineteenth Century (May 1896), 871–72.

  106. See Minutes of the Forest Gate School Visiting Committee, vol. 1 (1897), POBG/83/1, London Metropolitan Archives. Lansbury narrowly defeated Crooks to serve as chair of the committee in October 1897. Surprisingly, the two often had different views about the school’s management. In many ways, it is possible to trace the roots of Lansbury’s world-famous grassroots Poplarism to his work on this committee.

  107. When Henrietta Barnett led a deputation to the Local Government Board in 1894 to demand an inquiry into the education of pauper children in barrack schools, she noted that during the previous fifteen years, she had taken 135 girls directly from Forest Gate into her home “under my personal observation.” See “The Barrack Life of Pauper Children,” The Englishwoman’s Review (October 15, 1894).

  108. See Poplar Training School, Forest Gate, Register of Children, 1887, POBG/214/02 and Superintendent’s Report Book and Journal, 1887, POBG/215/05, London Metropolitan Archives.

  109. See December 25, 1880, Parish Register, St. Jude’s, Whitechapel, accessed via Ancestry.com

  110. Durkheim famously developed this argument in his Division of Labor in Society (1893, English translation, 1933).

  111. For such self-lacerating analysis, see Stephen Hobhouse: Reformer, Pacifist, Christian. An Autobiography (Boston, 1952). See also Deborah Cohen, Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain (New York, 2013). chap. 6.

  112. See Muriel’s substantial typescript biographical sketch of her father, “My Father,” Lester/2/1, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate.
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  113. This is based on census data of their Leytonstone neighborhood. The Lesters briefly left Essex for Hindhead in Surrey around 1898 only to return to Loughton in Essex around three years later.

  114. Doris Lester, “Notes for an Autobiography,” Lester/3/1, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate.

  115. This remarkable album has survived and includes Muriel and Doris’s first entries. Lester Family Writing Album, Lester/1/1/1, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate.

  116. See Red Leather Diary, Lester Papers, Lester/1/2, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate. See also her typescript account of these prayers, Lester Papers, 2/1a, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate Institute.

  117. “Victorian Sunday,” interview with Kathleen Lester Hogg by Jean Yorke, BBC Radio Broadcast, June 5, 1960. See Lester/2/1, Bishopsgate.

  118. See Verona Doris Lester, “A Victorian Sunday,” in Just Children (privately printed), 28.

  119. Lilley was a local girl, born in Buckhurst Hill, Essex in 1872. See Census data for 1891 accessed via Ancestry.com.

  120. Verona Doris Lester, Just Children (n.d., privately printed), 5–6, 23–25, Lester/3/4, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate.

  121. Muriel noted this detail in her last typescript autobiographical fragment, written in 1965. See “At 80, from 1883,” Lester/2/1a, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate.

  122. Verona Doris Lester, Just Children (privately printed), 24 in Lester Papers, 3/4, Bishopsgate Institute.

  123. Elizabeth Anna Hart, Clare Linton’s Friend (London, 1900), 41. The novel was serialized in the Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine, vol.16, 1884.

  124. Anna Elizabeth Hart, “A Child’s Thought,” in Poems Written for a Child (London, 1868), 45–47.

  125. The novel participates in a long literary tradition in which spoiled, well-to-do children learn to become moral, strong self-sufficient selves through their relationships with a poor child. Thomas Day’s Sanford and Merton (1783) chronicles the way in which a creolized indolent child of white Jamaican planters comes to Britain and befriends a poor boy who teaches him how to be a proper boy. In this novel, issues of race and social status intersect to show that cross-class friendship between children is essential to educating the well-to-do child in his proper duties.

  126. Hart, Clare Linton’s Friend, 116–17.

  127. On girls’ passionate and erotically charged relationships with their dolls, see Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton, 2007), chap.3.

  128. For a precise reconstruction of her literary genealogy in the periodical press between 1893 and 1897, see Michelle Tusan, “Inventing the New Woman: Print Culture and Identity Politics During the Fin-de-siècle,” Victorian Periodicals Review 31 (Summer, 1998).

  129. Muriel read the best-selling novel Marcella (1894) chronicling its headstrong idealistic New Woman heroine who abandons her independence for conjugal love. Marcella’s famous author, the social reformer and child-welfare advocate Mrs. Humphry Ward, confessed with some bitterness that her own mid-century education had been all too typical in its deficiencies. “Poor teaching, poor school-books” and “indifferent food” ensured that she learned “nothing thoroughly or accurately.” See Mrs. Humphry Ward, A Writer’s Recollections (London, 1918), 129–34.

  130. See Sally Mitchell’s marvelous The New Girl: Girls’ Culture in England, 1880–1915 (New York, 1995).

  131. See Carole Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (London, 1981).

  132. Muriel Lester, It Occurred to Me (New York, 1937), 3. On Shaw and Jaeger clothing, see Ruth Livesey, Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880–1914 (Oxford, 2007), 122–23.

  133. On this hospital run by women for women and the settlement, see Anna Tillyard, “Nursing Branch, Report of Work,” Second Annual Report of Women-Workers in Canning Town, East London (London, 1893), 16–19 and Margaret Pearse, M.D., Resident Physician, “Medical and Nursing Report,” Third Annual Report of Women-Workers in Canning Town, East London (London, 1894), 22–27.

  134. Doris Lester, “Notes for an Autobiography,” Lester/2/1, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate. See Patricia Marks, Bicycles, Bangs and Bloomers: The New Woman in the Popular Press (Lexington, KY, 1990). Hilary Marland demonstrates the broad range of responses among doctors and women themselves to the health and social implications of bicycles on girls’ and young women’s lives. Moderation, Marland argues, was the keynote of this debate as with so many others surrounding girls’ sports, physical culture, and intellectual development. See Hilary Marland, Health and Girlhood in Britain, 1874–1920 (Basingstoke, 2013), esp. chap. 3.

  135. The 1901 Census lists the school as “Woodlands” rather than Wanstead College on 74 Woodford Road, directly next door to another small private school, Gowan Lea, into which it was eventually incorporated. See W. R. Powell, ed., Victoria County History: A History of the County of Essex, vol. 6 (London, 1973), 337.

  136. On this debate, see “Co-Education,” The Speaker, August 29, 1896, 220. See also the debate about co-education and American values conducted in the pages of the Times in 1896.

  137. Alice Woods, ed., Co-Education, A Series of Essays by Various Authors (London, 1903), 143–44.

  138. See Michael Sadler, Report on Secondary and Higher Education in Essex (Chelmsford, 1906), 150.

  139. See Doris Lester, Typescript autobiography, III, “School Days and Holidays,” Lester/3/1, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate.

  140. This information comes from census data for the Martins from 1861 onward, accessed via Ancestry.com.

  141. See “Signal From Our Watch Tower,” The Woman’s Signal, August 4, 1898, 72–73.

  142. Muriel Lester, It Occurred to Me (New York, 1937), 6.

  143. On the connections between these radical “domestic” ideas with anticolonial activism, see Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism and the Politics of Friendship (Durham, NC, 2006).

  144. On the attractions of Loughton to “radicals,” see Chris Pond, A Walk Round Loughton (Loughton, 2002), 5.

  145. The child of a haberdasher, Morrison, like Henry Lester, had been born in very humble circumstances in Poplar. Unlike Henry, he went to great lengths to conceal his social origins and styled himself a “man of letters” born in Blackheath in his 1901 census return.

  146. Other prominent Toynbee Hall men who moved to Loughton included G. L. Bruce and Cyril Jackson, both distinguished educationists and reformers.

  147. Printed materials and annual reports for Oriolet Hospital are in the large Charity Organisation Society file investigating Oldfield. See A/FWA/C/D330/1, London Metropolitan Archives. These reports include an interview with his estranged wife about his conjugal irregularities and infidelity. See also Richard Morris and Chris Pond, eds., Loughton a Hundred Years Ago, Being the Text of Itinerary of Loughton 1905–1912 by William Chapman Waller (Loughton, 2006).

  148. Chris Pond, The Buildings of Loughton and Notable People of the Town (Loughton, 2003), 4.

  149. Illness compelled Jowett to cancel his plan to visit St. Leonard’s in 1891. See notice of speech by Prof. Lewis Campbell about Jowett’s interest in the school in The Woman’s Herald, October 26, 1893, 574.

  150. On the history and culture of these “public” schools for girls, see Carol Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (London, 1981), chap. 2.

  151. See Elizabeth Edwards, “Homoerotic Friendship and College Principals, 1880–1960,” Women’s History Review 4:2 (June 1995): 149–63. On Maynard and Lumsden’s relationship, see Naomi Lloyd’s fine study, “Evangelicalism and the Making of Same-Sex Desire: the Life and Writings of Constance Maynard,” PhD diss., University of British Columbia, 2011. See also Pauline Phipps, “Faith, Desire and Sexual Identity: Constance Maynard’s Atonement,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 18:2 (2009): 265–86.

  152. Martha Vicinus, “Distance and Desire: English Boarding School Friendships,” Signs 9:4 (Summer 1984): 600–622.

 
; 153. See Muriel Lester Diary, June 4, n.d. [c.1899], Lester/1/1, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate Institute.

  154. On the centrality of sport to the curriculum at St. Leonard’s, see Kathleen McCrone, Playing the Game: Sport and the Physical Emancipation of English Women, 1870–1914 (London, 1988), chap. 3, Former headmistress of St. Leonard’s, Miss Dove, insisted that “I do not speak too strongly when I say that games, i.e., active games in the open air, are essential to a healthy existence, and that most of the qualities, if not all, that conduce to the supremacy of our country in so many quarters of the globe, are fostered, if not solely developed, by means of games.” See Jane Frances Dove, “Cultivation of the Body,” in Dorothea Beale, Lucy H. M. Soulsby, and Jane Frances Dove, Work and Play in Girls’ Schools (London, 1901), 398.

  155. According to the St. Leonard’s Gazette, Muriel was one of fifty-seven new girls to arrive in the autumn of 1898. See St. Leonard’s Gazette 5:3 (October 1898): 336.

  156. For a detailed adulatory account of daily life at St. Leonard’s and its system of instruction in academics and sport, see Alice Zimmern, The Renaissance of Girls’ Education in England, A Record of Fifty Years’ Progress (London, 1898), 153–57. On the house system at St. Leonard’s see the volume celebrating its 50th anniversary in Julia Grant, Katharine McCutcheon, and Ethel Sanders, eds., St. Leonard’s School, 1877–1927 (London, 1927), chap. 4. On the use of furnishings and design to cultivate domesticity within female public schools, see Jane Hamlett, At Home in the Institution: Material Life in Asylums, Lodging Houses, and Schools in Victorian and Edwardian England (Basingstoke, 2014), chap. 4.

  157. Muriel Lester, It Occurred to Me (New York, 1937), 10.

  158. See Muriel Lester Diary, entries from c. 1899, c. 1900, and January 1, 1905, Lester/1/1, Lester Papers, Bishopsgate Institute.

  159. At least one of the children who attended Doris’s first nursery school and kindergarten at Kingsley Hall in 1915 did wonder about Doris’s marital status. Lylie Valentine recalled asking Doris why she had never married and had her own children. Lylie recalled Doris’s answer to her: “I am married to Bow and you are all my children.” “That was true and she loved us all,” was Lylie’s comment. See Lylie Valentine, Two Sisters and the Cockney Kids (London, 1978), chap. 2.