The Match Girl and the Heiress

by Seth Koven

  160. Mrs. C. L. Balfour, Toil and Trust (London, 1860), 19.

  161. Hart, Clare Linton’s Friend (London, 1900).

  162. Muriel Lester, Kill or Cure (Nashville, TN, 1937), 12–13.

  163. On Rosa’s influence on her thinking about wealth and poverty, see It Occurred to Me, 86–87; on Rosa’s commitment to and experiments with a “deepening understanding” of the lives of her poor neighbors, see Rosa Hobhouse, The Interplay of Life and Art (1958), unpublished typescript autobiography, pp.110–26, Friends House Library, London.

  Chapter Two. Capitalism, from Below and Down Under: The Global Traffic in Matches and Match Girls

  1. The Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants (MABYS), an organization championed by Mrs. Barnett, produced an annual report about the status of the Forest Gate girls under its care. The purpose of the report was to document the association’s successes and failures. The report made no attempt to exaggerate the efficacy of its benevolent labors. It is full of damning summations of reckless, bad, and sometimes even illegal behavior by the girls. The report also reflected MABYS’s belief in its right—in fact obligation—to offer moral judgments about its girls as well as the assumption that only middle-class readers would ever have access to its reports. It used a system of partial anonymity: it identified each girl by her initials as well as a host of particular details about her, rather than her given name and surname. This partial anonymity has made it possible for me to deduce that Alice Dowell is “A.D.,” who entered Forest Gate as a ward of Poplar and then went to “Mrs. Barnett’s Cottage Home.” Maria Poole, MABYS secretary, gave Alice the highest possible evaluation of her behavior and progress as a servant: “very satisfactory.” In the eyes of MABYS, she was “a dear little girl.” See Report of the Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants, for the Year Ended 31st March, 1888, which is itself part of the Forest Gate School District Annual Report, 1888 (London, 1888), 26. The MABYS report for the following year actually named A.D. as “Alice” in its “particulars” and noted that she was still doing well in her “first place.” See Forest Gate School District, Annual Report, 1889 (London, 1889), 24.

  2. Contemporaries called this expansion of trade unionism to unskilled workers the New Unionism. Articles about New Unionism and its putative defeat of “Old Unionism” appeared with increasing frequency in 1890. See, for example, “The Revolt of the Breechless,” Scots Observer 4:95 (September 13, 1890): 425; and Frederic Harrison, “The Old and New Unionism,” The Speaker 2 (September 13, 1890): 288. Both articles reported on the 1890 meeting of the Trades Union Congress in Liverpool.

  3. Their names do not appear in the well-preserved Strike Register at the digitized Trades Union Congress History archives. Several of their immediate neighbors on Marner Street did go on strike. See http://www.unionhistory.info/matchworkers/registercontents.php. Hereafter cited as TUC online archive.

  4. There is a vast and excellent literature on New Journalism. On New Journalism in relation to sexual and gender dissidence and fin-de-siècle culture, see John Stokes, In the Nineties (Chicago, 1989), esp. chap.1, and Laurel Brake, “Endgames: The Politics of The Yellow Book, Decadence, Gender and the New Journalism,” in Laurel Brake, ed., The Ending of Epochs (Cambridge, 1995). Useful general starting points include Joel Wiener, Papers for the Millions: The New Journalism in Britain, 1850s to 1914 (Westport, CT, 1985); for “New Journalism” within the broader context of Victorian press, see Mark Hampton, Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850–1950 (Champaign-Urbana, IL, 2004); and for excerpted examples, see Stephen Donovan and Matthew Rubery, Secret Commissions: An Anthology of Victorian Investigative Journalism (Peterborough, Ontario, 2012).

  5. My analysis does not reject the salience of class as an analytic category or as a way to characterize social relations so much as use it as one of many factors important in understanding Nellie’s working life in the match industry. Many scholars have pointed to the insufficiency of class to explain working-class thoughts, actions, feelings, and behavior. For particularly influential critiques of Marxist approaches to class and class consciousness, see Patrick Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1994) and Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class 1848–1914 (Cambridge, 1991); Carolyn Kay Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (New Brunswick, NJ, 1987).

  6. This chapter joins a body of work that seeks to combine global history with cultural and gender analysis by using an individual “life” as one site where these histories overlap. See Desley Deacon, Penny Russell, and Angela Wollacott, eds., Transnational Lives: Biographies of Global Modernity (New York, 2010). It also heeds Michael Roper’s call to integrate analysis of cultural discourses and forms with emotion and subjectivity. See Michael Roper, “Slipping Out of View: Subjectivity and Emotion in Gender History,” History Workshop Journal, 59 (Spring 2005): 57–72.

  7. See James Winter, London’s Teeming Streets (London, 1993), for a brilliant analysis of the dynamic dialectical tensions of streets as places of constant flows and obstructions.

  8. Benjamin Waugh, The Gaol Cradle, Who Rocks It? (London, 1873), 78.

  9. Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor: The Condition and Earnings of Those That Will Work, Cannot Work and Will Not Work, Vol.1, London Street-Folk (London, n.d), 142.

  10. On girl flower sellers as social problems, see Yvette Florio Lane, “Flowering Trades: Work, Charity, and Consumption in 19th and early 20th Century Britain,” Unpublished doctoral dissertation (in progress), Rutgers University.

  11. The tale actually unfolds on New Year’s Eve. See H. C. Andersen, “The Little Match Girl,” trans. Charles Beckwith, Bentley’s Miscellany, 21 (1847): 105–6. It was immediately reprinted in the March 1847 number of the American Christian periodical The Universalist, devoted to the doctrine of “universal benevolence.” See The Universalist 12 (March 6, 1847): 271.

  12. Ibid., 106.

  13. See Thomas Laqueur, “Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative,” in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley, 1989).

  14. These included the 1802 Health and Morals of Apprentices Act; the 1819 and 1825 Cotton Mills and Factories Acts; the 1833 Mills and Factories Act; the 1842 Mines and Collieries Act; and the 1847 Hours of Labour of Young Persons and Females in Factories Act (Ten Hours Act). While schooling became universally mandatory in 1879, the state did not make it free until the early 1890s.

  15. See David Rubinstein, School Attendance in London, 1870–1904: A Social History (Hull, 1969).

  16. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (London, 1887), 489.

  17. M.C.T., Mattie’s Home; or, the Little Match-Girl and Her Friends (London, 1873); G. Todd, Little Fan or the Life and Fortunes of a London Match-Girl (Edinburgh, 1874). Not all “match girl” stories blamed parents, and writers freely adapted Andersen’s tale. For example, “Mother’s Story” makes no mention of the match girl’s parents. When the kindly grandmother dies, the match girl is left to fend for herself on the streets before her own frozen death. See “Mother’s Story,” The Child’s Companion, June 1, 1881.

  18. See Pall Mall Gazette, April 1, 1886, 14.

  19. See Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago, 1992); Deborah Gorham, “The ‘Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ Re-examined: Child Prostitution and the Idea of Childhood in Late-Victorian England,” Victorian Studies 21:3 (Spring 1978): 353–79.

  20. See Glasgow Herald, May 1, 1890, for a review of one such school edition edited by Alfonzo Gardiner for John Heywood’s Literary Reader. Some images of the match girl, including Mary Ellen Edwards’s (“MEE”) widely circulated illustration from the children’s magazine Little Folks, accentuated her utter isolation and the inhospitable urban environment. Edwards depicted the barefoot little match girl in the midst of a blizzard clasping her ragged shawl in a huddled position. Her ou
tstretched hand holds matches, but she is the sole person in the image. Her vacant stare underscores her passivity and helplessness. Edwards’s image accompanied W. E. Fowler’s poem “The Little Match Girl.”

  21. “Dinner and Entertainments to the Poor,” Daily News (London), December 27, 1886, 3.

  22. Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Tales (London, 1888).

  23. The exhibition was widely covered by the press. See “Anglo-Danish Exhibition,” Era, May 19, 1888, 17 and May 26, 1888, 15. See also Daily News (London), May 11, 1888, 5. Given the ubiquity of match girls and heiresses in Victorian popular literature, it is hardly surprising that a playwright eventually combined both figures in a single character. The play Matches (1899) starred a poor match girl discovered to be the heiress daughter of a military officer. Transformed into a proper lady, she eventually falls in love with her wealthy guardian. Country Life Illustrated blasted it as a “tawdry stage novelette of the most mediocre and namby-pamby kind.” See “Matches,” Country Life Illustrated, January 28, 1899, 122. See also Man. [pseud.], “An Exquisite Matinée,” The Saturday Review, January 21, 1899, 76–77.

  24. On the protection of children through the “policing of parents,” see George Behlmer, Friends of the Family: The English Home and Its Guardians, 1850–1940 (Stanford, 1998), chap. 2.

  25. See Louise Raw, Striking A Light: The Bryant and May Watchwomen and their Place in History (London, 2009) for a detailed analysis of the history and historiography of the strike.

  26. See Annie Besant and W. T. Stead, “To Our Fellow Servants,” The Link, A Journal for the Servants of Man (February 4, 1888): 1; and “The People’s Pillory,” The Link (February 4, 1888): 3.

  27. On Besant and birth control, see Walter Arnstein, The Bradlaugh Case: Atheism, Sex and Politics Among the Late Victorians (Columbia, MO, 1983); on Besant’s remarkable career, see A. H. Nethcot’s two-volume biography, The First Five Lives of Annie Besant (Chicago, 1960) and The Last Four Lives of Annie Besant (Chicago, 1963). For a reliable starting point on Fabianism, see Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie, The Fabians (New York, 1978).

  28. See Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State (New York, 1980).

  29. See Annie Besant, “White Slavery in London,” The Link (June 23, 1888): 2. Besant based her article on interviews with match factory women at Bryant and May. The firm was determined to ferret out Besant’s informants and coerce them into signing a statement contradicting her allegations. When the match workers refused, Bryant and May dismissed a “trouble maker” at the Victoria factory for defying her foreman on July 2 or 3. Her fellow workers promptly went out on strike in solidarity.

  30. Designating women’s work as unskilled sustained a wage gap between men and women, a point of broad agreement among employers and most male trade unionists and workers as well as a point of considerable conflict between men and women. For employers, women’s low wages meant higher profits. Laboring men sought to preserve “property in skill” as their exclusive domain and demanded a breadwinner wage sufficient to support their families. On gender conflicts in the workplace, see Sonya Rose, Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England (London, 1992). In fact, few men in East London received a family wage and female work in the match industry required considerable skill: speed, dexterity, and concentration. These were skills best learned by children trained to perform rapid, repetitive hand movements as their bodies matured into adulthood. Up to the early 1880s, match manufacturers such as Bryant and May and R. Bell’s regularly hired children as young as seven or eight to work half shifts. While many contemporaries were dazzled by the dexterity and speed required by match factory work, Mrs. Fenwick Miller dissented. She argued that “any girl” could obtain the necessary skill in a few months. Such girls needed only the “very slightest degree of natural ability.” Florence Fenwick Miller, “Ladies Column,” Illustrated London News, July 21, 1888, 74.

  31. Louise Raw persuasively argues that former Bryant and May match factory women sometimes did produce matchboxes for the company in their homes to accommodate the demands of marriage and motherhood. There was considerable fluidity between women employed by Bryant and May in the factory and those who worked at home to supply the company with matchboxes. See Louise Raw, Striking A Light: The Bryant and May Watchwomen and Their Place in History (London, 2009). Raw importantly recasts the strike as the work of the match factory women themselves rather than viewing them as following the lead of Besant and Burrows.

  32. See “The Press and the Match Girls,” The Link (July 28, 1888): 4.

  33. On July 7, 1888, the East London Advertiser, defender of conservative business interests, published an unsympathetic account of the strikers under the heading “Bryant and May’s Match Girls on Strike,” blaming outsiders for fanning the “flames” of unrest. The match girls had come to curse “loud and deep the advice of socialist outsiders.” East London Advertiser, July 7, 1888. The Advertiser ultimately altered its position in the aftermath of Bryant and May’s acknowledgment that some of the girls’ grievances were true. However, it shifted the weight of blame to the failures of foremen and women rather than the “gentleman” capitalist owners of the firm. See East London Advertiser, July 21, 1888, 6. The Times, no friend to radical causes, wholeheartedly concurred. It adopted the term “match girls” in the first of several articles condemning “Social Democrats” as “pests of the modern industrial world” for fomenting disharmony at Bryant and May. See the editorial on “the strike of the match girls,” Times (London), July 14, 1888, 11. The article provided a detailed narrative of the strike with harsh condemnation for the instigators, “agitators who make it the business of their lives to sow discord between employers and employed.” The Times, in exonerating the match girls of blame for their ill-advised actions, also stripped them of any trace of agency. It insisted “the course they have followed has not been of their own choice.”

  34. Reynolds ran a short article on the strike of Bryant and May’s match girls on July 8, 1888. The Star provided both the most in-depth and sympathetic coverage of the strike, which in turn helped establish the fledgling paper’s reputation for hard-hitting news coverage. Bryant and May’s labor practices remained one of its favorite targets for the next decade. On the Star’s later campaigns against “phossy jaw” at Bryant and May, see Carolyn Malone, “Sensational Stories, Endangered Bodies: Women’s Work and the New Journalism in England in the 1890s,” Albion 31:1 (Spring 1999): 49–71. Albion. On July 13, 1888, the Daily News ran a story on the strike of “matchmakers” at Bryant and May.

  35. See “The Strike Fund,” The Link (July 21, 1888): 4–5.

  36. Annie Besant, An Autobiography (London, 1893), 331–32.

  37. Burrows shared Besant’s interest in Theosophy and was a very active member of the British Section of the movement.

  38. Besant, Annie Besant: An Autobiography, 331–38.

  39. See notices about activities in “England,” Lucifer 6 (March 1890): 68 and “Opening of the East London Working Women’s Club,” under “Theosophical Activities,” Lucifer 7 (September 1890): 79–80. My thanks to the archivist of the Henry S. Olcott Memorial Library of the Theosophical Society in America for sending me copies of the relevant issues of Lucifer.

  40. “Women Out of Work, An East End Club,” Women’s Penny Paper, August 23, 1890.

  41. “Interview with Rev. J. T. Hazzard, Baptist Minister, The Lighthouse and Blackthorn Street Chapel, Devons Road, Bromley by Bow,” n.d., B176, p. 11, Charles Booth Papers, British Library of Politics, Economics, and Sociology (BLPES).

  42. See “A walk among the following churches: Dr Thacker’s Church; St Mary Bow; St Leonard’s; Congregational Church Bruce Road; Methodist Church; Strict Baptist Church; Bow Road Baptist Church; Wesleyan Church; Harley Street Congregational Church; Holy Trinity Stepney; Presbyterian Church Bow Road; Berger Hall; St Andrews Mission Church,” January 22, 1899, B385, p. 91, Charles Booth Papers, BLPES. W. Hayward,
the minister in charge of Berger Hall, informed Charles Booth that most members of Berger Hall came from the surrounding five or six streets and included dock laborers, railway men, brick layers, and matchmakers from Bryant and May’s and Bell’s, the latter of whom filled up the ranks of Berger Hall’s Sunday school and church. See “Interview with W. Hayward, Harley House, Bow Road and Berger Hall, Empson Street, Bromley, Baptist,” n.d., B176, pp. 24–47, Charles Booth Papers, BLPES.

  43. Charles Booth, “Walk among the following churches: St Annes Limehouse; Salvation Army Citadel; Coverdale Congregational Church; Father Higley’s Church; St Matthews; St James the Less; Wesleyan Mission; St Dunsta’s Stepney Green; Congregational Meeting House,” February 27, 1898, B385, p. 11, Charles Booth Papers, BLPES. On Thompson and the Forward Movement, see “God’s Work, and His Workers. Wesleyan East-End Mission,” Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine, April 1890, 312. The article notes Thompson’s particular success in attaching “ladies” from “better-class Circuits” with the Girls’ Home. For a contemporary history of the Forward Movement, see James E. McCulloch, The Open Church for the Unchurched or How to Reach the Masses (London, 1905).

  44. On Parry see, “Report of visit to St Friedeswide, Christ Church Mission,” May 24, 1898, B385, p. 27 Charles Booth Papers, BLPES.

  45. “Interview with C.J.O. Sanders, honorary superintendent of Wesleyan Mission Devons Road,” n.d., B176, p. 205, Charles Booth Papers, BLPES.

  46. The Hon. Superintendent of the Wesleyan Mission on Devon’s Road, Bow, C.J.O. Sanders had founded the Albert Terrace mission soon after the strike, around 1890. See “Interview with C.J.O. Sanders, honorary superintendent of Wesleyan Mission Devons Road,” n.d., B176, pp. 203–4, Charles Booth Papers, BLPES.